Chapter 25: Alexis

Chapter 25: Alexis

Knowing Will and having a functional understanding of Alphas in general, I knew he’d never agree to revisit the site where he was defeated. It was simply against the Alpha code to go to the battleground where they had been beaten. Not that it was just about shame and loss. There was more nuance to it. An Alpha could only return to the site of their defeat if they meant to reclaim that place by winning in a new fight.

From what I could tell, Blair’s tower had been abandoned for quite some now. As for precisely when it was abandoned, I wasn’t sure. My guess was it was ditched somewhere between Ralph’s and Maurice’s deaths. With two of his most loyal compadres no longer working with him, Blair knew he was backed into a corner with wolves surrounding him from all sides. Even if there were someone who was a level higher on the hierarchy of chaos, Blair wouldn’t bet his safety against the entire pack of Grimms. It made sense for him to run, thus, he ran.

And that’s why Will would never visit this place. It would be against the Alpha’s code. Since there was no adversary to fight in this abandoned tower, coming here would be moot for him. He’d never be able to reclaim this place as his own. An Alpha wolf could only claim a space if he won it from someone in a fight. He could never go to a place and designate it as his. If my knowledge of history served me right, when the Grimms had initially come to America, they had to fight for this land from another pack of wolves. It was only after the wolves were defeated that the Grimms claimed the Grimm Abode as theirs.

I, on the other hand, was a slave to no such conditions and premises. I could come here freely and roam around while looking for some critical piece of evidence. Evidence that required a finer eye than Will possessed. As intelligent as he was, Will was far from being fluent in computers. Here, in this desolate building, the only things that had survived the process of Blair’s migration were leftover stacks of computers and servers. Other things included paperwork, lab equipment, and corporate paraphernalia, all of which were useless to me. If there was any evidence of this secret mastermind’s existence, it had to be in those computers.

But which computers, exactly? There were more than thirty floors in this building, and all of them had sub-sections. I didn’t have the time to sort through every single floor, hoping to find something tangible.

Then it occurred to me that I wasn’t as fluent in computers as I’d thought I’d be. This was strictly Maliha’s domain, but calling on Maliha to aid me in this fool’s errand to find the world’s smallest needle in the world’s biggest haystack would only result in me unknowingly spilling the beans to Maliha about werewolves, vampires, and perverted occultists preying on the innocent. As bizarre and far-out as Maliha was, she’d never be able to grasp the fact that a secret universe thrived under her very nose. She’d go insane.

I did not want my best friend to go insane. Not unless it was extremely necessary. If there’d ever come a time when I had to tell her about my real identity, I would ensure that I’d do it in such a way as to soften the blow. But given that it was such a hard blow, it’d require me a lot of mental gymnastics to be able to pull something like this off.

Getting into the vacated building was not hard at all. Now that Blair wasn’t there himself, he also didn’t have any of his guards and mercenaries guarding the place. There was just one big caution tape wrapped around the entrance of the building with a couple of police patrolmen roaming around the perimeter, drinking coffee and eating donuts while talking about the big game last night. They never saw me as I slipped past them and through the cracked glass door that led into the building.

As I had presumed, this was a case of “What Will doesn’t know won’t hurt him.” He’d never have to find out that I had to visit the place where he had both suffered such an embarrassing loss. I’d bear the bad memories for him. It was traumatic enough, being in here, on my own. I could see from where I’d fallen off the window, see where Will’s cold body had frothed from the mouth as he’d said Ariana’s name, and witness our collective demise as Blair had injected him with Wolf’s Bane. It was as if all of that had just happened yesterday.

All of it was utterly painful. Will did not deserve to come here to revisit the pain. That’s what mates were for. They helped one bear the burden and ease one’s pain. I wanted to believe that that was what I was doing for him. At least, I hoped that that’s what I was doing for him. He had been so nice to me lately, ever since we’d come back from our getaway in Vermont. Will had been nothing but the most perfect gentleman ever since our engagement.

Speaking of our engagement, the ring on my finger, with its massive diamond, felt too heavy and sturdy, reminding me at every step that I was now bound to my mate in more than one way. It beckoned me to be careful, a tangible reminder of our relationship in the form of gold and diamonds.

It was going to be too humongous of a task, going from floor to floor, wondering which computer held the right information. Most of the computers, just like most of the equipment and stuff left over, had been destroyed, making my already difficult task harder.

