Chapter 5 #2
After that, we don’t talk at all, focusing on getting food into our stomachs. The first two pizzas are gone when the doorbell rings again, and this time I let him get it. I have food.
He comes back with bags of the cardboard cartons that denote Asian food. “Chinese?” I ask, and he replies, “Korean.”
I moan. “Barbecue?” It’s not a real question—I can smell it now that I’m trying.
The look he gives me clearly shows how offended he is by that question. “Of course. There are chopsticks in one of the bags—unless you need a fork?”
It’s my turn to give him an offended look, and he snickers. Shifters have made eating a must-know in any culture, plus I’ve traveled a fair bit. There are few tables around the world that I can’t comfortably assimilate into.
The doorbell rings once more, this time with an array of salads and bread. The fresh vegetables and greens are welcome after a day of eating mostly fast food.
There’s not a lot left when we begin clearing away in preparation for the call with my team, and we’ll probably polish that off later in the evening.
“How much did you tell Sam?” Aidan asks, settling back in front of his laptop.
I shrug. “Not much. It would have taken a while to explain via text, and knowing Sam, there would have been a million questions. I told him it was urgent, that we had a theory, and to please set up a call.” As if on cue, the meeting app on my laptop chimes.
“Ready?” I ask, and Aidan moves along the island and sits on the stool beside me.
Every nerve ending in my body goes crazy, and I’m half hard. How did I ever mistake this for leftover anger? Maybe I’m stupider than I thought.
Angling the screen so we can both see it, I hit Accept. There’s a moment of static while the encryption resolves, and then Percy’s office appears on the screen. That surprises me for a second until I remember that he does have a great teleconferencing setup in there.
“Can you hear us, Al?” Sam asks, sitting at Percy’s desk and looking at the laptop in front of him instead of at me on the wall screen.
“I’m sorry, are you speaking to me? It’s hard to tell while you’re looking at something else.”
Beside me, Aidan makes a sound that could be a cough or could be him choking on his own spit.
“He can hear me,” Sam tells Percy, still not bothering to look at me, his bestest bestie, the person who always has his back! It’s devastating. I need to tell him so.
“I’m devastated by your indifference, Sam. How can you be so cruel? So unfeeling? Our friendship—”
“ Anyway ,” Gideon interrupts loudly. “What happened before you even got there that necessitated this meeting?”
“I was briefing Alistair, and he has a theory,” Aidan says. “It’s both interesting and terrifying. Tell them.”
I run quickly through the details, summarizing what Aidan told me and explaining how we’d extrapolated from there. Andrew interrupts once to swear viciously, and I’m faced with a lot of grim expressions by the time I finish.
“This is not good,” David says heavily, lines of strain around his eyes. He takes on too much—that’s partly our fault. It’s so easy to depend on him, but we should probably make an effort to remember that he’s only one person.
“It’s still only a theory,” I say, because I know most of the research for this is going to fall on him and I want to make him feel better.
“Aidan,” Percy says thoughtfully, “how many of the younger pack members in the area did you meet? Ones that would hypothetically have been raised without being properly educated.”
I remember asking a similar question on the plane and realize I never followed that thought through.
“Not many,” Aidan admits. “Maybe three or four? Those who had very close ties to the two lads in custody. While the senior pack members were perfectly helpful and polite, they didn’t exactly give me free rein to speak with everyone, and there was no reason I could use to insist and still fly under the radar. ”
“That’s pretty much an admission of guilt right there,” Andrew says.
“If your species leader came to your out-of-the-way town, wouldn’t you be going out of your way to make them welcome—and introducing as many pack members as possible?
It’s not an opportunity that comes around often.
Helpful and polite but not overtly welcoming is a neon sign that says go away and don’t pay attention to us. ”
Ellie makes an agreeing noise. “Al, you were probably too little to remember, but we had the species leader visit our pack once—Shian. She was, what, two leaders ago? The pack leader basically held a weeklong open house for everyone to meet her, and we lived in a much more densely populated area than Beker County. It was an incredible experience—we get taught about the magic, and we feel it in ourselves, but if you don’t have interactions with a pack leader or other leader, it’s hard to understand that it really does tie us all together. ”
A very old, very hazy memory stirs in the back of my head.
