Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
“Ileave you alone for five minutes and somehow things manage to go from bad to worse,” Larkin says. She eyes Leo and Antonio curiously, her gaze lingering on Antonio. “I thought this one was a vampire.”
“Yeah, that was a whole thing,” I say, shuffling back against the building.
“It made sense at the time.” Antonio gives me a look that tells me to shut up.
This time, I listen. I nervously roll the bullet between my fingers, then shove it into my pocket as one of the officers starts walking toward us.
I picked it up off the ground before anyone else could see it. Or at least before anyone else with credibility could. It’s flattened and warped, like it hit a sheet of Kevlar or something. We’re lucky the energy surrounding me didn’t cause it to ricochet.
“The coalition is destabilizing fast,” Larkin says, meeting my eyes with an icy stare.
“Fix it.” Then she turns and walks away.
One of the responding officers is a pack member, and between that and Xavier’s connections, we can probably get out of here without having to go to the station for questioning.
Which is going to make what I want to do next a little difficult.
I only need a few minutes alone with an unlocked police computer to run a quick search on Eudora Claire Bellamy. My gaze flicks toward the patrol cars. There are computers inside. And there’s a good chance at least one of them is still logged in.
“Just go with this,” I whisper to my brothers. “I need to get inside one of those cars.” Then I put a hand to my forehead and sway dramatically. “I need some cool air.”
Antonio immediately grabs me by the shoulders like he’s supporting my weight. “I think she’s gonna pass out,” he says. He takes a few awkward steps forward, dragging me along with him. “Let her sit down.”
He reaches for the back door of a patrol car. I mentally roll my eyes. What good is the back seat going to do me?
“That’s Xavier Malus’s wife,” one of the officers whispers. Not quietly enough. “He’d have your head if you put her in the back.”
“Ma’am,” another officer says, stepping forward. He opens the front passenger door of his cruiser. “The air is on.”
“Oh, thank you so much.” I glance at his badge. “I’ll make sure to tell my husband how helpful you’ve been, Officer Martinez.”
“So, I just remembered something,” Leo blurts behind me.
Perfect. Every officer within earshot looks toward him.
I have absolutely no idea what story he’s about to tell, but Leo is more than capable of making something up and holding an audience long enough for me to do what I need to do.
Before anyone can look back at me, I lean over and tap the computer mounted in the center console.
Just like I hoped, Officer Martinez is still logged into the system.
We’ve hacked into enough official networks over the years that navigating the next few screens comes almost instinctively.
I pull out my phone, ready to take pictures if anything comes up.
I glance over my shoulder. The officers are all looking skeptically at Leo as he tells some elaborate story, complete with dramatic hand gestures.
I quickly type Eudora Claire Bellamy into the missing-person database.
Nothing local would necessarily come up, but she’s a minor.
Her name should be flagged nationally. It doesn’t take long.
My heart jumps into my throat when her information appears.
I snap a quick picture of the NCIC report, then click into a separate incident report.
Everything inside me is screaming at me to stop and read it. But I don’t have time. I might have seconds before someone catches me.
I take two more pictures, clear out the search, and lean back against the seat just as Officer Martinez approaches with a bottle of water. I take it and twist off the cap.
“Thank you.” I take a drink. “I’m feeling much better.”
“Take your time, Mrs. Malus,” he says. “You’re lucky the gun jammed. This could’ve been much worse. I can only imagine how rattled you are.”
“Yeah.” I keep up the terrified-wife act. Though at this point, what is this? My third close call recently? There’s a reason hunters move around. Having repeated run-ins with the police tends to look suspicious.
“And that’s when I saw him pull out the gun,” Leo is saying behind us. “I heard the shot, but I wasn’t looking directly at him.”
The officer taking his statement scribbles notes, looking increasingly confused.
“Thank God my sister is okay.”
“Are we needed for anything else?” Antonio asks, making a show of pulling his phone from his pocket. “Theo and Xavier are eager for us to return home.” I internally smile. I’m almost proud of him for sinking to my level and using the Malus name like a get-out-of-jail-free card.