I took out my phone, feeling restricted in my abilities that I had to depend on Maliha even though I didn’t want to.

“Sup, home girl,” Maliha’s chirpy voice came from the phone half a second after I’d dialed her number. That woman was as quick on the draw when it came to her phone as a cowboy was back in the old West days. “Been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“I’ve been meaning to meet you, but I was out of the city,” I said. There. That was a half-truth. And for now, it would have to suffice.

“Out of the city? I’ve never known you to step out of Fiddler’s Green. Where were you?” Maliha asked.

“First Bangor, then Vermont, and now I’m back home. Anyways, I’ve got this question. Can you help me out with a computer problem I’m having?”

“Sure. Shoot. What is it?”

“Say you’re somewhere where there are more than a hundred computers. How can you go about searching a group of computers in such a way that you can access all the information on all of them at the same time? Is such a thing even possible at all?”

“That’s not a tall order by any means,” Maliha said, filling me with relief. “If said computers are in an office, they’re all joined by the company’s intranet. And most of these connections are wired, so even if the internet is not functional, the intranet always is. All you have to do is gain root access to the admin. Can you do that?”

“I don’t even know what root access or admin means,” I said, feeling like a fool. Why hadn’t I taken the computer competency courses in community college when I had the chance? Oh, wait, I remember. It’s because our community colleges had decades-old Pentium PCs in the lab, and the only competency I could learn on them was how to operate Windows XP. In this office, on the other hand, all the computers were iMacs and Macbooks. I doubted if my computer competency classes from a community college would have helped me with this particular problem.

“It’s fine. I’ll help you. All you have to do is find a computer. Any computer, as long as it is connected to the intranet. Can you do that?” Maliha asked.

“I can. Anyways, what are you doing? Are you still waitressing for the diner?” I asked as I looked at the array of computers in the bullpen ahead of me, hoping that at least one of them would be working.

“Ah, yes. About that. I’m not waitressing anymore. There comes a time in a person’s life when they understand that they cannot skate about life doing menial chores and call it living. I’m a reformed person now. I’ve decided to teach computing to underprivileged kids at the community college. I’m there these days all the time. They’re paying good money, and they do need the help, help which I am very eager to provide. It’s fulfilling work. You should come by the campus sometime, relive some of the old memories from back in the day.”

“I’ll make sure to do so. Will wants to see the local community college. I’ve been meaning to take him some time. It’s good that you’re there. Now I have two reasons to come by,” I said. “Aha!” I exclaimed as I came across one computer whose screen hadn’t been completely battered. There were lines on the screen, but at least I could see what was written on it.

“You found a computer?” Maliha asked.

“Oh, yes!”

“Good, then login through the admin panel. Here’s the trick with corporations. Most of their admin usernames are admin, and their passwords are the word password. No one ever bothers to change them. It’s stupid, but it’s true. Why don’t you try that?” Maliha laughed.

As stupid as that suggestion was, it miraculously worked, and now I was logged into the computer. I could see the tiny internet icon on the top right, meaning the computer was connected to the intranet.

“If you want root access, boot the computer in safe mode,” Maliha said.

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” I said. “The computer is already connected to the servers. I can see the tiny server icons in the network section.”

“You cannot access them just like that. As I said, you need root access as an admin. Now, that is trickier to get than logging in,” Maliha said.

“How do I do that?”

“Search for the terminal and then do exactly as I say,” she said.

I did exactly as she asked and opened the terminal. She gave me a string of letters, numbers, and words to type in, which I did without questioning her. Maliha was a magician in her domain. There was no denying it. After I pressed the Enter key, a window popped up in front of me, displaying everything on the servers.

“How did you do that?” I asked Maliha, unable to believe that she’d helped me access the servers from so far away. “I’m sure it’ll all go over my head, but how did you do that?”

“I just did a localized DDoS attack using all the intranet’s computers on the server, disabling the server’s primary encryption, and making the data in the servers public to the intranet. Does that make sense to you?”

“It doesn’t. But one of these days, you’re going to have to teach me all this. You have to. It’s like wizardry,” I said, my mouth hanging open as I perused all the folders in the servers.

“It’s very simple, my friend,” Maliha said. “Humans built computers to be fallible so that they could extort the corporations through black hat hacking. It’s one of the worst kept secrets of all time?”

“I see you’re back to being your conspiracy theorist self,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ll catch up with you soon. You take care.”

