Chapter 21
Chapter
Twenty-One
Anotification dings on the computer, and Leo scoots it closer. “Oh, good. The rest of the therapy notes finished downloading.”
“What’s the most recent one?” Xavier asks.
“Give me a second.” We all watch anxiously as Leo scrolls. “Okay, the most recent note…” He skims the text, then narrows his eyes. “Sorry. It’s a scanned copy of handwritten notes, and it’s not exactly easy to read.” He takes another few seconds to decipher it, then makes a face.
“What?” Antonio asks. “I know that look.”
Leo starts reading. “Claire came to see me quite agitated and upset. It’s the first time she has requested a meeting in nearly three months.
She had a visitor today, a woman named Abigail Mills, who claimed to be one of Claire’s teachers.
Claire insisted she had never seen Mrs. Mills before and said the woman was lying.
She repeatedly stated that ‘he sent her.’ When I asked who ‘he’ was, Claire said, ‘the man from my dreams. The man who wants my blood.’”
A chill runs down my spine.
Leo keeps going. “Claire was crying and exhibited behavior consistent with genuinely believing what she was telling me. She was cooperative with staff, and after consulting with Dr. Mona, she was given one milligram of Xanax and went to bed.”
“Abigail Mills,” Antonio says. His eyes land on mine.
“I take it that means something,” Xavier says.
“That was one of Vivian’s aliases,” I tell him. My stomach drops. “What’s the date?”
“Two days before Claire disappeared,” Leo says. “Just about three weeks ago.”
“So Vivian visited Claire.” I stare at the laptop. “Why?” No one answers. “If the Order already discarded her, what would Vivian want with her?”
“The demon communicated with you because he had marked you,” Devon says slowly. “If someone had already cracked the door open and had access to even a little of his power, could he communicate with them too?”
“Oh, definitely.” I nod. “We know the Order has been siphoning power from him for centuries.”
“And if the Bellamy family was responsible for imprisoning demons…” Xavier begins. His expression darkens. “It would make sense that Vaelric would be interested in the girl.”
I let out a ragged breath and stand, suddenly too anxious to sit still.
“We need to think through every possible reason Vivian could’ve been there,” Antonio says. His tone makes it clear he isn’t defending her. “I know we don’t have many other explanations, but I don’t want us jumping to a conclusion and missing something.”
“Maybe she thought she could switch Claire for one of you and make her be the one she gave up,” Mabel suggests. Then she immediately shakes her head. “No. She’s too young. And Wren had already been here for more than three weeks by then.”
“Vivian left without her,” Leo says, scrolling through more notes. “And from what I can tell, this is the first mention of her at all.” He looks up. “Before Abigail Mills, Claire didn’t have visitors.”
My chest tightens and I sit back down. “This poor girl.”
Xavier’s hand lands on my thigh. “Don’t let your emotions get the better of you,” he says softly. “Your compassion is one of the many things I love about you, but I need you to keep your head on your shoulders.”
“He’s right,” Antonio says reluctantly. “We don’t know why Vivian wanted this girl. Our best guess is still a guess.”
“I know.” My voice comes out sharper than I mean it to.
“I know there’s a lot happening right now, and somehow I’m at the center of pretty much all of it.
” Tears suddenly sting my eyes. I think it’s some combination of exhaustion and the fact that I’m the only person in this room who truly knows what it feels like to be ripped away from your family, experimented on, and discarded like garbage when you stop being useful.
Theo comes back into the room. From the look on his face, he heard enough to know what we’re talking about.
And he looks just as concerned as the rest of us.
He would probably rather walk into direct sunlight than admit that, though.
Instead, he holds one hand out dramatically and pretends to check his watch.
“We have a business meeting to attend,” he says, raising his eyebrows at Xavier. “Or did you forget?”
“I didn’t forget,” Xavier says patiently. For the first time, I’m genuinely impressed by the way he deals with Theo. There is no chance I could tolerate either of my brothers for seven hundred years. Then again, I did watch Xavier snap Theo’s neck once.
