Chapter 64 DEX

Chapter 64 DEX
I'd been pulling on the thread of the third problem—the moved car— for a few days without saying much about it to anyone, because I wanted to be sure before I made everyone panic. I was sure now.

The car was moved by a woman named Iris. She was not on any of our personnel lists. She wasn’t in the hunter network records Nadia reconstructed. She wasn’t affiliated with Marcus's operation in any way that I could find. 

What she was affiliated with was a separate hunter group that broke away from Marcus's network eight years ago over a disagreement that apparently got very bad. Now they operated independently. They had their own agenda, which was not exactly aligned with Marcus's and not exactly opposed to it. 

According to Petra when I brought her the information, they were what the supernatural council classified as an unaffiliated threat. They were unpredictable and therefore more dangerous.

I didn't know why Iris was watching the pack. I didn't know if she was a threat to us specifically or to Marcus, or both. I knew she had moved my car just to let me know she had been near it without taking anything from it, which was either a warning, a message, or something else entirely. 

I kept thinking about that for days and days, and I still couldn’t resolve it. I didn't expect it to get resolved on its own. Over the years of doing this work, I had learned to stop waiting for doubt to save me the trouble.

I had a way of working, which was to follow the thread until it ended and then look carefully at the information I had gathered. I had been doing this long enough to trust the process even when it was slow and the end was not visible from where I was. 

It all started with a car. The car led to surveillance footage from a parking lot three blocks away. The footage led to a partial plate, which was barely legible in the low-resolution frame. The plate led to a rental car. The rental was paid in cash through an intermediary that took me four days to unpeel, layer by layer, each one requiring a slightly different set of ID, which I wasn’t even supposed to have. 

At the center of it was Iris. No last name appeared in any record I could find. Just a single picture, which was grainy and slightly overexposed, pulled from what appeared to be a hunter network file dated nine years ago, before the split. 

She was looking slightly to the left of the camera, as though something at the edge of the frame caught her attention at the last possible second. She looked like someone who was used to places not quite containing her. I understood that quality. I had it myself, and it had never made me easier to work with.

I ran her against everything I had access to and several things I arguably did not. The supernatural council's internal database, which Petra gave me access to, had a file on the group she appeared to belong to. In the council records, they were called the Fractured Line. I suspected that wasn’t what they called themselves, but what the council called them because naming a thing was a way of pretending you had some type of grip on it. 

The Fractured Line separated from Marcus's network eight years ago over one single question: specifically, over whether the hunter movement should operate in permanent concealment or should eventually move toward the public. 

Marcus, at that time, was the one arguing for concealment. The Fractured Line disagreed. The disagreement hadn’t been peaceful by all accounts. There were no subsequent mentions of the Fractured Line in any council file after the split. For eight years, they had been operating entirely off any grid I could reach.

This was what made the present situation interesting, enough to make my head hurt. Because if Marcus had now changed his stance—if he was currently the one moving toward public exposure—then whatever the Fractured Line's current stance was, it was no longer obvious from the outside. 

They might be his allies or his opposition. They might even be watching carefully to see which way things went before they committed to a position. Iris moving a car without taking anything was not the act of someone who was committed to a side. It was the act of someone running a test. I wanted to know what she was testing for, and whether this pack had passed or failed.

I ran two more queries and found nothing new. I stared at the picture for a long moment, studying the line of her jaw, the set of her shoulders, and the way she carried herself in a still image. The picture was nine years old. She would look different now. I committed what I could to memory, then closed the file.

I told Zane on a Wednesday morning before anyone else was awake. I laid it out plainly, in the order I found it, because that was how Zane processed things best. 

"Does Nadia know this group?" he asked.

“I asked her last night. She's heard of them but has never made contact. Marcus kept her away from them deliberately." I paused. "Which might mean they're relevant to the stuff about her mother. The timing suggests that."

Zane looked out the window, then said, "Find her."

"Already working on it." I paused at the door. "Also, Nadia is going to figure out what I'm doing. She now thinks faster than she did a month ago. Her wolf side is gradually waking up."

"I know,” was Zane’s reply. 

He didn't sound worried about it. He sounded like someone who had already decided that Nadia Cole, however she was changing, was exactly where she should be. 

I noted this, filed it in a corner of my brain to dissect it later, and said nothing further. 

I had approximately four hundred things to do and no extra hours to do them in. So I went to do them.