“I’ve got your back,” I promised.
“We just need to find out why the simulator is framing him,” Dimitri said.
“There you are,” Slater murmured as Snakey hissed up around a broken security camera half-buried in the dirt andbrought it back to Slater. “Let’s see who the real culprit is. Snakey?”
Chaos magic flickered around us before Snakey dove into the device, coaxing lost footage to life.
Slater’s red eyes turned bright red, covering the whites. “I can see what he sees,” he murmured as he saw through Snakey’s eyes. I hadn’t known chaos demons were capable of that. “Shit. The device was burned before the culprits were shown. All that’s on it is fire and screaming shifters being burned.”
Snakey jumped out of the camera as Slater’s eyes went back to normal.
Snakey slithered off toward the rubble again.
“I didn’t know you and Snakey could do that,” I said in awe as Koa let go of my hand. “That’s really fucking cool.”
“There’s a few things you don’t know, venom baby. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.” He winked at me.
Hawk scratched his head, bewildered. “Wait…if bat shifters are extinct, why’s there still a bat shifter kid?”
“This happened in the past,” Aura reminded him, rolling her blue eyes. “The extinction of their species doesn’t apply to what happened here. Keep up. Besides, if this happened that far back, how are there even cameras?”
“Maybe they just modernized it a bit?” Eleanor suggested. “It would make sense that they wanted to gauge our abilities with some tech.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I murmured, scanning the evidence again.
“Let’s focus on what really matters,” Lorian stated clearly. “We need to figure out what caused this.”
“Dragon cult?” Aura suggested. “Talon marks and a phoenix feather. Evidence suggests the dragons and drakes could be framing the phoenixes.”
“Butwhy?” Koa asked. “The dragons and drakes don’t usually have an issue with phoenixes.”
“These talon marks are too uniform.” Dimitri crouched down next to one.
“I thought the same. Even the phoenix feather looked perfectly placed,” I said. “Right next to the kid that, without Lorian’s power, would’ve been too traumatized to say anything.”
“It seems that someonewantsus to think that this was done by the phoenixes or dragons.” Hawk scratched his head, and he couldn’t be more right.
“Snakey found another camera.” Slater tilted his head as his eyes went red again. “There’s a cloaked figure, blurred by smoke, and they’re…dropping that feather next to the kid deliberately.”
I felt a chill crawl down my spine. “False evidence planted.”
Dimitri’s eyes met mine, and I knew we both thought the same thing.
“Humans,” we said.
“Humans?” Aura scoffed. “How could humans do this kind of damage? Let aloneframeany supernatural.”
“The surveillance supports that theory,” Slater said as he blinked until the whites came back into his eyes. Snakey slithered around his neck to rest before fading into him.
The feather was real, but it was collected and planted,not shed.The claw marks had to be manufactured.
“Look at the spacing.” I pointed. “The talon marks are identical.”
The child sniffled as he woke with a sob before Lorian placed his hand back on his shoulder.
“A hand,” the boy whispered. “A gloved hand. I couldn’t sense any magical essence from them. It was a large group.”
That was it.