“Catch you later,” Maliha said, hanging up. Conspiracy theories or not, she had helped me with a big problem.

From folder to folder, I searched until I found one that contained Blair’s files on them. If Maliha hadn’t helped me with this, I’d never have been able to access Blair’s files.

Hundreds of call logs, recordings, documents, images, and videos. I did not know where to begin.

I randomly clicked on one of the recordings and played it in the background as I looked through the rest of the folder. The conversation being played in the audio immediately hooked me, making me converge all my attention to the voices. Three of them were identifiable right away. I’d recognize those voices anywhere. The fourth one, on the other hand, was a voice speaking in a German accent, making it hard for me to recognize it at first.

This audio file was from a few months ago before Will had been injected with Wolf’s Bane.

“Beckett. How fares the alchemy?” the mystery man asked. “Are you still stuck in the same rut as your father?”

“I may be working for you, but mind how you talk about my dad,” Blair scoffed.

“Yeah, he’s really sensitive when it comes to his father,” Maurice said.

“Aren’t you as well, considering who we’re speaking to?” the mystery man snapped.

“I am sorry,” Maurice said in a tone that was so subservient that it was hard for me to believe that it was Maurice.

“And how much are you aiding in the process, Ralph?” the mystery man asked. “Did you manage to smuggle the chemicals required for the prototype? I heard they had to be imported from Romania. How do you fare on that front?”

“I had the batch shipped to Blair. All the balls are in his court right now, Master Fredrich,” Ralph said. “I just want to know how someone can do this to their brother?”

“Family can be a pain in the ass, Ralph, as I am sure you will one day understand. When my brother threatened the Grimm legacy, I had to make sure that he was destroyed. But before he was destroyed, I had to see to it that he was crippled emotionally and physically. Now that Blair’s father has failed in this regard, it falls on you three to make sure that Wilhelm and his broodmare are vanquished. If it weren’t for him, I would still be a lord of the lands in Germany, tending to our estate and enjoying the luxuries of wealth. Instead, here I rot in the squalor of this infested hamlet.”

Never in a thousand years would I have guessed that it was Fred who had been conspiring against Will all this time. How was I ever going to show Will this and have him believe that his brother had been his biggest enemy for the past seventy-something years? It would break Will’s heart.

How did he do it? How did Fred manage to come across as kindly, meek, old, decrepit, and weak while living a completely different life in the shadows all this time? How fierce was his hate against his brother that he was capable of doing something so vile to him?

“But even though you’re his brother, sometimes I feel pity for what the man has been through,” Blair said.

“I do not pay you to pity your foes,” Fred said. “Remember the fact that he killed your father. Does that not move you to seek revenge?”

“I understand that my father was a big old cunt who couldn’t get enough of torture and parlor tricks that he liked to call magic. If I were to torture someone for seventy years, I’d understand if they’d want to kill me in return. While I do harbor hate in my heart for your brother, I’m just saying that I do understand his point of view.

“The next time you empathize with my enemy will be your last, Blair Beckett. You keep reminding yourself of that, and you may yet live,” Fred said.

So many recordings just like this one, with Fred giving out commands to Blair, Ralph, and Maurice and them obeying him completely. The more Fred talked in these recordings, the more I understood why he was so bent on destroying Will.

I had to show these recordings to him immediately. His life was in danger.

While I did not know exactly how to work computers like a whizz, as Maliha could do, I did know the fundamentals of copying and pasting documents. I even had a flash drive for that purpose with me. I put it into the computer and copied the contents of Blair’s server folder into it.

***

I entered the building at around seven in the morning. By the time I left, it was two in the afternoon. The town looked completely different than how it had looked in the morning. There were ribbons, flags, and banners all over the streets, covering the skyline. The town square was being carpeted red, and a tent was being hung over the roster at the center of the erected stage. It took me a second to realize that tonight the results of the mayoral election were going to be announced.

That would explain the frills, the balloons, and the people walking around holding cotton candy in their hands and smeared paints on their faces. It was as if the mayoral election had been turned into a big carnival of sorts—nothing strange; it was just how these things worked in America.

What it did do was create a lot of trouble for me. With the streets packed with people eager to find out the results of the election, there was such a crowd everywhere that I wasn’t able to find my way out of downtown as quickly as I had wanted. With Will being back there in the commune with Fred right there beside him, my heart panicked, knowing full well that something terrible was going to happen very soon if I didn’t stop it in time.