The werewolf officer looks back and forth at us. He definitely knows something is off. But between Xavier’s influence and his pack master clearly not wanting me detained, he looks like a man whose hands are tied.
And the faster we leave, the happier everyone will probably be. A few minutes later, we’re walking away.
“You gonna tell me what the hell that was about?” Antonio asks once we’re a block away.
“It’s one of the names in the notebook.” I realize I started in the middle of my explanation. “Eudora Claire Bellamy,” I backtrack. “Marie told me the Bellamy family hunted demons alongside the Blackwoods. That can’t be a coincidence. Her name is in that notebook.”
“If the Bellamys trapped demons the way the Blackwoods did,” Leo says slowly, thinking out loud, “then theoretically there could still be demons locked in Bellamy prisons.”
“Exactly.” I pull out my phone. “I need to talk to Marie. She made it sound like she knew who Eudora was.”
“Call her,” Antonio says, like it’s that simple.
“I texted her and she hasn’t replied.” I’m painfully aware that I sound like a teenage girl refusing to double-text her crush.
I just really don’t want Marie to dislike me.
I’m desperate for that witch connection.
Which, yes, definitely makes me sound like a thirteen-year-old girl obsessing over whether her crush likes her back.
I open the photos on my phone and look down at the reports as we walk.
“She’s seventeen,” I read aloud. “Claire is her middle name and what she goes by.” I keep reading. Then stop. “Wait. No way.” “What?” Leo asks. “She ran away from a group home just a couple weeks ago.”
“So she’s alive?” he asks.
“I mean, she hasn’t been found dead.” I scan the report more carefully.
“The article I found online was old, but it looks like the general information was accurate. Claire has a history of running away. She’s tried multiple times to get back to family on the East Coast.” I swipe to the incident report, which gives a much more detailed look at what was happening before her disappearance.
“There’s a report written by a local cop.” I’m so focused on reading that I walk directly into Antonio. I put one hand on his shoulder and use him as a guide so I can keep reading without worrying about where I’m going.
“Okay…” I skim the report and paraphrase as I go. “It says that about two weeks before her most recent escape, she started acting strangely. She seemed agitated and complained about headaches.”
I scroll. “Several days before she disappeared, she claimed she was hearing voices, but she has no prior history of mental illness.” My pace slows.
“The staff said she became desperate to find her family because she believed they could help her.” I keep reading.
Then stop entirely. “The security cameras malfunctioned at the exact time she escaped.”
“Sure they did,” Antonio says. All three of us look at one another. Something is definitely wrong here. And I can’t ignore it.
“You’re gonna hate me for suggesting this,” Leo says once we get into the car.
I already know what he’s going to say.
“Text Ryder.”
Yep.
Exactly what I expected.
“He still has all his Order credentials. He can run a search on her.”
“No,” Antonio says as he gets into the driver’s seat and starts the car, blasting the a/c. “If the Order has anything to do with this, they could have her name flagged. We’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way.”
“You’re encouraging me to hack into a secure network?” Leo asks with fake disgust. He’s actually annoyingly good at that kind of thing. “You know, it’s been several years since I’ve been on the FBI watchlist.” He’s only half joking.
“It doesn’t look like she has a criminal record,” I say, reading through the rest of the reports. “She just runs away, gets caught, and ends up back at the group home.” I frown. “What I don’t understand is, if she’s a Bellamy, why is she living in a group home like an orphan?”
“Call Marie,” Antonio repeats.
Almost as if he summoned her psychically, my phone rings.
Marie. “Give me a million dollars,” Antonio says, holding out his hand. Nothing happens. “Damn.” He points toward my phone. “Answer it.”
I pick up. “Hey, Marie. Funny, I was just about to call you.”
“My intuition is back on,” she replies. “I did a little more digging into Eudora Bellamy.” Something in her tone makes me straighten. “I heard some crazy rumors, and I know better than to gossip, but this one got me.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“You said Eudora was kidnapped by the Order.”
“It’s really starting to look that way.”
“That’s impossible,” Marie says.
I go still.
“Why?”
“Because Eudora Bellamy died in a car accident sixteen years ago.”