“You go deal with that,” I tell Xavier. He gives my thigh a squeeze. “I want to keep going through these files. I don’t really have anything else to do right now.”
“Okay.” He kisses the top of my head.
Zeke joins him, and the three of them leave with Theo.
I don’t think my nervous system can handle any more stress, so avoiding coalition drama for the next hour sounds ideal.
“Don’t drive yourself crazy over this,” Devon says.
He takes Xavier’s spot beside me and hands me a stack of papers. I look down at the date.
Claire had just turned thirteen. This was her intake report.
She was asked about the behavioral problems that supposedly made it unsafe for her to continue living with other children.
But she couldn’t come up with a single concrete example.
She couldn’t even name one of her adoptive siblings.
The therapist notes that Claire seemed frightened and that her answers sounded rehearsed.
The next several months of notes follow the same pattern.
Claire is sad.
Quiet.
But agreeable.
She never causes trouble.
Never steps out of line.
And her story never changes. The therapist repeatedly notes suspicion that Claire has been told what to say.
As the months go on, I can tell the therapist starts to genuinely care about her.
The notes become a little less clinical.
A little more personal. She never directly says it, but the implication is obvious.
She thinks it’s heartbreaking that Claire has been labeled such a difficult child when nothing in her behavior supports it.
Because of that label, no one even considers her for adoption.
“She was fifteen the first time she ran away,” I say, finding the note.
“She didn’t get very far. But she told the therapist she had a dream that her mother had the same name she did and told her to go home.”
“Do you think that could actually be true?” Mabel asks.
“Yeah.” I keep reading. “Even if Claire hadn’t figured out how to tap into her own power yet, spirits visiting through dreams is absolutely possible.”
The therapist had apparently checked the address Claire gave her.
It belonged to the Bellamy family. The same family who had given her up through a closed adoption.
The final note from that session says the therapist intended to ask Claire the next day how she knew the address. I flip to the next page.
“She says the information came to her in a dream,” I read. “That her mother wants her to go home. That her family has something to tell her.”
My stomach twists.
“The therapist reminds Claire that she was given up in a closed adoption and repeatedly questions how she could possibly know anything about her biological family.”
I keep reading.
“Claire became tearful and appeared genuinely distressed at being accused of lying.” The next couple months don’t give us much. Claire seems to fall into a depressive state. Barely speaking. Barely eating. Eventually, she’s put on a heavy dose of antidepressants.
My heart aches for her.
Did she always sense that there was something different about her? Something that made her feel like she didn’t belong with everyone else? I always felt that way. Though, in my defense, I was actively treated like I was different. I flip forward several more months.
Then stop.
A few weeks after Claire’s sixteenth birthday, the therapist documents what she calls several “unexplained incidents.” I know exactly what that means.
Claire was using magic. Accidentally. Magic she didn’t even know she possessed.
Around her seventeenth birthday, she tried to run away twice.
She had an after-school job and was caught trying to buy a bus ticket to Connecticut.
“What’s in Ohio?” I ask, looking at my brothers wondering how Claire ended up there.
“I don’t know,” Antonio says. “Maybe a lab. A safe house. Or maybe they just picked somewhere random enough that no one would look too closely.”
“Yeah. That would make sense.”
I keep going through the notes. Nothing else stands out until the night Claire disappeared three weeks ago.
She slipped out after dark. And just like the police report said, there was an issue with both the power and the backup generator for almost ten minutes.
The note says Claire used the blackout to conceal her escape.
I stare at the words.
“What if she didn’t cause the blackout?”
Everyone looks at me.
“What if someone else did?” The thought settles heavily in my stomach. “Did Claire actually run away?” I swallow. “Or was she taken?” My phone rings.
The sound startles me enough that I jerk my head up.
“It’s Marie.” I answer and immediately put her on speaker. “Hey. Please tell me you found something.”
“Oh, honey,” Marie says. There’s something in her voice that makes my stomach drop. “I found some things. You might want to sit down for this.”