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“Maybe it’s just a similar last name?” Wade didn’t sound convinced at all. He turned the phone my way.

Melody Holt.

I had a heartbeat to deny the connection. Holt wasn’t that uncommon. Maybe it was a coincidence.

And yet.

I opened my phone and pulled up Jude’s personal records with a thumbprint.

“Fuck.”

His mother.

I flipped my phone to show the group. They all cursed.

Not only was Ivan missing. Not only was Jude nothing but a ghost. Now his mother was dead at a crime scene tied to a cult of crazies.

Another wrinkle in a mess that kept getting larger.

But the picture was starting to come together. Not a one-off incident with the Thayersons trying to “fix” their autistic child. This was bigger. A slew of parents seeking supernatural assistance to rewrite their progeny.

And Melody Holt was one of them.

“We need to find her husband,” I said, shoving my phone back in my pocket. “If Melody was here, he might know why. Or he might be next.”

“Tiana’s already on it,” Ezra said after typing into his phone at lightning speed. “She’s pulling his financials, his location history, everything.” He sighed, reading through his phone. “Sadly, a lot of it’s locked up behind red tape and lawyers. I didn’t know he was that well connected.”

“The military?” I asked.

Ezra nodded. “Government contracts. Lots of NDAs and a wall of lawyers. I knew the Holts were rich, but I didn’t think they were that rich.”

They weren’t. Jude wasn’t. Neither was his grandfather.

Something didn’t add up.

“Did you know the father filed to have Ivan permanently committed?” Ezra asked. “To one of those variant facilities.”

“What?”

“File’s a mile long. Claims Ivan is a danger to society and himself.”

Facilities was a kind word. Those places were jails for variants. But rumors had been circulating for years that they were something darker than jails. Government sanctioned testing facilities. Trying to harness variant abilities. Trying to recreate them.

No one had ever proved it. No one had ever gotten past the NDAs and the legal walls. And a rare report ended up with the whistleblower dead and unverifiable.

“The document has a long contract attached for a Florida facility.” Ezra continued to scroll. “What if they took the kid?”

“From under Xavier’s nose?” I asked. “Do they have variants kidnapping other variants? They’d have to be at least demigod level to get past the twins.” And then there was Xavier, who might pretend to only be a demigod, and was fated to Ivan. They might not be bound yet, but I knew he’d rip the Veil apart himself to keep that kid safe. A curse of having shifter blood. The bond overruled all common sense.

I looked around at the bodies, the chaos, the flashing lights. At Michael Thayerson’s corpse in a body bag and Melody Holt’s name on a screen. At the fog that had swallowed Jude’s brother and the father who wanted him locked away.

The pieces clicked together.

The changeling touching Jude as a child. Had that been another bargain, like the Thayersons? Maybe Jude’s power wasn’t what they wanted. Maybe they’d been stuck with him.

Jude would have something snarky to say about that.

But the thought left a nasty taste in my mouth.