Chapter 129
“Hey, Cass,” Aaron said, walking toward me as Cadence headed for the chair Mom had been sitting in earlier. “Cadence said you had some questions about what happened in Sierraville.” He sat down on the sofa pretty close to me, and I wanted to scoot back, scoot away from him, but not only would that probably be rude, there was nowhere for me to go.
“Yeah,” I said, looking anywhere but his eyes. “I just wanted to know what happened to Elliott.”
“I think that’s a valid question, and you deserve to know. It’s just… not something that’s easy for either one of us to talk about, as you can imagine.”
“Right,” I said, shaking my head. “I can understand that. I don’t need… details… or anything. It’s just, that guy who shot him? Who was he? Why would he do that?”
I expected a whole litany of reasons why he wouldn’t be able to tell me, but instead, he surprised me by being honest. Perhaps this would be the new normal after all. “Well, you know who Laura is, right?” Aaron asked me, his hands folded in his lap and his back to my sister who was now staring across the room in the most catatonic state I think I’ve ever seen her.
Answering that question was a little tricky for me. I didn’t know why he thought I might know who Laura is. So… I just stared at him for a moment. Part of my inability to speak had to do with accidentally looking him in the eyes. I could see how my sister had become so captivated. It was like I was stuck in his tractor beam, and Chewy wasn’t able to punch anything hard enough for me to break free.
“It’s okay,” Aaron finally said and kind of smirked, like he was remembering something. “Elliott either honestly wanted me to know he wasn’t wiping your mind the way I’d told him he should be, or he really wasn’t good at keeping secrets.”
So, not only did Aurora know I had more information than I was supposed to, so did Aaron? “I mean, he confirmed a few things for me, but he didn’t usually outright tell me anything, unless I already knew about it.” In this case, I already knew Jack was a Vampire, so Elliott had told me about my sister getting shot trying to destroy him. And the person doing the shooting had been Laura, Aaron’s ex-girlfriend. I wondered if he might mention that.
He only nodded at me, like he understood I was trying to protect Elliott. I expected some sort of reaction out of Cadence, but she either wasn’t listening or wasn’t able to process the details of our conversation. “Laura has been angry at me for a long time, and throughout the time that she’s been hating me, she’s been hunting a Vampire named Giovani. Have you heard of him?”
“Uh….” My head was doing some sort of a mix between shaking and nodding. I really wanted to lie to him but was struggling.
“Giovani was created by Holland, the Vampire that Cadence killed in Paris. I know she told you about that.”
“Yes, she did.” That I could confirm.
“I know you know about Jack.” It wasn’t a question this time, and I also saw Cadence’s head turn, an eyebrow raised. “Giovani considered Jack a brother because they were both created by Holland.”
“So Holland bit Jack?” I asked, taking advantage of my opportunity to find out even more than I had before.
“She didn’t bite him; she scratched him. We didn’t even know it at the time, and his incubation period, if you will, took a lot longer than it would have if she’d done more than just break the surface.”
“Wow,” I muttered, finally able to pull my eyes away from his and drop my gaze. “Poor Jack.”
“I know,” Aaron agreed. “If we would’ve have realized what was going on, we might’ve been able to get to him first and made sure he was properly prepared, but with everything going on with Holland then, well, he sort of slipped through the cracks a little bit. I’ll take the blame on that one.” He said it like he meant it, and like he was used to taking the blame for things whether or not he was actually the one at fault. “Anyway, Laura left that night, the night Jack died, very angry at both me and Cadence.”
“Why was she mad at Cadence? She wasn’t even your girlfriend at the time.”
“Cadence is pretty remarkable,” Aaron replied, and I could tell he wasn’t just saying that because my sister is pretty, but he genuinely meant it. “I think there was a lot of jealousy driving what happened, honestly. I also think Laura was of the opinion that if she hurt Cadence, she could get back at me.”
“You are not very good at breaking up with girls.” I folded my arms and stared at him for a moment, and he actually laughed. “Just saying.”
“Valid point,” he nodded, not looking at my sister, who had a small smirk on her face as she stared at the wall again. “Anyway, when Laura left here, somehow she managed to join up with three other Hunters who were also mad at Cadence, and me, and Elliott.”
“Why would anyone be mad at all three of you?” I asked, confused.
“It’s another sort of a long story, but we were on a hunt a few months before, your sister’s first hunt, where things went a little sideways. I’d promised these three we’d take the Vampire in unharmed so they could interrogate him. Why they wanted to do that doesn’t really matter, but Cadence destroyed the Vampire and the three of them swore vengeance against us.”
“Did you know that?” I wondered. “Did you know they were planning to get even?”
He shrugged. “People get angry at me a lot. Usually, they don’t mean it, and it blows over. In this case, I guess none of us really thought Cowboy Sam meant what he said. The other two, Finn and Camila, are just his sidekicks. They don’t think for themselves, anyway.”
“Cowboy Sam?” I repeated. “He sounds like a cartoon character.”
“I have a few other things I’d like to call him,” my sister muttered, and Aaron turned to look at her, sympathetically, for a moment. I wondered if he said anything to her. I hated not knowing.
“Laura and Sam, along with the other two imbeciles, came up with a plan to lure us out into the middle of nowhere. With the titanium bullets, they knew they could take us all out.” My eyes flickered to my sister, who was looking at us questioningly, probably wondering if I would stop him and ask what he was talking about—what titanium bullets—but I didn’t have to do that because I already knew. “They said they had information about where Giovani was, but they couldn’t get to him with their limited resources.”
“And you just believed them?” I asked, my forehead crinkled in surprise.
“No. We checked other sources, and they had a lot of confirmation, from independent Hunters we’ve worked with before.”
“And Eliza,” Cadence said, not turning her head at all this time.
“Right,” Aaron confirmed. “Eliza sent some people to check on the situation, too, and she was convinced it was legitimate. But we are now of the opinion she was actually working with Laura.”
“So Eliza was trying to get you guys killed?” I asked, ready to track her down and put an end to that purple-headed meanie.
“We don’t think she knew that was what the plan was,” Aaron said, “but we are still in the process of investigating that.”
“Where is she?” I asked. “Some place miserable I hope.”
“Siberia,” Cadence replied, almost chuckling.
“With a pretty badly damaged eye,” Aaron added, and now my sister was really laughing, though it didn’t last long. I assumed Cadence must’ve given her a shiner. “So, even though we’d done a lot of investigating and everything managed to check out, it was an ambush.”
“Was Giovani even there?” I asked, shaking my head.
“We don’t think so. There was a Vampire hiding in the cabin in the woods that they told us was the location, but when we arrived, Cadence was pretty sure it wasn’t Giovani. And her gut is usually right about those things. By then, the four of them had already accessed weapons they’d hidden days earlier in the trees with the titanium bullets ready to fire.”
“I was going to say, didn’t you check their weapons, but I guess that answers that question.”
“They didn’t need any special bullets to kill us,” he said, and I assumed he meant the Guardians, “but yeah, we checked everything. It didn’t matter, though.” He let out a sigh and ran his hand through his hair. I was beginning to notice he did that when he was exasperated. “We shouldn’t have ever gone in the first place….”
“We all knew the risks,” Cadence reminded him. “We all knew this was a possibility. We sat right here in this room and decided to go for it.”
“I know,” Aaron said. I had a feeling this wasn’t the first time they’d had this particular recap conversation.
