Page 30

30. Throwback Thursday

Rome

John felt well enough to walk over to the restaurant for supper. Taking over a couple of tables in a corner, we drew a lot of curious stares from the diners who were obviously locals in this small farming community.

I could certainly understand why they were looking. With his wild eyes, messy hair, heavy tattoos, and scarred face, Kerry alone was enough to turn heads. Add in my extreme self, Mira the Amazon, and movie-star gorgeous Gigi, we became quite the circus.

Only John and Travis could have fit in here.

Speaking of Travis, he looked ready to burst if he didn’t get to share what he’d found in his research soon.

Good thing Kerry talked with him and Gigi about what to keep from Mira.

After the waitress handed out menus and took our drinks order, I asked Travis what he’d discovered.

“I couldn’t find anything on Samuel Castle, but that only means he’s not on any human radar. I’ll hack into the Council’s files later and look. Anyway, while I was looking up Hubler, I only found his official bio, business interests, etcetera, but something Gigi said yesterday made me think in a different direction. She was talking about last names and how the woman usually took the man’s surname when they got married.”

“It’s been an ongoing discussion between me and Jax.” Gigi smiled. “I don’t see my very Irish name changing to Bridget Kosta, nor can we imagine Jax’s Greek name going well with Carnahan. I think maybe we should hyphenate.”

“Or each of you keep your own last name,” I suggested.

“I like Gigi Kosta,” Travis said. “Sounds like a movie star.”

“ Anyway ,” Kerry growled at him, “what different direction did you look in?”

“His wife.” Travis looked around at all of us. “Her name’s Emily and there wasn’t too much about her anywhere other than her status as his wife. However, I did find some things on her mother’s social media sites.”

“Her mother,” I repeated.

We shut up as the waitress came over with our drinks and took our meal orders.

“Well, what did you find?” Kerry asked the second she left.

“For one, good old Mom posted a picture from Emily Hubler’s freshman year of college.” Travis looked like a smug cat. “She was holding two babies!”

“Her mom was?” Kerry looked lost.

“No, Emily Hubler was!” Travis glowered at him. “Before she was Mrs. Hubler. I dug deeper into Mom’s site and found out Emily married Hubler her junior year of college. Mom posted a picture from their wedding on a Throwback Thursday. They were standing with two children. They were obviously twins and looked like they were maybe two years old.”

“What’s Throwback Thursday?” Kerry was getting irritated.

“So they had kids before they got married.” I waved a hand. “What does that matter to us?”

“Because her husband is not the father. The twins have her maiden name in all Mom’s posts. But here’s the part I found most interesting: Before she was Emily Hubler, she was Emily Argaud.”

Silence.

“ No !” Gigi gasped. “It can’t be connected to Reilly. It can’t ! Can it?”

“Do you know her? Him? Uh, them?” Mira raised her eyebrows as she looked around the table.

“Argaud is not a common last name.” John looked at Travis.

A thundercloud built on Kerry’s face, and I kept an eye on him while I listened.

“I dipped into some human records and found there is no father listed on either of her babies’ birth certificates. Only Emily Argaud is listed as the mom.” Travis shrugged. “Could be a coincidence that Emily Hubler’s maiden name is Argaud and her son’s name is Reilly, but the fact that both his first and last name are spelled the same makes me think it’s not.”

Kerry’s skin glittered blue now.

“What is it that you know that I don’t?” I cut my eyes from Kerry to Travis.

“Yeah! Share with the rest of us,” Mira demanded.

“Reilly Argaud is a former classmate,” John supplied. “A real douche.”

Suddenly, Kerry started to shake so hard, the silverware on the table vibrated.

“Dude, what’s wrong?” Mira reached out a hand toward him, but I grabbed it before she could touch him. He was aglow with power, which would have hurt her if she touched him.

“Reilly targeted Gemma for several months last fall,” Gigi murmured. “Then, just before Thanksgiving, he trapped her in the dojo and—

“He hurt her!” Fireflies of power spewed out of Kerry’s mouth with each word.

“And you didn’t kill him?” Mira arched one eyebrow.

“She wouldn’t let me!” he sneered.

I choked back a laugh.

