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  “Wh… what?” Shakes’ face paled even further.

  “Caroline was the human involved in bringing down the elf supremacist terror plot last fall,” Greg supplied. “You’re lucky she even speaks to elves, considering what they did to her.”

  “And what they did to Darien. He saved my life back then, and went out of his way to avoid scaring me with his existence, to the point that it almost killed him,” Caroline growled herself. “So I suggest that you take your nasty attitudes and adjust them, or you’re going to find your future here a lot less bright and shiny. Nobody likes working with a bigot.”

  “Oh, um… I— I guess that, uh, I should maybe go get a copy of this to the Chief.” Shakes stood up and stammered his way out of the conference room, glancing back and forth between Greg and Caroline, and they both watched him speed walk back towards his cubby.

  “Well, now we have all sorts of new information,” Greg said, the growl still in his voice. “About the traffickers and about our I.T. guy.”

  “He’d better hope that he grows out of that attitude. Or he’s going to stop making friends.” Caroline glared at the now empty doorway.

  “Let’s hope so. I’d bet that something’s going on with that kid.” Greg agreed. “So it sounds like D is having a bit more luck than we are. However, we’d better get a team over to room 37B and see if there’s anything to be found over there.

  10

  Caroline and Greg found themselves back at the motel that afternoon, working with Mitch and his team to comb the room. They didn’t find anything especially helpful other than a few traces of several mages having been through the room. Greg picked up faint hints of the scents that had been in the van with Lucas, but time and the motel’s cleaning staff had effectively erased anything that would help.

  That evening Greg escorted her back to her dorm room. “I don’t want you disappearing on your way home from work,” he said with a shrug as they walked from his car to her building.

  “Thanks, big brother.” Caroline rolled her eyes at him, but he just laughed.

  “I always wanted a family. Glad you’re on board, C.” Greg grinned down at her and she couldn’t stop the tired sigh escaping. Well, there were worse fates to be stuck with than being adopted by a giant puppy like Greg. Something in his words caught her attention, though. There was a pain buried in them that she was sure he successfully hid from everyone, but her odd talent picked it up and forced her to hear it.

  “What do you mean you’ve always wanted a family?”

  Greg was silent for several minutes, frowning and moving awkwardly as he walked. Finally, with a grimace his shrugged again. “You know I’m the only known…” He glanced around. “You know that I’m unique, right?”

  Caroline nodded. Greg glanced around again and saw how close they were to the dorm building. He put a hand on Caroline’s elbow and led her over to a bench, away from a group talking about a presentation they were organizing for some class.

  “I don’t have a family because my kind…” Greg clenched his jaw and squared his shoulders. “It turns out that we’re not born so much as created. I don’t even have parents in the normal sense. There was a male genetic donor of some species, I don’t even know that much. The woman that carried me was human, but it wasn’t her choice, and I don’t think she was genetically related to me. She was a prisoner as much as I was.”

  “Holy shit,” Caroline was stunned not just by the words, but by the pain in them. “Greg, I…” What did you say to that sort of information? There was nothing. She just leaned over and wrapped her arms around him, squeezing him in a tight hug. Greg’s shoulders were practically cement bricks, as tense as he was, but after a few minutes he took a deep breath and started to relax a fraction.

  “Yeah, well. I don’t like to talk about it, for obvious reasons. Some of it’s in my personnel file, of course, but…” Greg shrugged and took a deep breath. “She raised me, sort of. The mages who created me didn’t want to deal with an infant, which is not a shock, looking back. I don’t know what they expected. No shifter is born already in adulthood. Didn’t stop them from running all sorts of crazy tests, though. Most of my earliest memories are of a lab.”

  “Sounds like they were more like mad scientists than mages,” Caroline shivered. “That’s horrifying, Greg.” This evening got dark, much faster than she expected. This was so much worse than the I was an only child or I grew up in foster care that she had been expecting.

