“I didn’t believe her,” Connor whispered. “When Jenna told me that Hannah had been being taken by a monster. I never believed her.” There was another long stretch of silence, the pain on his friend’s face agonizing to see. “I somehow convinced myself that if Jenna was wrong, that if she’d made everything up, then it wouldn’t be my fault that I did absolutely nothing to help find Hannah. It’s a shitty thing to do, but once I let myself believe the lie—even for a second—I couldn’t stop.”
“So you painted Jenna as the bad guy in order for you to be able to live without the guilt of doing nothing?” Trevor asked slowly.
He should be angry, but he wasn’t. Just disappointed. Really frigging disappointed. He guessed there were no lies so great as the ones we tell ourselves.
Connor nodded, almost imperceptibly. “By the time Jenna showed up in Dallas, saying she’d seen Hannah, I’d become so invested in the lie, it had become my truth. And if my sister was wrong about what had happened to Hannah, then in my mind, she was wrong about you, too. So I did everything I could to keep you two apart because there was no way you could be right for one another. Jenna had to be wrong. She had to be.”
Trevor shook his head at the way Connor had been forced to twist himself—and reality—into knots in his effort to keep the lie going. He would have felt sorry for his friend if it wasn’t for the fact that Jenna was the one who’d been the victim here. She was the one who’d borne all the pain for her brother’s stupidity.
“Not that I really care or anything, because seriously, you’re a complete a-hole,” Trevor finally said, trying—and failing—to keep the anger out of his voice. “But how’s your world going now that reality has intruded and proven Jenna right and you wrong?”
Connor’s eyes flashed yellow gold, and for a second, Trevor thought he was about to lose control again. Then it seemed like the air—and the fight—went out of his friend all of a sudden, and his shoulders visibly slumped.
“How am I supposed to live with knowing that I abandoned Jenna when she needed me the most?” Connor said, his words thick with emotion he was clearly working hard to suppress. “That I said all those horrible things to my sister? That Hannah has been a prisoner of these ghouls for a decade without me ever doing a damn thing about it? How am I supposed to live with that kind of guilt? How do I fix this?”
“I have no idea how you deal with it,” Trevor admitted. “That’s between you and your conscience, I suppose. But when it comes to fixing it, first, we need to focus on finding Hannah and getting her back. Once we’ve done that, you’ll need to sit down and tell Jenna exactly what you just told me. There’s a chance she may never forgive you, but you have to start there.”
Connor didn’t say anything for a long time, but then he finally nodded. “Okay, we focus on Hannah first. And afterward, I’ll try and talk to Jenna. Do you think that maybe you could help with that?”
To say Trevor was shocked that Connor would ask for his help was an understatement. Truthfully, he wasn’t too sure he wanted to be put in that kindof position. Even if Connor was a pack mate and a friend, Trevor was still firmly on Team Jenna when it came to this issue. But in the end, he murmured something that sounded appropriately positive, simply to end the conversation.
Connor seemed to accept that, because he stood without comment and headed over to join everyone else at the bar. Trevor followed, catching sight of Hale lifting a brow and mouthing the wordseverything okay?in his direction. Trevor had no doubt that Hale had been eavesdropping on their conversation and had heard everything they said, but he nodded at his friend all the same.
Hale and Mike—along with Davina and all four of the investigators from HOPD—were pouring over a large piece of paper, easily as wide as the bar and at least four feet long. It didn’t take Trevor long to figure out what it was.
“What’s going on with the old street map?” Connor asked, turning his head this way and that to get a look at the thing. “Have you found another way into the ghoul caverns?”
Everyone exchanged looks with each other for a second, leaving Trevor to wonder what they’d missed. He’d been too focused on the conversation with Connor to pay attention to anything they’d been discussing over here.
“Davina found the map for us,” Mike said. “It shows pretty much everything that’s undergroundhere in LA, from the old tunnels that serviced the speakeasies during the Prohibition era of the twenties and thirties to the small subway system that was shut down in the fifties. It also includes all the major sewer lines and utility corridors plus those parts of the LA aqueduct system that run underground. If there’s another way into the ghoul caverns, it should be on here.”
Trevor leaned over and looked at all the crisscrossing, colored lines, some heavy, most much thinner, a few of them nothing but faint penciled-in marks. “That’s a lot of tunnels to search. Especially when we’re not quite certain what we’re even looking for.”
“That’s an understatement,” Davina assured him. “There are over eleven miles of Prohibition tunnels alone. Throw in everything else and you’re easily talking a couple hundred miles of underground lines to contend with.”
“And unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time to waste,” Mike said firmly. “We have to find a way into those caverns, and we need to do it fast.”
Trevor glanced at Connor to see his concern mirrored on his friend’s face.
“What’s wrong?” Trevor asked slowly. “Did something happen?”
“The ghouls grabbed five unhoused people out of an alley on the western edge of the Skid Row area late last night,” Owen said grimly. “Two of them arefriends of Jenna’s. Ada and Nicole. The cops came and took a report, but as you can imagine, they’re not putting much emphasis on this one since witnesses told them theSkid Row Screamerdid it.”
“Five people all at once?” Connor questioned, looking around at them. “Has that ever happened before?”
The HOPD peeps and Davina all shook their heads.
“I have some old books that I’m digging through,” Davina said. “I’m hoping they might tell me something, but even without that, I can’t imagine a move this aggressive by the ghouls meaning anything good.”
Trevor silently agreed as he joined the rest of them in pouring over the map and trying to narrow down where they should start.
“It looks like some of the old Prohibition tunnels run close to the Skid Row district,” Mike said, running his finger along some of the heavier black lines on the map, stopping at an intersection near the Hall of Records on Temple Street. “This entrance into the tunnels is only about a mile to the east of the alley where those people were taken last night. I think we should focus our attention on those tunnels first and see if we can pick up their scent so we can hopefully track them from there.”
They continued to go back and forth for a while, but ultimately, nobody had a better suggestion than Mike’s.
“Have you thought about what you’re going to do if you do run into the ghouls again?” Owen asked. “I know you said that werewolves are damn near indestructible, but even you guys could barely keep those things at bay. And you definitely couldn’t stop them. How do you expect us to go into the middle of their territory to rescue all these captives—assuming we can find them—and make it out alive? I mean, don’t we need a better way to fight these things?”
Trevor threw Hale a questioning look. “You told them all about us?”
