He sighed, and I knew I had won.
“Fine, but there are rules.”
Instead of jumping up and down like a five-year-old on Christmas morning, I schooled my face to an alert attentiveness. No reason for him to know I planned to ditch his rules in favor of doing things my own way.
“Give me your phone,” he said.
I dug it out of my bag and handed it to him. He withdrew his and typed a few buttons into it. My phone rang. He clicked the ignore button, then typed a few more buttons into my phone. He handed it back to me.
“I put my number in there. You’re to call every hour on the hour. You’re not to make a move unless I approve it and under no circumstances are you to confront the draugr on your own. You don’t have the strength or power to survive an encounter like that.”
I slid my phone out of his hands. “Sure, Dad.”
“Miss a check-in and I’ll yank you into the nearest safe house. You’ll just have to take your chances that I find the creature before that mark kills you. Remember, if you try to hide, I’ll-”
“Yeah, yeah. You’ll kill my family,” I snapped, walking away. “Don’t worry. As aggravated as they make me, I wouldn’t put them in danger.”
I felt the weight of his eyes on me as I walked to my car and drove away.
I’d managed to get myself a temporary reprieve, but I doubted I could keep him at arm’s length for long. His patience was bound to dry up before too long. There was also the deal with the sorcerer to keep in mind. The noose around my neck kept tightening and there were no scissors in sight.
*
I ended up back at my apartment. Now that the vampires had found my family, there was no point in hiding. They only had to threaten harm against the people I loved, and I’d folded like a cheap paper bag.
The sun was still a long way off as I let myself into my place. I threw my keys and bag on the coffee table before pulling out my laptop and a pad of paper. Time to review what I knew before something else happened, and I needed to go chasing around the city like a crazy person.
I pulled up a map and sent it to the printer, printing sections of it on several pages and arranging them on the coffee table in front of me.
Flipping on the TV, I let the news babble in the background as I grabbed the bowl of M&M’s off the end table next to me and placed a yellow candy at the site of the dryad’s death. Next, I placed red ones at the site of the two werewolf murders. More and more M&M’s were added to the map as I tried to remember the ones from Brax’s list. The vampire had interrupted us before we’d managed to visit every site. I couldn’t mark one of the earlier murders off since I couldn’t remember the exact location. I also couldn’t mark the most recent death.
Finished, I sat back. No pattern emerged. It looked like someone had dumped the shell coated chocolates on the map and they had just scattered with no rhyme or reason.
I threw myself back and looked up at my ceiling. I made a terrible detective. Couldn’t make sense of anything.
I sat back up and hunched over the map. I was missing something.
What? Think.
Something should be here that wasn’t.
“Another family has been reported missing,” the newscaster said in the background.
I looked up.
“This is the fourth family to go missing in this fashion. Columbus police are cautioning people to lock their doors at night.”
That was it. The humans. There was an entire set of victims that Brax, Liam or myself hadn’t factored into the investigation.
I pulled up news articles from the last few months, searching until I found the ones focusing on the missing. I marked the victims’ houses off using the green M&Ms. It took me an hour to be sure I found all references to the human victims.
“I’ll be damned.”
Where the colors marking the supernatural community’s victims were spread all over the city, the green was concentrated in one spot. Right next to one of the older parts of the city. Westgate.
I typed the name into google and scrolled past anything that said apartment or real estate. I paused at a blurb that said “Westgate was partially constructed on a former civil war prison camp.” That seemed interesting. I hadn’t realized there were any confederate prison camps in Columbus.
Looked like the only thing that remained was a cemetery.
