Page 2

I didn’t have freezing my balls off in a tiny town in Alaska on my bingo card for this job, but that's because if I ran away from home, I’d be heading for somewhere sunnier. Sitting inside my hired truck in the parking lot of a bar, waiting for the doors to open for lunch, I pull my coat tighter around myself.

Usually, I didn’t take on jobs that took me out of state, but the money had been good and I knew tracking down Gwyn Albin, or should I say, Blue Aubin, might take me away from home for a while.

When The Husk contacted me, looking for a missing Omega, I told myself I wasn’t going to get involved. Hunting down runaway kids didn’t always end well. Telling someone their husband was cheating or that a business partner was embezzling from the firm was very different from telling someone that their child was gone.

My time as an intelligence agent had shown me the very worst side of humanity. From human trafficking to prostitution to drug smuggling, there was no telling where these kids might end up, but they rarely had a happy ending.

I’d been planning to turn down The Husk when I’d been invited to a meeting at The Warren. They brought out pictures of a teenager with silver white hair and dark eyes and I thought to myself, what if I can find him? What if this is one of those rare cases that could have a happy ending? There was just something tugging at the back of my mind and I knew if I didn’t take this case, I’d regret it.

I never had much experience working with The Husk. They kept to themselves like most Leporidae species. I wasn’t even sure if the group that had contacted me were rabbits or hares, and it was considered rude to ask which sub species they might be.

The Husk was typically made up of the elders of that species, governing and creating laws for those shifters to live by. Abiel, their High Leap, which was similar to a chief or leader, had contacted me via email, insisting that we meet in person to discuss the case.

One of the reasons I’d become a private investigator after leaving my job at Interpol was so that I had the freedom to pick and choose my cases. When they told me it was a missing person’s case, a teenager, I turned it down. But Abiel was insistent, almost scarily so, sending me daily emails. I’d also received three letters to my home and several voicemails. I knew what desperation felt like, the way it tastes bitter on your tongue as you chase any glimmer of hope. There’s a type of madness rooted in desperation, and Abiel ticked all those boxes.

In the end, my mother had been the one to finally push me into at least accepting the meeting, and so I flew upstate to The Warren 297.

The day I met with Abiel in person, l wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. The Warren was one of several dotted across the world. It looked like a large sprawling compound at the base of the mountains, the kind I’d previously seen in my work with cults or groups who existed off the grid.

Once my identity had been checked, I'd been let inside the metal gates and directed to a parking lot where Abiel had been waiting for me. I wasn’t offered a tour and, in fact, I suspect my visit had been planned very carefully to avoid putting me in contact with any other members of The Husk or the shifters that lived at The Warren. There were only alpha males in the area, despite the number of buildings, and when I’d asked about the population, Abiel had shut me down.

As for Abiel, he greeted me with kind smiles and lots of praise, which instantly set off my alarm bells. He was in his mid-40s, with dark shoulder length hair and a full, neatly trimmed beard and a soft accent. Eastern European, if I had to guess. His brown eyes barely left me as he led me into his office, almost as if he were afraid that I might run wild inside the compound.

The Husk wanted Gwyn returned to The Warren safely. His parents were anxious and worried that he’d been lured away by friends he’d met on an online forum. Abiel insisted that Gwyn had been a quiet boy, shy and hardworking, until he’d met these so-called friends. I’d seen it before, over and over again. Teens lured away with promises of freedom, wealth, drugs or sometimes for love. They were misled, groomed, and kidnapped. If that was the case, I needed to help bring him home.

Part way through the conversation, something shifted. When I asked how long Gwyn had been away for, he was unable to give me a straight answer—only saying ‘too long’ or ‘long enough’.

The tone shifted again when he mentioned that Gwyn hadn’t left The Warren empty handed. Apparently, the teen had stolen some artefacts from The Husk. Abiel refused to disclose what the artefacts were, stating that they were of important religious or cultural status to The Husk, and I didn’t push. That wasn’t the job. The mission was to return a missing kid, even if something was niggling at the back of my mind. I needed money for the mortgage payments and my mother’s hospital bills, and so I kept my nose out of places it didn’t belong.

Except, when I started digging, following the tiny breadcrumbs Abiel gave me and pulling a few strings with an old friend back at Interpol, I learned that Gwyn wasn’t the teenager Abiel had made me believe he was. I’d had to explain to an indignant Abiel that I wouldn’t and couldn’t force Gwyn to return if I found him. I legally couldn’t, because that would be kidnapping and while I may be willing to flirt a little with the lines of the law, I wasn’t willing to break them.

Coming to a compromise, I agreed to track down Gwyn, watch him for a few weeks and deliver my findings to Abiel, so that The Husk could reach out and persuade him to return and his parents would know that he was safe.

It had been a hell of a hunt, with only scraps of information here and there, some of it making no sense. My big break had been a stroke of luck. While I’d been chasing a sighting in Canada, I’d overheard some contractors discussing a job they’d completed for a white-haired beauty. A beauty by the name of Blanco, who had made them sign non-disclosure agreements and had flown them in specifically for the work.

One of the things I’d picked up about Gwyn was the attachment to his name in some variation, so all of his aliases followed the same ‘white’ or ‘fair’ theme, either with the first name or the surname. When I’d heard ‘Blanco’, I’d just known in my gut it was him.

Getting the contractors to talk had been a little trickier, but nothing a bottle of expensive whiskey and some ego stroking couldn’t handle. They’d built him a specialized vault, but had no clue what it might be for, although they had their theories, ranging from an Only Cams streaming hub, to a top-secret spy. I quickly realized it must be where he was keeping the artefacts, if he still had them and while I’d told myself repeatedly, I was not going to poke around, I may have put out some feelers to find out just what the stolen items were. So far, my search was turning up empty-handed.

That’s how I found myself booking a rental apartment that belonged to someone who was away for months at a time, in a tiny little town called Aurora Pines. I'd already been in town a week and while I’d been settling in, I’d also been discreetly asking around town—a few questions here and there under the guise of getting to know the locals and learning the history of Aurora Pines. Not that there was all that much history in this sleepy little mountain side town.

My enquiries had led me to Shepherd Coleman, owner of The Antler Inn, a bar in town, one of only two in the immediate area. From there, I was told about the young bar back and server who works for him, Ciro, and a bartender called Mazie, who also happened to be the cashier's daughter. Nerys, the cashier at the store, was only too happy to tell me about the relative newcomer to their town, and that’s how I found him. Gwyn. Or should I say, Blue? Blue with the silver hair, who everyone adored.

From there and with a little help from my next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, I learned that Blue was a long-term renter of a cabin Shepherd kept out by the lake. He’d inherited it after his fathers had died, and refused to live in it, but he also hadn’t wanted to sell it either.

I haven’t been able to determine much about Blue's relationship with Shepherd, and whether it went beyond boss and employee—but it wouldn’t surprise me. Young runaways often latched onto people who showed them kindness or affection and not only had the older man given Blue a job, but a home too.

Scrolling through the images on my phone, snapshots I’d managed to take covertly while around town, I stare at the young man. He was beautiful, in a tortured poet kind of way, with dark serious eyes, sharp cheekbones and pale skin. His silver hair was either slicked back, or tied up in a small half bun.

Back at my new home, I’d examined the cabin on the internet, digging out old floor plans and using a mapping app but nothing struck me as odd or out of the ordinary. If I wanted to learn more about the vault, I was going to have to check it out myself.