“You almost did,” Travis said in a grave tone. “Gave him a beatdown he’ll never forget.”

“Wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough for what he did.” Kerry’s hold on his temper slipped even further. “If he somehow had a hand in this, he’ll wish I had killed him!”

“Calm down!” I hissed. “These humans may not be able to see your power, but they’ll notice if you flip this table.”

While he lapsed into his breathing exercises, Travis and John filled Mira and me in on everything that had happened last fall, including a more detailed description of how Argaud had “targeted” Gemma and why.

“Where is this guy now?” Mira asked.

“Doing twenty in the Box.” Travis paused long enough to take a drink of his pop. “He was tried and convicted for a number of crimes in December.”

“Well, I don’t know where or what the box is, but let’s go have a chat with him.” She looked over at me. “Maybe there were some things that didn’t come out at his trial.”

“I don’t think they’re going to let you just stroll into the Box.” Travis frowned. “Do you know how that works, Rome?”

“I’ll call Clem,” I said. “He can get us in.”

“Reilly has no reason to help us.” Gigi shook her head. “Even if you can arrange a trip to the Box, he won’t talk to us.”

“He’ll talk to me, one way or another,” Kerry muttered.

“Dude,” John deadpanned, “they’re not going to let you bring hot coals into a prison.”

“There’s more, too,” Travis said. “Well, I think there is. It’s hard going backward through someone’s social media sites with no context.”

“Get to the point,” Kerry growled.

“There are other children on Grandma Argaud’s site besides Reilly’s twin. Her name’s Marlie, by the way, but Grandma calls her Lee-Lee. Grandma posts regularly about her and the other two kids.”

“Who are the other two?” Gigi asked when Travis paused to take a breath.

“Well, one girl, Amelia, died when she was small. She would have been about 16 now. Grandma usually posts a memorial picture or poem. From what I can gather, she had a sarcoma that metastasized rapidly—”

“Dragon, I’m about two seconds from—”

“She had cancer,” I told Kerry, then motioned at Travis to continue.

“The other kid, Drew, is thirteen. Grandma posts normal things about him. Soccer games, band concerts, stuff like that.”

“So Reginald Hubler and his wife had two children after they were married. Reilly’s half-siblings.” Gigi shrugged. “What does this matter to us?”

“I don’t know if it does. I’m only telling you everything I found out. What I think might be of importance to us is that Grandma hasn’t posted anything, not one thing, about Lee-Lee or Drew for nearly six months now. No soccer games. No band concerts. Just memorial things for the dead little girl.”

“That is curious,” John agreed.

While the others chatted, I exchanged a look with Kerry and saw he was thinking the same thing I was.

If Hubler needed a leash for his wife, a child was a good one.

#

We walked back to the motel in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. I headed toward Travis and John’s room, but found myself being directed toward my own.

“Can you and Boots take care of planning our trip to the Box?” Kerry thrust a black Council credit card in my face. “It’s somewhere in the Barents Sea.”

Boots? Is he really going to saddle her with that?

But Mira was grinning, so I let it go.

“I know where the Box is.” I pushed the card away. “And I have one of those, too, thanks.”

“Good. You two get to work. I wanna leave as soon as possible.”

Then he was gone.

A little taken aback, I turned to Mira.

“Gigi said he can’t read.” She shrugged. “Or at least not well. I suppose his knowledge of geography is pretty limited, too. I don’t think he’d get far in planning an international trip on his own.”

“He’s not dumb ,” I defended him. “He’s uneducated, is all.”

“I didn’t say he was dumb.” Her tone was mild. “I’m explaining why he delegated this task to you. To us. You looked puzzled, Sir Serious.”

“Would you stop that?”

“What?” Her face scrunched up. “I like it. It’s so fitting.”

“Whatever.”

She raised an eyebrow, but didn’t respond as she sat on my bed. Leaning back on her hands, she looked up at me.

“What do you know about this place we’re going to?” she asked. “I assume it’s a prison.”

I was having a hard time concentrating. She rolled her neck and her hair streamed down her back to brush the comforter. My comforter. Then she arched her spine, humming happily when it popped. The movement also stretched her shirt tightly across her chest.

