“There was this damn owl,” he grumbled as he leaned forward, rubbing at his eyes. “It would not shut up.”
Asher walked in next, looking refreshed. He sat down with a slice of pizza, and we all looked at me weirdly. He paused. “What?”
“Pizza?” I asked. “That’s what you’re eating for breakfast?”
“It’s all I had in the fridge. I haven’t been able to go shopping yet.”
“Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” Brandon quipped. “I’ve got a really tightly organized bunch, don’t I? Have you all gone a little soft since being here?”
“Oh, don’t even, I watched you eat cold pizza after a long night many times.”
I laughed as I pulled my mug closer and took a sip. Brandon waved his hand. “Alright, let’s get into the meeting. We all have duties to get to, so this shouldn’t take long.”
We all sat up a little straighter, knowing that the goofy connection between us was on the back burner and we needed to focus.
“We did some digging into the recent attack and found nothing to back it up.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“That it was a false alarm or someone deliberately got our attention away from the pack and into the woods,” Brandon said, his face shifting. “No one said they saw a hybrid, so we have no idea how the alert came to be.”
I thought of finding Gabriella and Hazel in the woods, both with their bags, trekking away. I didn’t think they were involved, but it didn’t look good. It was more of a reason we couldn’t let anyone find out.
“I didn’t see anything when we were looking,” Asher said, looking at me. “Did you, Westley?”
I shook my head. “No. Nothing out of the ordinary. Are you sure that’s what happened?”
Kaleb nodded. “Yeah, we circled back, and the message was a call-in from a random number. We have no idea who even sent us out.”
I frowned, feeling my stomach dip at that information.
“Why didn’t you ask Jade about it? Did she feel anything?”
“Both of the girls were on the other side of Belrose in the woods with the other witches doing some exercises. We couldn’t get in touch with them, and we weren’t wasting any time trying to.”
So, someone had to have known that they weren’t here. And that made things even worse.
“Do we think we have a mole?” Asher asked.
Brandon and Kaleb fell silent. I shifted, uncomfortable in my seat. Everything pointed toward Gabriella and Hazel. I wasn’t blind to that, but I knew they weren’t part of everything going on. They didn’t even have magic. Gabriella was sweet, and Hazel was reserved. Neither of them was a mad genius trying to take us all down.
“We need to think of something because this calm won’t last forever. We don’t need a repeat of history.”
I thought of the shelter fire and how I arrived last. The flames heated the entire parking lot, and everyone was talking as they watched it burn to the ground. Everyone was asking the same questions. What happened? I remembered watching Kaleb come out the back, Asher and Brandon running around trying to get everyone under control. It was a complete disaster, but at least the animals were alive.
We went inside when the fire was out and found the body. It was mostly charred, but you could see he was in his humanform. Nora had explained to us that the man had been a dog. An animal she had been taking care of for weeks, and how he just shed his skin and changed into a vampire. How it had happened so fast, she hardly had a second to save herself.
We had tried to wrap our heads around this information for weeks. How was it possible? And who knew how to do something like that? Nora explained that he told her that witches were helping, which threw an entirely new problem at us. Who could we trust?
I knew that Brandon and Kaleb had been on high alert since then. Nora explained that she could sense something was off, but she figured he was just a scared animal, so she didn’t think too much about it. It was just another trick to catch us off guard, a trick we wouldn’t allow to happen again.
“Speaking of history, have either of them felt anything off in town?”
Kaleb and Brandon both shook their heads. “No. Nothing like that. Nora and Jade haven’t felt anything in town, which is a relief but not a solution.”
“It sounds like we need to figure out our next steps because this sitting clearly isn’t working,” Asher added. “It’s only making things better for them.”
“Sitting here is saving us,” Brandon countered. “It keeps our people alive.”
