“You thought of something?” Jared said, pulling me to my feet.
My eyes widened. “Last year, when I was in Jack’s office for the Port of Providence file, one of his cabinets were locked. I never found the keys to it. When I found the file I was looking for, I sort of forgot about it.”
Jared pulled me to my feet, quickly climbing the stairs. I tugged on the drawers of the row of file cabinets until I found one that wouldn’t budge. “That’s it,” I said. “The keys in the desk don’t work. I’ve tried them.”
Jared looked around the room, and then casually yanked the drawer. It made a loud popping noise, but it opened easily enough—for Jared.
“Well, that’s one way to do it,” I grinned.
Jared fingered through each of the papers. “You start with the bottom drawer. We’ll meet in the middle.”
I sat on my knees, pulling open my designated drawer. Old pictures, bank accounts overseas, but nothing about family. The familiar frustration from the last time I had spent rummaging through his office for clues clouded my brain.
Jared powered through three drawers before I finished one, but when he reached the fourth, he stopped. He held a paper in front of his face, and then looked beyond it to the adjacent wall.
“What is it?” I asked. Before he could answer, I noted that it was drawing of a coat of arms, similar to the one hanging from the wall.
“Does the Franks mean anything to you, Nina?” he asked.
I shook my head, pushing myself to my feet. “No. Should it?”
“You’re Irish, aren’t you?”
“Yeah? So?” Some days I had patience for his step-by-step approach of getting to the truth. This was not one of those days.
“It’s a common misconception. Surely Jack wouldn’t display something that didn’t specifically belong to him.”
“You lost me,” I said, hoping he would get to the point.
“Coats Of Arms were designed to designate a knight whose face would’ve been covered during battle. They are inherited from father to son, so it wouldn’t make sense to have a ‘Grey’ coat of arms for an entire family or last name. Jack wasn’t the type to buy into that nonsense, so this must be the original, passed down.”
“Okay.”
Jared scanned the drawing. “This is similar, but it’s not the same. And it’s unlike any crest or coat of arms I’ve ever seen.”
Jared handed the paper to me, and I recoiled at the misshapen beast. It had the body of a large cat, perhaps a panther or leopard, and large paws, I guessed to be the paws of a bear. Seven heads ascended from its body, with horns, and crowns sitting atop those horns. It was grotesque.
“This is our family’s coat of arms? Sick,” I said, handing the drawing back to Jared. “No wonder Jack changed it. He couldn’t hang something that monstrous on the wall.”
“This is very similar to the creature in Revelations,” Jared said, staring at the twisted black lines on the paper. The heads, the horns, the crowns….”
“What creature?” I said, wary.
Jared made a face, and then pored over the other files in the drawer. He stopped for a moment, and then leaned in closer to the document he had paused on. His shoulders slumped. “Agh…no,” he whispered, his head falling forward.
“What is it?” I said, afraid of what he might say.
He nervously rubbed the back of his neck, pulling the paper from the drawer. He looked once more, and then shut his eyes tight.
I fidgeted. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”
His eyes slowly opened, and the twin storms of his irises sent panic throughout my body. He glanced at the coat of arms on the wall. “I promise you, Nina. You don’t want to know.”
“I think I have to know at this point,” I said, pulling the paper from his hand.
Jared shook his head. “I can still figure out how to save you without you knowing everything. We’ve talked about that before. Trust me when I say that you don’t want to know this.”
I lowered my eyes to the paper. It was a list of names, similar to a family tree, but it only followed one line. My name was at the bottom. Higher on the list, names like Dagobert the third, and Clovis the first. The name at the top, Merovius, had two fathers: King Clodian; the other name caused my legs to disappear, and I dropped the paper to the floor.
Jared supported my weight. “Sweetheart?” he said, pulling my chin up so that he could see into my eyes. He lifted me into his arms and carried me to Jack’s desk chair, kneeling before me.
“What…what does that mean? What the hell is a Beast of the Sea?” I wailed.
Jared shook his head. “It’s just a story, Nina, nothing more.”
“Tell me,” I whispered.
Jared’s jaws fluttered. “I don’t want to.”
“What am I?”
A small smile touched Jared’s mouth. “You’re human. You just have some pretty potent blood running through your veins.”