The Immortal Guardians all exchanged uncomfortable looks.
“Gershom has upped his game,” Seth began. “Even more so than we first believed. He is telling the vampires in our area to increase their numbers and travel in larger packs. And he poses as Aidan when he directs them. Apparently he has become very adept at shape-shifting and is using that talent to once more try to pit us against each other and sow dissent amongst our ranks.”
“He’s doing a hell of a job,” Roland murmured.
Seth dipped his chin in acknowledgment. “There’s more. Chris?”
Leaning forward, Chris braced his elbows on the table. “I’d like to begin by introducing our guests.” He gestured to the woman. “This is Alena Moreno, the head of the West Coast division of the network here in the United States.”
Dana nodded a greeting with the others.
He motioned to the man beside him. “And this is Scott Henderson, head of the Midwest division of the network.”
More nods and greetings.
“Once you all not so subtly pointed out that I had my head up my ass and was fixating on proving that Aidan was the guilty party instead of proving him innocent,” Chris said, “I took my investigation in a different direction.”
Rising, he picked up a large stack of manila file folders and slowly circled the table, handing one to each person he passed. “The gifted ones Gershom abducted failed to come to my attention immediately because the abductions were all readily explainable. They were sick with the flu. Or on cruise. There had been a death in the family. You get the picture.”
Nods all around.
“We had what appeared to be Aidan on video absconding with three of the six women who went missing here in North Carolina. Then I discovered three men had also gone missing. I had my team at the network check up on every other gifted one who resides in North Carolina, as well as the rest of the East Coast that falls under my purview. Just to make sure all bases were covered, I also contacted Alena and Scott to inform them of recent events and ask them if they had encountered similar disappearances. They had not, but agreed to conduct their own investigations to be certain.”
Dana’s eyebrows shot up when Chris came abreast of her and handed Aidan a folder, then held one out to her, too. They really were treating her as if she were one of them.
Releasing Aidan’s hand, she took the folder and set it on the table in front of her.
“What did you learn?” Aidan asked.
Chris distributed the rest of the folders, then retook his seat. “Seth and I both received calls from Alena. Alena did, in fact, come across a gifted one who was missing, a man who was supposed to be on a cruise. Seth met with her. Several hours later, after doing more investigating, Alena called him back. I also got a call from Scott about the same time.”
When Aidan opened his file, Dana opened hers. The first in a stack of loose pages boasted a black-and-white map of the United States. Little red dots decorated the map like confetti, the largest group of them in North Carolina.
“When my East Coast team dug deeper,” Chris announced, his face grim, “we discovered that a dozen more gifted ones who were believed to be on sick leave or on vacation, et cetera, have in fact gone missing in other states in my domain.”
Dana stared at the map. Was that what the red dots represented? Missing gifted ones?
“Alena and Scott discovered that some of the gifted ones whose absences had previously been accounted for in the rest of the states were likewise not where they were supposed to be. All told, almost a hundred gifted ones have gone missing across the country in less than a month.”
Exclamations of disbelief erupted.
Dana set the map aside. On the second page in the stack, a black-and-white picture of a woman stared up at her. The woman’s name, age, and physical description were printed beneath the photo, as were her occupation and the details of her disappearance. According to her employer, she had contracted pneumonia and was supposed to have been home recovering. But the network was unable to locate her.
Dana turned the page. A man stared up at her. When his father had died, he had told his employer that he needed to fly to Dallas for the burial and would have to stay for a time to handle estate business. The network had confirmed that his father had indeed died and the man had flown to Dallas, but he had disappeared shortly after attending the funeral.
“Gershom was clever,” Chris told them, answering the question that Dana thought must be hovering on a lot of lips: How could all of these abductions have gone unnoticed? “Except for here in North Carolina, he only took one or two gifted ones from each state.”
Aidan looked at Scott and Alena. “Was I implicated in any of the other disappearances?”
Alena nodded. “We have video footage, taken from security cameras, of you”—frowning, she shook her head—“or someone who looks exactly like you, conversing with the women who went missing, getting into cars with them, then driving away. No one has seen them since.”
“What about the men who went missing?” Ethan asked.
Alena shook her head. “We only saw Aidan with the women. We found no video record of the men’s abductions.”
When Aidan’s eyes began to glow, Dana rested a hand on his arm and gave it a reassuring caress.
Aidan tried to keep his fury in check. But damn it, knowing that Gershom was posing as him while he kidnapped women and—for all they knew—harmed or killed them was beyond fucked up. His pulling that shite here had been bad enough. Knowing he was doing it all around the country…
“Is he doing it overseas as well?” he ground out.
“No,” Chris reassured him. “Only here in the States.”
Small comfort.
As Dana stroked his arm, Aidan forced his hands to relax their crushing grip on the edges of the file folder and leaned back in his seat.
Seth spoke into the leaden silence. “When Scott and Alena both informed me that an immortal might be implicated in the abductions, I assured them of your innocence, Aidan.”
Alena’s lips turned up in a faint smile. “By showing us that he himself can appear as you.”
Sheldon snorted. “So he’s a magician now.”
“Who?” Tracy asked beside him. “Seth or Gershom?”
“Gershom,” Sheldon said. “What do all magicians do?” He reached a hand out to his right in front of Jenna and waved it in a circle. “They do bullshit that’s guaranteed to hold your attention here…” He thrust his other hand out to his left in front of Tracy. “While they do the real shit over here.”
Ethan nodded. “He implicated Aidan here in a way we were guaranteed to notice and raised a vampire army so we’d be so busy fighting amongst ourselves, trying to clear Aidan’s name, and addressing the new vampire threat that we wouldn’t notice that he was quietly acquiring his own little collection of gifted ones.”
Sheldon lowered his hands. “Exactly. The question is—why is he taking the gifted ones?”