What are you doing? I hissed to myself. Stop staring.

But they are perfect!

I flicked my eyes away and fastened them on the wall behind her, forcing myself to picture the Box in minute detail.

Tell her all about that. Yeah, focus on the frozen wastelands and wish you were there right now. In the cold, wet snow.

Located on a tiny island between Svalbard and Franz Josef Land, the island was locked in ice and darkness five months of the year. A bleak landscape of seabirds, seals, and walruses, it appeared on no map in the world, had been sighted by no human eye, because dense layers of archangelic wards protected it from human knowledge.

The gulag itself, simply called the Box by most of us, was buried a mile in the earth. The inmates never saw daylight, never breathed fresh air. They mined the coal that fed the steam plant, laundered clothes and bedding, cooked, or cleaned until they’d served out their sentences. No one had ever escaped. Even if a prisoner managed to make it up the tunnel and out the metal doors, survival was unlikely. The temperature on the island rarely climbed above forty degrees, a biting wind scoured the permafrost, and polar bears patrolled the shores for easy prey.

“That’s pretty harsh, isn’t it?” she asked.

From the corner of my eye, I saw she’d finally relaxed her shoulders. Relieved, I met her gaze, then laughed without meaning to, both at her comment and at my own idiocy.

“Mira, you don’t send the worst criminals to a spa! A prison is a punishment, not a vacation.”

She stuck her tongue out at me and my eyebrows flew up.

I pulled out my phone and put a call through to Clem. He told me he’d arrange things with the people at the gulag and also have someone meet us in Tromso, Norway, the last real city near the gulag.

“Who?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “Someone I trust, though. You can bank on that.”

“Good idea to have someone meet us,” she said after I ended the call.

I agreed, then held out my phone so she could see as I began searching for means of traveling to Norway. We argued over which app to use, then over which airport to fly out of. Fortunately, there was only one choice if we wanted the earliest flight with the fewest connections.

“Yeah, Kerry’s not gonna handle constantly changing planes too well.” She smiled at me, like we were sharing a secret.

“Especially if the airports are crowded.” I smiled back.

After we mapped out the journey, we joined the others in Travis and John’s room.

“All set?” Gigi asked.

“Yes. Tomorrow, Mira will drive us to the Newark airport. There’s a flight out the next morning.”

“There are closer international airports. Richmond, for example.” Travis frowned. “Why Newark?”

“No matter which airport we used, we would fly into Newark anyway.” Mira shrugged. “And the layover is so long, it would be faster to drive there in the first place. We’ll catch a plane to Oslo, then a connecting flight up to Tromso.”

“How close does that get us to the Box?” Kerry paced from one end of the room to the other.

“The gulag keeps an icebreaker stationed around Tromso. Clem’s arranging for someone he trusts to meet us there,” I explained. “After we make contact, it’s about a ten-hour boat ride, give or take an hour depending on ice and storms.”

“Have any of you ever been there before?” Mira looked around.

“Until six months ago, I never left New York City.” Kerry paced faster.

We all admitted we’d never been out of the country before. When Gigi brought up the question of passports, I explained Clem had told me to bring a set of blanks along. Since the mission had veered so far of course, the old man wanted us prepared for all eventualities. The passports only needed a nephilim to touch and imbue one with power for it to fill itself out, photo and all. Since we were missing several party members, there was even an extra for Mira.

Kerry stopped pacing and looked at me. I knew what he was thinking, and I agreed. It was why I hadn’t purchased the tickets yet. I wanted to know who was going - and who was staying with John.

I nodded, and he turned to John.

“Yeah, yeah.” John sighed and curled up on his bed. “I can’t go. I’ll check into a hotel and wait for you.”

“I don’t like leaving you by yourself, but it can’t be safe for you to fly with this bad of a head injury.”

“I know, but it still sucks. I was looking forward to adding more destinations to my range. Maybe I should head back to the Sanctuary on a bus or something.”

“No, we’ll need you later,” Kerry insisted. “When we find the others, after you get healed up, we’re gonna need to get the most vulnerable away first. You’re too valuable to the team to send home.”

“Yeah? Thanks, Kerry.” John laid his forearm over his eyes.

