Salvage: A Shadow Files Novel

by A. J. Scudiere

  Christina raised her eyebrow and brooked no opposition. Walter transferred her gun into her prosthetic hand and reached for her phone.

  On the fifth ring, he answered. "Fisher."

  Though it still sounded odd to her, hearing her true name, and while it made her feel even more like she was back in the military, Walter told him everything they had. Then she asked their questions. The problem was, Westerfield didn't know any of the most important answers.

  39

  GJ watched Walter move her thumb casually over the disconnect button and put the phone away. Walter had put Westerfield on speakerphone. Though he'd gotten their previous messages, she'd been right earlier and he was up to his eyeballs in his own crap.

  The two hunters he and Wade had been interrogating had given up basically zero information. Though why it had taken the agents so long to determine that, GJ didn't know. When she thought about it for half a second, she discovered she didn't want to. She was beginning to develop some additional questions, and these were about Westerfield. What kind of Special Agent in Charge pulled his trainees out before they completed their training?

  She and Walter had been sent into the middle of the Ozarks alone, and one of them—her—had no idea what she was walking into. Westerfield had known, but he’d given her no professional briefing and no personal heads up. She wanted to be flattered that he simply trusted her to figure it out, but the flattery only went so far. Her growing list of questions reached further.

  Though Westerfield ultimately knew nothing of the answers to their questions, he wasn't completely devoid of information.

  GJ had asked over Walter’s speaker, and he had answered, "No, there weren't similar raids going on against other families like the de Gottardis and Littles in the US."

  So the answer to "Why here?" wasn't just that the family was here. Families like theirs were everywhere. No, there was definitely something special about this one. He'd managed to confirm at least that he'd always suspected that the hunters organization existed across the entire US. Though he, too, was surprised by the high numbers they'd counted, not having thought it was so big. Their intel had not come back with that kind of record-breaking size before.

  As for "Why now?" Westerfield had no clue. GJ didn't either.

  She looked once to Walter and Christina and then turned. Heading into the other room, she looked only once at Shray, still zip-tied to his chair, wondering if he saw her grandfather again as she walked by.

  She grabbed Art by his arm and tugged him along. She pulled him out of the room, into the kitchen, through to the back bedroom that had thankfully been vacated in an effort of getting all the family members toward a central location.

  She just looked at him, deciding that he might answer what they couldn’t. So she asked point blank. "Why are they here Art? What do you know?"

  He hesitated, and it bothered the shit out of her.

  "Art?" she pressed, almost growing angry, but fighting the urge to let it show. It wasn’t a good negotiation tactic.

  He shook his head, still not speaking.

  GJ had to fill in the spaces. "So you know. You know why they're here, and you didn't tell us? You didn't give us what we needed to help fight them off? We're here to help you. We're here to save your family members. You do understand that they're trying to kill you?"

  Art nodded, and that bothered her even more. He understood what was at stake, and yet he still wasn't giving her the information she needed.

  Oh, fuck. After staring at him for a moment, she wouldn't say he cracked. He simply made a decision.

  "You have to talk to Will. Will is the only one who can make this decision, and maybe not Will alone."

  She didn't even think about it, just took his arm, dragged him back in to the room where they were guarding Shray, and traded him out for Will. Will followed along calmly, seeming to understand that something had cracked, and he waited calmly for GJ to say the right words. She didn't have them.

  "Will." She looked at him dead in the eyes, "What the fuck is going on here?"

  "These people came to our home. They came onto our land. They shot and killed our guest and then aimed at family members as well. You know this."

  "No, Will, I don't know this," GJ responded, trying to keep her voice from rising to a crescendo. She was trained better than this, she reminded herself. Yelling at him would yield her nothing. She understood the psychology behind it. However, she also understood the psychology that made her want to yell and hit things. And she definitely wanted to yell and hit things.

  Unable to throw punches, she started throwing questions out into the dark. Thinking along the lines of police interrogation. If he lied, she might see when he flinched. It would maybe, hopefully, send her down the right path. "Who is it here that they want, Will? They came for someone in particular. Did they want Wade? Because they killed Randall, and he was wearing Wade’s clothing and his ID."

