Epilogue Anders

Almost three years later

“ D on’t call me until you get some actual information next time. And no, ‘he ate lunch with his wife’ is not useful fucking information,” I snapped, ending the call with a curse and chucking my phone onto the desk. Fucking useless. We were outsourcing surveillance to some of Sparrow’s men, and I could swear there wasn’t a functional brain cell between the lot of them.

“Babe?” Grace’s voice caught me off guard, and I glanced up to see her standing in the doorway, her laptop half open in her arms.

“Sorry, come in, just finishing explaining to Greg how to tie his fucking shoes,” I muttered, glaring at my phone again.

“Did you go with the bunny ears? That one’s a classic,” she teased, walking inside and stopping in front of our white board.

In our minimal amounts of spare time—mainly Levy’s since he was bored and refused to surf all day like Jesse—we had begun collecting information on Mundi Evolutionis LTD, keeping tabs on them so we could always stay one step ahead and out of their radar. Levy was taking it one step more personally. Once he’d found out that there might be people—hell, children— trapped in a building somewhere being experimented on, he’d made it his mission to find them.

“I was talking to my online friend, and she gave me some more information about specials that we could add to the map,” Grace explained, setting down her laptop and grabbing some of the stickers off the side of the board. Slowly, we’d been figuring out where other specials—well, one cluster, so far—were hiding out and making sure they knew to be wary of any suits from M.E. that came sniffing around.

So far we’d found buildings owned by them, or by subsidiaries, in our own city, as well as one in Colorado, and a third in New York. The one in the mountains had me the most suspicious. It was far from the nearest town and built like a fortress, with way too much security for a simple research facility. I had people watching any and all known employees of the three buildings, from janitorial staff to CEOs, trying to get any crumb of inside knowledge about their dealings.

“The babies turned three months old yesterday,” Grace mentioned as she finished adding her notes to our little investigative board. “Menowin and Scarlet,” she reminded me, when I gave her a confused look.

“What kind of name is Menowin?” I asked, wrinkling my nose. I tried to ignore the soft smile on her lips as she talked about babies. I’d gotten a vasectomy as soon as the whole chaotic mess had been cleaned up, but I knew she was still considering things. I wasn’t opposed to babies per say, but I refused to inflict the curse of my bloodline on an innocent child .

“It’s a family name, I guess,” she replied. “The one who gets visions said his grandmother chose the name.” Right, that was totally reasonable.

“Has he seen anything actually useful to our investigation?” I asked, and she rolled her eyes.

“Yes, actually, he has,” Grace countered and I perked up. Finally, that fortune-telling loon was useful. I’d had to block his number on three separate phones after he somehow figured out how to contact me directly. I preferred to let Grace sort out his 2 am ramblings and give me the cliff notes. “He said he felt someone reaching out. Just a voice, sort of… floating? They said they were trapped somewhere. With some others.” She looked at me, watching for my reaction.

“It’s… something?” I grimaced, but it really wasn’t. We needed locations, addresses, fucking physical descriptions. Anything.

“Oh! A forest!” she burst out suddenly, and I stilled. “He said the voice was lost in the trees. Big ones, like Christmas trees.” A glimmer of hope sparked in her eyes, and I nodded, grabbing a pen and using it to draw a large circle around the building in Colorado. The one surrounded on three sides by a wide swath of national forests. Forests full of pine trees.

“Now that is something,” I told her with a tight-lipped smile.