Chapter 35
Jamie closed his eyes and wandered into their captive’s head. Weird. Usually when he entered someone’s mind, their thoughts flowed easily into his head as if he were hearing them speak. This man’s mind was different. It was like the man’s thoughts—his voice—was very far away. He frowned.
“We can do this. Just go deeper,” his wolf said.
“What’s wrong?” Aiden asked. Jamie heard the fear in his voice.
“Nothing. Just give me a minute.”
He closed his eyes and reached deeper into the man’s mind. It felt like walking through a foggy, dark corridor lit by a small circular floor lights. He finally came to an open door. He walked in and saw what appeared to be an office filled with file cabinets, piles and piles of paper, and file folders stacked every which way. He had to sort through the files to find the information he was searching for. It always felt as if it took hours when he was searching through someone’s mind, but usually just seconds elapsed before he located what he’d been looking for.
What type of shifter are you? He rifled through a towering pile of files that had yellowed with age. There! In front of him was a photograph of a hyena in a cage. Hyena shifter, huh? He continued to flip through the file. There was an image of the captive from years earlier, standing in the woods surrounded by several hyenas. He appeared dejected, his eyes empty. You haven’t been able to shift, right?
He shuffled the papers, glancing at images of the man at school, maybe college, then working with some kind of machines. Maybe an engineer? The next image caused him to suck in a breath. Alden Williamson was smiling with his hand extended as if about to shake the hyena shifter’s hand.
Ploof!
Jamie glanced up at the sound. One of the stacks of files disappeared into thin air. That had never happened before. He frowned and continued his search. Why were you trying to take the baby? He flipped through papers as fast as he could.
Ploof!
A pile just to the left of the one he was sorting through vanished. Could someone be trying to stop him from getting information?
“Jamie, something’s wrong!” Mac yelled.
“What?” he asked as he continued his search through the hyena shifter’s mind.
“He’s seizing. I’m trying to make him stop,” she exclaimed.
“She’s trying to stabilize him, but it doesn’t look good. Find out whatever you can,” his mate said, his voice smooth in his ear.
Jamie found a file with the words Alden Williamson written across the cover. He flipped through, searching the captive’s memories of the man who haunted his own nightmares. The file contained images similar to old polaroid snapshots of Alden Williamson in a suit, Williamson in a white lab coat, a sterile looking laboratory, nurses dressed in black scrubs walking around a hospital or medical clinic, injections of a green liquid into his arm, a cave, shooting a phoenix fire gun at a training range.
A dossier was placed in front of him on a desk with a picture of Tessa in the folder with a black X over her face, a picture of Iris with ACQUIRE-DO NOT HARM written in marker at the bottom corner, pictures of May, Mac, Piper and Leah, all with EXTERMINATE scrawled in the corner. Then he saw the picture of him and Aiden taken years ago with a large X over his face and ACQUIRE-DO NOT KILL above Aiden’s. The second to last picture in the file was of a newborn baby with a tuft of red hair with VESSEL written in bold in the corner.
Vessel for what?
“Jamie, I can’t keep his heart beating much longer,” Mac gasped.
The last picture in the file was a map of New Hampshire with Grey Lake circled. The word INCINERATE was written along the bottom.
He felt Aiden’s hand wrap around his. A jolt of heat ran up his arm and through his body, enveloping him in a comforting, warm sensation. “You’ve got this. Just focus on what you can extract from him.” Jamie loved his deep voice.
He closed the folder, turned it over, and was about to pick up the next one when he saw writing on the back cover. The word REBIRTH was scrawled in the same handwriting as on the pictures within the file.
What the hell did it mean? The images could actually represent pictures that this shifter had viewed. But where had the term “rebirth” come from? Did it refer to Tessa’s rebirth?
Ploof? Ploof! Ploof! Pile after pile of files vanished from the captive’s mind. Jamie had to hurry.
“Tell me! Who is being reborn? Why is the child a vessel? For what?” Jamie shouted into the shifter’s fracturing mind.
Ploof! Ploof! Ploof!
The piles all disappeared as Mac screamed, “Jamie, get out. He’s dying!”
Just before he was pulled from the man’s thoughts, he saw one final vision. A portrait of a sneering Alden Williamson hung in the now otherwise empty file room of the hyena shifter’s mind.
Oh, shit!