“Yeah,” I say slowly. “I think I remember… Mama made me wear my good shirt and trousers. I didn’t want to visit the stupid ‘special’ lady.
She told Aloysius to get her a switch, so I apologized and sulked the whole way there.
Then I saw all the sweets, but Mama wouldn’t let me have any until after I met the leader.
I was thinking about having a very loud tantrum when someone came over and touched my head.
It must have been her—the species leader.
She smelled good and safe and she made me feel calm and happy.
” It’s mostly dimmed by time and the perspective of a young child, but that moment stands out.
“There, see!” Andrew points at me—well, at the screen. “If you were a senior member of a pack and could give that opportunity to your little ones, wouldn’t you?”
We all look at Aidan. “How did the young ones react when they met you?” Percy asks.
Aidan sighs and shakes his head. “I can’t say for sure. Their surprise could have been because they’re not used to outsiders.”
“Or they felt the connection through the magic,” Ellie counters, “and had no idea what it was.”
“Maybe you should go back to visit the two we have in custody,” Sam muses. “We were clearly asking the wrong questions.”
We all fall silent, because damn him, we should have thought of that sooner.
Aidan looks at me. “It would mean heading up to Washington,” he says. “Are you up for another flight so soon?”
“Actually,” David interjects before I can reply, “that’s not possible. When it became clear they were definitely from a local pack, I had them moved to minimize the risk of a jailbreak attempt. They’re here.”
“You didn’t think to mention this?” Percy asks mildly, and David shrugs, a slight tint of color on his cheeks.
“It didn’t come up. I figured this way they would be at hand if we needed to question them again anyway.”
Percy nods. “This is better, actually. I’ll go visit them myself. If the only real knowledge they have of the magic is from their short meeting with Aidan, then meeting me is likely to be a shock.”
That’s for sure. But I’m not loving the idea of the lucifer meeting face-to-face with insurrectionists.
“I’ll come with you,” Gideon says firmly. It’s not a suggestion or question, and if I know Gideon—which I like to think I do, since he’s shacked up with my bestie—he’ll bring along a squad of elite enforcers too.
Percy sighs but doesn’t argue. “At the very least, we should be able to get them to talk about their education and find out what they’ve been taught about the magic and CSG.”
“Yes,” Aidan agrees. “They might not want to talk about their mission, but basic schooling from thirty or forty years ago is something they’d probably consider harmless.
And in the meantime, Alistair and I will chat with pack members from outside Beker County.
Jun said they’ve never done anything to overtly arouse suspicion, which means they have to have been participating in intra-pack events.
Maybe someone will remember something unusual they said. ”
“Aim for the ones in the same age bracket,” Ellie suggests.
“It’s been a while, but I seem to remember that any time we had pack gatherings, the kids and teens would inevitably end up playing some kind of reenactment of the species wars.
It’s impossible to do that without the magic and the lucifer coming into it somehow, so if anyone hadn’t been taught about them, it would show. ”
“We used to do that too,” Andrew muses. “I guess some things are just eternal.”
I bite back a question about whether the Black Death had interfered in gatherings back then, because even though I’m safely across the country now, I do eventually have to go home and don’t want him to kill me when I do.
“We’ll target our questions around that kind of thing, then,” I say instead. “Hopefully we’ll be able to form a picture.”
“And while you’re doing that, Noah and I will start looking at census data,” David says, making notes. “You’re right. It’s unlikely the CCA has built only a hellhound following. I don’t know why they’re segregating by species, but they’ve given us an easy way to find them.”
Noah, who’s been unusually quiet so far, chooses this moment to speak up.
“Not to be a downer,” he starts, and I instantly brace myself.
I’m probably not going to like whatever he says next.
“But we thought, based on all the records we confiscated from Tish’s lab, that we’d located all the CCA compounds and arrested most of their people. Right?”
“We obviously missed this,” Sam agrees. “I’ll go back through the records. At the time, we were looking for encampments and CCA-owned buildings. We might have skimmed right past mentions of towns. Our focus wasn’t on civilian members.”
“Why not?” Noah asks. “Genuine question. I get that the scientists and trained soldiers were a higher risk to us, but why did we discount any mention of Joe Bloggs who supports the CCA?”