  “It’s… I want you to know,” Greg said. He leaned back on the bench and stared up at the red-leafy branches over their heads, autumn taking over mother nature’s paintbrush. They rustled softly in the breeze coming off the hills, and Caroline smelled the chill of the turning season in the air. “It’s good to talk about sometimes, I think. I’ve told Darien a bit, too. Point knows a little.”

  “Mom— she insisted that I call her that, even though she really wasn’t. But all we really had back then was each other— she took care of me outside the lab, in our little prison cell apartment. She taught me to read and write and whatever else she could with the shitty supplies they gave us. It’s thanks to her that I didn’t turn feral.”

  “Jesus,” Caroline leaned up and hugged him. The pain in his voice was thick now, and obvious enough that anyone could hear it, but it was also an old pain. Almost a familiar one. He leaned into her hug and sighed. It was a sad sound.

  “How did you get free?” And did the jerks who did this pay? If there was any justice in the world, they’d been tossed into a hole in the ground behind locked doors and the key not just thrown away, but melted down and turned into soda cans or something.

  “When I was about eight, there was a raid and the FPAA got us out of there. Mom was killed shielding me from the fighting. Isn’t that funny? As deadly and powerful as I am, as much damage as I can take and still be fine, she threw herself over me as soon as the shooting started and wouldn’t let me up until it was too late.”

  “Mothers are like that,” Caroline said. “Worrying and keeping their kids safe is their job. God, Greg.”

  They sat like that, Greg hunched down, his head resting on Caroline’s shoulder, for a long time. The presentation group broke up and went their separate ways. A couple passed the bench, all hands and giggles and oblivious to their surroundings, and went into the dorm. A car somewhere honked long and loud.

  “It was mostly okay after that. The FPAA arranged therapists and a decent group home for troubled paranormal kids and actual school and stuff. Mostly so they could be sure I wasn’t going to go insane and start rampaging through the country and all, but it wasn’t bad. I didn’t end up one of this kids tossed into the system and forgotten.”

  Caroline let that sink in for a minute. They didn’t forget Greg because they couldn’t afford to lose track of him. He was, after all, the only known manticore alive. Politics at its finest, sadly, but Greg wasn’t bitter about that side of it at all, it seemed.

  “Sorry for getting all maudlin all of a sudden,” Greg said, sitting up. “I don’t talk about that very often anymore, because it still hits really hard, even after twenty something years, you know? I guess that when you said that, about being your big brother, I just…” He swallowed and shrugged.

  “Hey, I was an only child, too,” Caroline said, bumping his arm with her shoulder. “I’m glad to know that doesn’t stop me from having siblings. And, I can brag that my big brother is more significantly badass than just about anyone else’s.”

  Greg smiled, and it really was like the sun coming out from behind the clouds.

  “You brag about me?” He asked. Caroline laughed.

  “I have once or twice,” she tipped her head to the side and frowned. “But now I’m going to be even more grossed out when people imply we’re dating.”

  Greg grinned and after a moment Caroline couldn’t stop her laugh.

  “Come on, kitten. Let’s get you home safe for the night,” Greg said. “I promise to be as embarrassing as a protec
tive older brother can be. I’m going to take this position very seriously, you know.”

  Caroline groaned, and Greg hammed it up through the hallways of the dorm building, all the way to her door, where he made a big fuss about making sure she was inside with the door locked. Her roommate was left sitting on her own bed, staring at the blonde giant.

  “Is that your date?” She asked, awe lacing every word. “Holy crap! No wonder you didn’t come home last night”

  “What? Ew, no. This is Greg. He’s basically my brother in pretty much every way that counts, so no. No dating.” Caroline answered, smiling at her claim on him, and Greg puffed up a bit. “We work together though, and he’s being paranoid, so he walked me in from the car. My actual date for last night, Lucas, got kidnapped. So I’ve been at work since… god. One in the morning?”

  “What?”