“I’ll stay with him,” I heard Mira say.

“No!”

Everyone stared at me, and Mira’s eyes darkened.

Now she probably thinks I don’t trust her to stay with John.

I had to say something to explain my adamant response.

“Mira and I will stay with John. In case anything happens and we need to be somewhere in the States quickly. Fastest you all could get back here is twenty, twenty-four hours. Between the two of us, we can handle almost anything that might crop up. And I have to admit I don’t feel up to running all over Norway.”

That sounded like logical reasoning to me, even if it wasn’t the whole truth.

“I keep forgetting you’re injured, too.” Kerry scratched his head. “Sorry.”

“You’re injured?” Mira whipped around and glared at me. “More than the giant goose egg on your forehead?”

“It’s nothing.” I touched my head gingerly with my fingertips.

Thankfully, Kerry diverted her attention. Too bad it was in another direction I didn’t want to go.

“You seem to be dealing with her taint okay. Way better than you did mine at first, anyway. You sure it won’t become an issue?”

“I’m good.” I glared at him, and he glared back. “After living with your stink for more than a week, I’ve learned to tolerate it.”

“What? I stink ?” Mira bent her head and sniffed her shirt. “I showered earlier.”

“It’s your taint. It smells bad to warriors.” Gigi made a face. “Don’t worry about it. Normal people like Travis and John and I don’t smell it.”

But Mira seemed stunned and hurt shadowed her eyes again. She dropped her gaze to the tops of her red boots and didn’t look up again. I wanted to say something to ease her discomfort, but I didn’t know what.

Kerry was either ignoring or oblivious to her reaction.

“Mira, I want you to get something to access the Internet. What do you call it, Travis? A mobile what?”

“Device.” Travis flicked his eyes away from his phone. “A mobile device.”

“Yeah. Use Rome’s Council card, not your own money. Then, while you’re waiting, I want you to find out more about Mrs. Hubler. I have a feeling about her.”

“What kind of feeling?” Mira asked.

“A bad one. She’s still alive, right, Dragon?” “Yep. Lots of pictures of her on Hubler’s arm at social functions, but not a lot of information beyond which designers she favors for dresses and shoes. Doesn’t even do any volunteer or charity work. It’s like she doesn’t exist outside of his shadow.”

“Send me the most recent picture you can find of her. After Mira picks up a smartphone, I’ll share it with her as well as our contacts list.” I glanced at Kerry, who looked pensive. “What is it, buddy?”

“The other week, I told Jax about seeing marks all over Argaud’s arms, and Jax said Argaud wasn’t always a jerk.”

“That’s right.” Gigi nodded. “Jax came to the Sanctuary when he was eight. He said Reilly arrived a year or so later and they got along well. But about three years ago, Reilly changed. He became mean and distant and didn’t want anything more to do with Jax, which is odd because Jax gets along with everyone.”

“Yeah, I remember hearing Whit ask Reilly why he’d started going home every break and long weekend.” Travis looked from Gigi to Kerry. “Reilly didn’t answer him. Do you think it might have something to do with his twin or half-brother? Maybe something happened to one of them, or they got sick? Maybe they died, too.”

“Then Grandma Argaud would have done that memorial stuff you said she did for the little girl. It is curious, though.” Kerry looked at me. “You think it matters?”

“More information never hurts.” I shrugged and slid my hands into my back pockets. “Sometimes the smallest things tip the balance. I think we need to find out as much as we can from this Argaud kid.”

“Don’t worry.” A feral grin stretched across Kerry’s face. “He’ll tell me everything.”

“Hot coals,” muttered John from under his forearm.

“Nah, I got something that’ll work even better. I know what he wants, and I’m gonna offer it to him.”

“You think he’s so ingenuous, he’ll believe you?” Gigi raised an eyebrow at him.

“I don’t know what ingenuous is, but I do know he wants this so bad, he’ll cooperate if there’s the smallest chance he’ll get it.”

“Get what?” Travis asked with a frown.

“Yeah,” Gigi threw in. “What does Reilly want so badly?”

I didn’t know Reilly Argaud, but I had a good guess based on what these kids had shared about him. Kerry’s next words confirmed it.

“His family’s freedom.”