“Damon and Eden.”
“And you want to see if he was being naughty,” he says knowingly.
“Actually, I’m wondering how he got hurt.”
Jace pauses typing and shoots me a confused look. “Hurt?”
“Jordan showed me a video of them walking together,” I explain. “It was obvious that Damon was injured and Eden was helping him. But Jordan was so focused on her going into the Keepers’ house with him that he didn’t even seem to notice Damon was in no shape to do anything with anyone.”
“Where am I looking?”
“Around the Minerva building.”
He taps out a few commands, and a new set of cameras appears on his screens. “When should I start the search?”
“Three weeks ago Friday. Around eleven.”
I watch the screens as he pulls up the saved videos and starts playing several of them at 2x speed, giving us multiple angles of the Minerva Building.
After a few moments of not seeing anything, a figure dressed all in black with curly hair lurches out from the shadows beside the building in question and falls on his hands and knees.
Jace stops the video and goes back a few seconds, then starts it again at normal speed.
We watch as Damon stumbles out from beside the building, his movements uncontrolled as he lands hard on the ground. He jerks a few times, but it’s impossible to see why with the lower half of his body hidden in shadow.
A figure appears in the darkness behind him and grabs him by the back of his jacket, then hauls Damon to his feet and throws him against the wall of the building.
The side of Damon’s head hits the bricks before he can get his arms fully up to protect himself, and his attacker spins him around while Damon is still trying to get his feet under him again.
It’s hard to see too many details because the video is zoomed out, but the fitted black mask and black gloves his attacker is wearing, along with his all-black clothes, point to this beingmore than just a scuffle. Hiding his face is smart, but the gloves are an entirely different story.
The guy pins Damon against the wall, his arm on Damon’s throat.
Jace pauses the video as a smaller figure with a long braid appears in the corner of one of the other video feeds, and he continues typing until the video feeds shift so the one with Eden in it is beside the one with Damon. Then he starts them both with a tap of a key.
We watch as Eden skids to a stop, her hands lifting to cover her mouth as she stares at the scene in front of her.
Neither Damon nor his attacker notice her, but instead of running like a sane person, Eden stays stock still like she’s frozen in place.
The guy holding Damon shifts a bit and reaches behind him just as Eden suddenly drops her hands and steps off the path as she strides toward them.
Seemingly oblivious to the fact that they have company, Damon’s attacker raises his hand, a gun clutched in his hand.
Before he can do anything with his weapon, Eden pulls her own gun out of her purse and says something to them.
Both men freeze, and she continues walking toward them, her hand steady as she aims the gun at the two men. She says something else, and Damon’s attacker hastily steps back before taking off along the side of the building and disappearing into the shadows.
“Are there cameras behind the building?” I ask as Damon slides down the wall, like his body is deflating, and Eden hurries over to him.
“Yup.” Jace pauses the video and turns his attention to one of his other screens as he does his thing. A moment later, four frozen video feeds appear on it. “But these ones will give us a better view of what happened.”
“These aren’t on the same system?” I ask, studying the screen curiously.
The layout of the feeds is different, and there’s no visible time stamp on any of the videos. They’re also shooting in night vision mode, which the school cams don’t have.
“Nope,” he says, his attention fixed on the feeds as he fast forwards them to presumably get to the right time. “There are school cams back there, but they’re older models and the video quality is shit. These are part of the Keepers’ system, but since they don’t take their cybersecurity as seriously as they should, I have full access to their network.”
“How long has that been a thing?”