  And that started the long explanation that there had been what Caroline now felt could be described as a rash of kidnappings near campus with Greg nodding sadly. Her roommate listened with horror and immediately grabbed her phone to make sure all her own friends were safe. She suggested a buddy system be instituted, and surprisingly, started to organize one among her friends. Once the phone calls started, Greg headed out to get some rest himself, and Caroline slumped down onto her bed.

  She had left a lot out of her explanations, like the stunning powder and the non-human auction goers, so while a buddy system might help, it might also just be a two-for-one deal for the kidnappers. Just because they had only grabbed people when they were alone so far didn’t mean they had to. She wasn’t entirely sure where she should draw the line between making sure people were being safe, and not discussing an active investigation, an honestly she was still more than a little distracted by Greg’s revelations.

  After a little while, her roommate went down the hall to keep organizing student safety patrols as she called it. Caroline settled in at her desk with the idea that she could get some actual schoolwork done, but the image of little boy Greg being tortured and treated like an experiment gnawed at her stomach. She had to keep reminding herself that he was free now, and cheerfully goofy more often than not.

  Maybe she’d take her schoolwork to do in the FPAA office where the desks weren’t so cramped and the chairs had padding. And she could reassure herself that Greg was okay now, after all that emotional dumping. It’s not like she could concentrate on theoretical case studies just now anyway.

  She’d just read the same paragraph for the third time when her phone rang.

  “Hello? Caroline? It’s Shelly.”

  “Hey, Shelly, how are you doing?” Caroline leaned back in her uncomfortable desk chair. “Is it true? There’s others?” Shelly’s voice was breathless and scared.

  “Others?” Caroline blinked at her desk to make sense of the question. Other manticores? Greg was sure he was the only one. How would Shelly know that?

  “Other students kidnapped? More than Janine and that one other girl?” Shelly’s voice was sharp over the phone. Oh! Right. That made much more sense.

  Caroline’s eyebrows crept up. “Uh, yeah. There are a few cases we believe are related,” she said carefully.

  “God, they’re right! My whole floor is buzzing with rumors. That there’s a hundred people missing, that there’s only two, that the campus is on lockdown, that they’re cancelling classes for the semester…. I don’t know what to believe,” Shelly said. “I just want Janine back.”

  “I know. Um,” Boy, that buddy system plan was obviously working well. At least the chatter about it was. The sound of a muffled sob broke Caroline out of her mental eyerolling.

  “Oh. Oh, Shelly, um. Just hang on. I’ll come over and we’ll talk about everything, okay? I know I called this morning, but maybe if we talk in person you’ll feel better.” And it might be the only way to tamp down the insane speculation. Lord, she wasn’t good at this.

  “Okay. Thanks, Caroline.”

  “No problem. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” She hung up and started putting her books away. Man, Caroline thought that the rumor mill in her relatively small hometown had been fast, but apparently nothing was faster than the campus grapevine.

  She grabbed her bag and a light jacket, checked that her taser was easy to reach, and locked the door behind her on the way out. If her roommate didn’t have her keys, well, either she could find a friend to crash with or she could wait till Caroline was back. Shouldn’t be long.

  It was a cool night, now that the weather had let go of it’s deathgrip on summer. The air smelled noticeably more like autumn leaves, and that oddly distinct feeling of school had settled over campus, making everyone hurry a bit faster and seem a bit more studious. Even in the few hours since she’d sat on the bench with Greg the temperature had dropped, and she wished she had a sweater on under her jacket.

  Shelly’s dorm was the next building over, but she still had to retrace her steps a bit. The path took her past the route to the parking lots, and up some stairs. Why campuses had to be so oddly laid out, she didn’t know, but it seemed to be a common theme for all the colleges she’d toured before picking this one. Those tours felt like so long ago, back when her biggest worry was what Queen Maureen the Mean was going to harass her over next gym class.

  Caroline laughed quietly under her breath. One short year ago she had actually been worried about an obnoxious twit of a high school bully. Moe wasn’t even that smart about it all, but it had felt at the time like the worst thing that could happen. Now? Well, now Caroline knew better.

