Page 62 of A Silent Prodigy for the Lycan Princess

“Pretty much. My memory palace is a crazy place,” I chuckle. “With weird animals that don’t even exist and an indoor waterfall. I even have a library in it.”

“But for you, it doesn’t end there, does it?” she asks.

“I don’t know why or how,” I say. “Eric thinks it’s both because of my IQ but also a possible gift, but every bit of information I receive I store into my palace automatically. I have several floors of libraries in my mind, of books I have read or words I have heard, and when I need information, I walk to the library and grab the book and read it again.”

“This is amazing. I mean, all of this just from your memory!” Aurelia says. “I hope you know how fantastic this is, Arden.” She pauses. “And what did you do before you noticed me? Were you in your memory palace?”

“Yes, and no. I had a look at the folders and information considering our potential victims, with Meg being our central one. I categorized the victims, like the one you reported, into highly likely victims, possible ones and unlikely ones.”

She nods. “Makes sense.”

“I built a shelf and added all the information, from the folders we put together, to the books in my mind. Then, I added the information I found online, shuffled everything in my mind, and put it into new folders in there. It’s not my actual memory palace, though; it’s more like I enter a cloud. Imagine it more digitally. I request one category from the folders, let’s say, height, and the numbers would surround me.”

“Goddess,” Aurelia mutters. “I don’t know what to say. If you ever belittle yourself in front of me again, I might kick you and give you timeout in your palace.”

I laugh at her last word, finding her threat incredibly cute.

“Don’t laugh,” she says.

I reach out my hand to grasp the back of her neck and pull her into a kiss. “You are cute,” I mutter against her lips.

It makes her chuckle. “No one has ever called me cute.”

“But you are,” I say, kissing her again. “Cute.” I kiss her again, my lips moving to her neck. “Beautiful.” My lips move to her ear. “Brave.”

I feel her fingers brushing through my hair, tugging at some strands while she presses her body against mine. I don’t know what came over me to kiss her like that and tell her how beautiful and stunning I find her, but everything with her seems so natural. With Coralie, I had to think hard about how to say things, but Aurelia doesn’t misunderstand me. And when she does, she just asks again, to understand.

I will happily give her all the answers.

She takes my face between her hands and rubs our noses together. “Before we drop unconscious from exhaustion, tell me… what did you find out?”

My eyes light up. “Blood,” I say.

“So, I heard it correctly, but what about it?”

“When I excluded those who are unlikely victims, I realized the blood types of the remaining ones are the same.”

She looks surprised now. “What?”

“I was checking the information over and over until I realized that whatever it is that they have in common is stored nowhere in our data. I tried to look for the blind spots.”

“You mean info that isn’t important to us, right?” she gasps. “For us wolves… blood types are irrelevant to us!”

“Exactly, which is why it only showed up in Meg’s data originally, as she lived with the humans, and to the humans, blood types are important in case of medical emergencies.”

Aurelia sits up straighter now, completely in work mode again. “For us wolves it’s irrelevant because our wolves heal us, and anyone can donate blood as long as he is of werewolf blood.”

“It’s the missing link. I realized that, while all the victims are omegas, not all of them are necessarily orphaned. Some just hadlittle contact with their parents or lived in different countries. We completely missed that during our research, which is why I decided to get as much information as possible. I checked the human database. And from that data it showed that at least four of those victims were archived there. And I can verify: they all share the same blood type.”

“I can’t believe it!”

“But that’s not all. Guess the blood type!”

“If you ask like that, it has to be rare,” she mutters.

“Not just rare, the rarest. Well, aside from Rh-null, but that’s only a handful of people in the whole world. They are all AB negative. It’s said that only 1% of the whole population worldwide has that blood type.”

“Goddess.” Aurelia brushes the hair out of her face. “And, although we now know they aren’t all orphaned, they were still pretty lonely, and all omegas and werewolves on top of that, which narrows it down even more.”