  No flinch from the head of the household. "Is it the house? Is there something special on the land? Like a mineral reserve?" she asked him. Money was a powerful motivator. But again, no flinch. "What is it, Will? What's here that they want?"

  There! Just the slightest twitch showed on the lower eyelid of his right eye.

  "What is it, Will?" she demanded again through clenched teeth, fighting to keep her ire down, to keep the tone out of her voice, when she was frustrated enough to draw her gun and aim it at this man she was supposed to protect.

  "It's not mine to say," he said on a sad sigh, echoing Art's words from earlier.

  "Well then who the fuck's is it?"

  "None of us alone. It belongs to all of us."

  "Is it bigger than a breadbox?" she quipped, thinking now was not the time for Twenty Questions. The questions were stupid, but as soon as it was out of her mouth, she saw it was at least useful. Were they protecting the entire house? An underground cave? Or maybe a magical amulet? She had no fucking idea.

  Again, a twitch flashed at the corner of his right eye. She was glad that despite her anger and her stupid question, she’d still been watching. "So, it's bigger than a breadbox. Is it smaller than a house?"

  Twitch. Yes.

  "Animal, vegetable, or mineral?" She tried again, slower. "Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

  Son of a bitch.

  "Mineral," she said. "Give it up, Will, because I can play this all day.”

  Still, he didn't speak, and GJ grew more and more irritated as she stood there trying to question this man who was trying equally hard to stare her down. Hadn't he figured out that she'd figured him out? She was done. "Do whatever you have to. Convene a tribunal. Draw straws. Flip a coin. I don't give a flying fuck, but, Will, we cannot protect you. We can't call in more agents if we don't know what's going on. We can't protect whatever this thing is that you think they're coming for, if we don't know what or where it is. Or even why they want it. You have five minutes."

  40

  Their little tribunal took more than a solid fifteen minutes. Walter kept looking at her watch and counting the time, waiting for the signal. In the meantime, Christina had walked back to the other house. GJ had headed to the third building, and together they checked in on everybody, as best they could.

  It was rough, Walter thought, standing on the porch, holding guard over them. There was one pair of night vision goggles between the three of them. Though they thought they had come prepared—GJ had many things in her go-bag—she did not have enough equipment for them to feel safe during a full assault on the compound.

  They'd alerted Westerfeld that they needed back up, but he was unable to pull agents in from other cases. Also, he was unable to reach out to the FBI in general, because as it stood right now, they had family members walking around in the shape of wolves. He couldn’t and wouldn’t risk a standard FBI agent, fully trained and valuable to the bureau, seeing something like that. In fact, Walter got the distinct impression that the “normies” were not allowed in Nightshade at all—and she began to wonder
again just what she and GJ were doing here.

  She'd watched over her two partners as they walked in two nearly opposite directions. That was a tactical mistake, she knew. Luckily, each was heavily armed and doing their best. No shots were fired, and with each passing, silent minute Walter wondered if it was a trap.

  It’s what she would have done if she’d been on the other side of this. Let them get in different houses, let them get split up. Then come at them when they were separated and weaker. It hadn't happened, though. Despite her tension and her extra-high state of alert, the other two women had returned completely unharmed.

  The wolves were still off in the distance; she'd heard them baying once more but further away, and then nothing. Again, she'd strained her ears, making certain the sounds had trailed off in a natural fashion and weren’t cut short. She listened for gunfire, both up close and in the distance, and heard nothing. Though she forced control of her body, she relaxed noticeably when Christina stepped through the door behind GJ. Then she let another layer of tension go when she was able to close and lock the door behind her partners, keeping all of them in.

  The other houses were reported back as safe. Alicia had been located in the woods with the kids after another cousin had been sent to find them and check in. They decided to stay there for the night and move further off the property in the morning.

  GJ came straight through the door bearing more scientific information. She didn't greet her partner, but said, "Wolves bay for communication."

  Well, it was another advantage, but they could have used a damn radio, Walter thought.

  “I asked the others at the house. I wanted to know why they thought they might have gone out and done it. So, it's okay. I mean, I guess, it's an advantage.”