  She shook her head, trying to dislodge images of snatched students, of Lucas vanishing into the alley shadows, and a young Greg out of her head. She thought, instead, of Greg’s manticore flying over Virginia this morning. The rush of that trip, of flying without a machine and being able to just lean over and watch the ground flow by below them… she wasn’t sure she could come up with words that expressed exactly how awesome and terrifying it had been.

  Caroline was turning to head up the steps and remembering the rush of the wind in her face when the sudden smell of a musty old storage room made her choke for a second, then there was nothing else.

  11

  Wherever she was, the surface under her was cold and hard. Caroline didn’t often have this much trouble waking up in the morning. Her alarm clock was more of a timer letting her know that she had to stop wallowing in bed and face the day.

  She was definitely not wallowing in bed right now, however. She had spent enough time waking up from fainting or being knocked out lately that she recognized the groggy reluctance to function. And isn’t that just a fun thing to realize is familiar? she grumbled to herself.

  Well, she definitely wasn’t in the medical suite at the FPAA office. Those beds were actually comfortable, for one thing. And there was usually someone sitting right there waiting to yell at her for another thing, and this room felt distinctly empty even with her eyes shut.

  It wasn’t a hospital, either. Hospitals generally tried to prevent patients from lying smooshed in an awkward position on their front, and usually made sure that unconsciousness was accompanied by lots of beeping and computer monitoring equipment sounds. Also, even those beds were more comfortable than this.

  She let her fingers twitch and brush the surface of whatever she was laying on. It was metal, she decided, and only marginally less freezing under where she was warming it with her own body heat. Well, this couldn’t be good.

  She lay there for a few more minutes, mentally checking for injuries or anything else obviously wrong with her body, and found nothing troubling. Her hands were bound together, but they were bound in front of her at least. She cracked her eyes open and looked. Oh, nice. Handcuffs.

  She let her eyes do the moving until she was convinced that yes, she was alone. And in a damn cage this time, it looked like. She seemed to be in the back of a small room, with what looked like industrial shelving lining the walls and separating her from the rest of the space. It made her think of a tin
y warehouse, but the shelves were covered in custodial supplies.

  Her head swam a bit and her vision blurred when she blinked and pondered sitting up. Noises nearby, from somewhere behind her around a corner of shelving, pulled her attention. Voices, footsteps… a door opening.

  “Okay, honey, time to wake up.” A man stepped around the end of the shelf. “I know you’re coming around, so don’t bother playing possum. That powder is pretty reliable with its timing.” He was on the bigger side of things, but big like a bouncer at a club that sees more maudlin drunks than actual fighting. A mid-level thug of some kind. She dug up enough unfogged clarity to glare at him from where she was still laying on the floor.

  “You managed to stir up a whole buncha problems for us, did you know that? I mean, we knew that we’d be noticed eventually, but we thought for sure we’d have till at least after the auction before anyone put it together and called someone above the cops,” he said. “What I want to know is how much you know. You somehow tracked us to the motel, and my boss wants very much to know how.”

  Caroline tried to keep up her glare and stay silent. Somehow tracked… He didn’t know about Lucas? If this guy didn’t know about Lucas, then where is he? How did he get in and out of the van without anyone noticing?

  If she was lucky this thug would tell her more than she already knew. If she was blessed by a miracle, they had only taken her purse, and not searched her hoodie’s pockets so she’d still have her taser. She wasn’t going to hold her breath on that one, but until this guy left and she could look, she’d hang onto the tiny hope.

  “Look, keeping clammed up isn’t going to help you, sweetheart. You’re already in it up to your pretty little neck now, and up for sale to boot,” he said. The man crouched down in front of the cage and she got a good look at him. Dark hair and a face that could have been attractive if not for the cruel gleam in his eyes. A nose that hinted at past violence with a slight crookedness. Caroline tried to memorize as much of the sleeve tattoo as she could see below his t-shirt sleeves.