“That’s possible,” Ronan murmured as he draped his arm around Kadence’s shoulder and drew her against his side.
“What does he plan to do with Simone?” Nathan asked.
“He’s trying to get her away from them,” Saxon said. “After that, I don’t know.”
“I can’t believe Simone is his mate,” Nathan muttered as he ran a hand through his black hair. “That won’t end well.”
“Why not?” Vicky demanded. “It’s worked out well enough for you and Kadence.”
“It did,” Nathan agreed as he took her hand. “But Simone is so proper, and Killean is so…”
“Rude,” Declan supplied when Nathan’s words trailed off.
“Yes.”
“Opposites do attract,” Vicky said. “And now that she’s a vampire, she’ll feel the pull of the mating bond more intensely than you and Kadence did while you were hunters.”
“And it was still strong for us,” Kadence said. “We have to help them.”
“He wouldn’t tell me where they are,” Saxon said.
“Convenient,” Lucien muttered.
“I’ve got it,” Declan said as he rose from his chair and walked over to the bar. He set the computer on the bar and turned it to face everyone. “Ninety-five dead in a fire in Norton, Vermont. The police say all exits were blocked and they’re looking for who could have started it. There are no witnesses. Due to the extent of the fire, identification will take a while, but they believe all wedding guests, including the bride and groom, perished in the blaze.”
“Okay, so he was telling the truth about that, so what?” Lucien asked.
“So, it gives us an idea of the things Joseph is targeting. Remote areas and groups of people who aren’t huge but aren’t small either. If we keep an eye out for more fires or accidents matching those criteria, we might get a better idea of where Joseph is centered,” Ronan replied. “Where in Vermont is Norton located?”
“Near the border of Canada and New Hampshire. Not much of a population,” Declan said.
“And Joseph took the hunters from a stronghold in New Hampshire,” Kadence murmured.
“Declan, do a search of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine for anything similar to what happened at this wedding,” Ronan commanded. “Check back three months, and if you find things that match, go back further.”
“He’s changing his MO,” Nathan said. “Before he was using the sewers and the homeless to create Savages, but once we discovered that he changed things.”
“He might have been doing this all along,” Ronan said. “But since it doesn’t fit the normal criteria of what we expect from a Savage, which is to hunt clubs, bars, and the homeless, we weren’t looking for it. We were also expecting smaller-scale attacks and not ones of this magnitude.”
Declan’s fingers flew across the keys before he stopped typing and lifted his head. “I’ve got three fires and two gas explosions that have gone unexplained with no known perpetrators throughout those states in the past three months. Fifteen people died in the first fire, twenty in the second, thirty-five in a gas explosion, thirty-seven in the next explosion, and sixty-two in the last fire.”
“So, the death toll is going up as he’s gathering and creating more Savages,” Ronan said.
“Shit,” Lucien muttered.
“If Joseph and Killean were working together, Joseph wouldn’t willingly let Killean feed us this info about the wedding,” Saxon said. “He’d know we would discover these other incidents once we learned about the wedding.”
“Maybe,” Ronan murmured. “If you pinpoint the locations of those events on a map, are they centered around anything?”
Declan worked at the computer for a minute before replying. “No, they’re all scattered across different states and towns.”
“But we know the pattern to look for now because of Killean,” Saxon said.
He had no idea why he was pushing so much for them to trust Killean on this. The two of them were Defenders together for a century and a half, there was a bond there, but he knew very little about Killean. Still, they’d saved each other’s lives more times than he could count, and Killean deserved some faith because of that.
But he didn’t think that was the reason he was pulling so staunchly for Killean. No, he could admit it was because heneededsomeone to come back from the line Killean crossed because he was so damn close to going over it himself.
Saxon lifted the bottle and drank half of it. When he lowered the bottle, he found Declan staring at him in that maddeningly penetrating way of his. Saxon grinned at him as he set the bottle on the bar.
