Chapter Two #3
But maybe the hunters didn’t have anything to do with this. Maybe Archie needed to dig deeper.
“Do you know anything about that, ma’am?”
She grinned, exposing her two rows of fangs. “You can call me Gladys.”
“Well, Gladys. Do you know anything else about that?”
“Only what I saw on the news.”
She managed to give him a few more details, like where that had happened. As soon as Archie was done talking to her, he took out his phone to research it.
He knew the cases were connected when one of the blog articles he found on the case had a drawing of the symbol.
He wasn’t sure how the author of the article had found out about it, but it was almost identical to the one found in the case of Daniel’s death, and whatever differences there were could be attributed to the author of the blog not getting a good look or having to fill in the gaps.
Archie needed to dig into this. The symbol might be a coincidence, but it also might not be. Was this second hunter dating a monster, too? Had he been present at the same case that caused Daniel to leave the hunters?
As always, talking to the neighbors had left Archie with even more questions, but this was the part that he enjoyed about this job. It was like a puzzle he had to put together, and once he did, he’d find who was behind the murders.
* * * *
JASPER COULDN’T STOP thinking about the symbol.
When he left Archie’s office, he was supposed to go back to work, but he texted his boss to tell him he’d see him the next day.
Thankfully, his boss wasn’t a hunter, and he knew what Jasper was going through.
Jasper hadn’t wanted to lie to him after he found out he was part monster, so he’d told him, half expecting to get fired.
Instead, his boss had told him that he expected to see him at work the next day, and that had been that.
It had been a relief, and Jasper would always be grateful for that.
He was also grateful that his boss allowed him to run around getting involved in hunters’ business even though he wasn’t a hunter anymore. He was extremely lenient, and Jasper would have to remember that when Christmas came.
So he’d gone home, knowing he wouldn’t be able to focus on work, and had paced the living room for a while.
The apartment had been empty and still was.
Corey and Kerry were at work, and they wouldn’t be back for a while.
That gave Jasper entirely too much time to waste.
Maybe he should’ve gone to work, after all, but he would’ve been too distracted to be useful.
Since he vaguely recognized the symbol Archie had shown him, he decided to go through his old pictures and files.
He’d kept some things since he’d left the hunters, and while they hadn’t come in handy yet, maybe they would this time around.
He just needed to know if there was anything there for sure.
It might not solve Daniel’s case, but if it could help Jasper stop obsessing over what was going on, it would be enough.
He brought the box of old documents to the living room and turned the TV on, but he wasn’t listening to it.
He hadn’t looked into the box since he’d left the hunters, and he hadn’t ever expected to have to again.
In truth, he wasn’t completely sure why he’d kept it.
Maybe it had been nostalgia, but it’d probably been that he’d wanted to be sure he had something to defend himself with if the hunters came after him.
They never took it well when a hunter decided to leave the organization.
They allowed it because they didn’t have a choice, but before it came out that Jasper was part monster, the hunters had been trying to get him to come back.
They’d tried talking to him many times, and his answer had always been no.
It still was, but it wasn’t a problem anymore. The hunters didn’t want him. He was part monster, which meant he didn’t belong with them, no matter how many of them he’d fought next to. He didn’t care, but he thought it was a little funny.
The first thing he saw when he opened the box was an old photo album. He hadn’t even remembered that it was there, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to look at the pictures inside, but they might reveal something, if not about Daniel, then about Jasper’s past.
He didn’t have many childhood pictures—and in hindsight, knowing what he did now, it made sense—so he’d always cherished the ones he did have.
They were all in this small album, and the first thing he saw when he opened it was a picture of him and his mother.
He had to be around five, and he was beaming at her, but her expression was tight.
Jasper continued flipping through the album.
Usually, the pictures were with his mother.
He didn’t have a lot of pictures with his father, which he wasn’t surprised by.
Most of the pictures were taken at the hunters’ headquarters since that was where they’d lived for most of Jasper’s childhood.
Having the hunters live there made it easier for them to be ready to move when they had to.
It meant they were always available when they had to fight the monsters.
They all had private apartments, but it still felt like growing up in a big community, and Jasper had enjoyed it.
He hadn’t enjoyed much of his time with the hunters.
He paused at one of the pictures taken in his father’s office.
Jasper was in his father’s chair, grinning, but his father was standing next to him, looking down at him with a frown.
That was the way Leroy usually looked at Jasper, so Jasper wasn’t offended or worried.
It wasn’t even what caught his attention.
No, that was the symbol on a piece of paper hanging behind Jasper.
He picked up the album and squinted at the picture.
He vaguely remembered the setup of his father’s office back then.
He’d had a whiteboard behind his desk where he wrote down information and put up documents and reports.
He’d clearly been working on a case, but of course, Jasper didn’t remember.
His father wouldn’t have talked about it to him, anyway. Jasper had been just a child.
But he recognized the symbol. He wasn’t sure why it was in his father’s office, but it was there, which meant that Daniel’s death was probably connected to the hunters.
That wasn’t a surprise. Daniel was an ex-hunter, so of course everything was related.
Jasper wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
Technically, he wasn’t the one investigating the case.
That was Archie, which meant it would be Archie who’d have to deal with the hunters.
The problem was that they wouldn’t give him anything.
They certainly wouldn’t help him solve Daniel’s case.
Hell, they were probably happy that Daniel was dead.
That way, he couldn’t talk about what he’d seen in his time as a hunter.
This was information Archie needed to know.
He’d have to be able to decide for himself if he wanted to keep digging or to contact Petra.
Jasper was pretty sure that he’d continue to dig, though.
Now that they knew that Daniel’s death was related to the hunters, possibly to Jasper, he wouldn’t let it go until they knew what was going on.
He’d do it for Jasper because he loved him and wanted to take care of him.
Poor Daniel would go to the back burner, but that didn’t mean that Archie would forget about him or stop trying to solve his case.
He wouldn’t. He’d just focus on making sure that Jasper was safe first. Unfortunately, Jasper had no idea if he was or not.