  They're not dead yet, Walter thought. She knew because she kept hearing them, and she'd started to recognize some individual voices in the sounds, at least she wanted to believe she had.

  With the three of them back it had taken only a few more minutes—though time seemed to drag on forever—before Will came out and motioned the agents to join them in the back room. They'd left junior members of the family guarding Shray Menon and now there were no feds in sight or sound of the captive either. Walter didn't like it but, given the look on Will and Art's face, there was something here. She felt she needed to be present for it. She felt they all did.

  They went into the back bedroom and stood in a loose formation around a queen-size, four-poster bed. Walter figured it was the most awkward board meeting she'd ever attended.

  Will started with, "We took a vote." And Walter decided she didn't give a flying fuck. She didn't care how they arrived at it, she only cared what they'd arrived at.

  "They're here for our records," he said, voice flat—concerned, but not overly upset. Maybe he'd been through this before. That was an important question, Walter thought, for she was still trying to wrap her mind around the idea of such a valuable record collection.

  "Records of what?" GJ asked, always on top of it, always ready for more information for that greedy little brain of hers.

  Not records in vinyl, Walter thought, records of happenings. Duh. She must be tired.

  Will waited out his own heavy sigh, then said, "They're here because we're the oldest family like us in the US. We can trace our ancestry back to the Egyptians."

  "The Egyptians had wolves?" GJ asked. Walter thought about all the places her partner had listed where her grandfather had found skeletons. Egypt had not been on the list.

  It was Will who gave her a smirk and raised an eyebrow, "You've seen the hieroglyphs, right? They worship the dogs."

  Holy shit. Walter almost physically felt the realization smack her in the face.

  But it was GJ who voiced it. “And you can trace your lineage that far, or is this another myth, like werewolves?”

  Leave it to GJ to look these people in the eye and tell them their family history was absolutely, plausibly, incorrect. Still, Walter found herself waiting.

  "Yes," Will declared, no uncertainly in his tone.

  Though she was no GJ, Walter had learned to listen to the undertones. She wasn't quite a human lie detector, but if Will Little’s records were incomplete or possibly faulty, he didn’t know about it. He didn’t believe in the possibility either. He was sure of this to the marrow of his bones. His weird, shape-shifting bones.

  "We have ancestry and recorded births and deaths on every known American family with our genetics." He looked back and forth between the women as he spoke, stating his points as though these were standard scientific observations on par with any research or genealogy GJ might have dug up in her past life as an academic.

  "How many families are there?" Walter asked, wondering for a moment what Donovan might belong to. What group, what family, what branch.

  "There are fifteen family groups, and numerous individual families mixed in with society. They’re scattered all over the States. Mostly, the groups land in places with fertile farmland and open spaces. We do seem to get more and more crowded at times."

  "Why now?" Walter probed, repeating GJ’s question from earlier. "If these records date back to the Egyptians, then they've been here for how long?"

  "I think it's because of the Littles," Will said, and Walter stopped, hoping everyone else would, too, giving him time to expound on what he meant. Sure enough, he did. "My family—the Littles—were outside of Billings, Montana. The city expanded and basically got too close. They decided to move. I and my immediate family had already relocated here—my wife’s the de Gottardi. The rest of the group came down here and joined this farm. Overall, our family units have gotten a little smaller—with technology being what it is, more were able to leave and live solitary lives, but still stay in touch."

  "People like Wade?" Walter asked, wondering why the words had tumbled out her mouth. Will almost laughed.

  "You think the FBI recruited him just because he's a brilliant scientist? I mean, he is," and as she watched, his chest puffed up with pride for his grandson. "But honestly, he's in your division in part because he belongs to the oldest family in the US. He's in because he knows or is related to most every faction here on the continent."

  Bullshit, Walter thought. Unassuming Wade, who liked to talk about quarks, spin, and all kinds of things she couldn't pronounce, let alone understand, was actually some kind of ambassador for the werewolves?

  But Will wasn’t done. "About two months after the rest of the Littles cleared out of the Billings place, their compound was raided and burned to the ground.”

  41

  GJ listened, almost too fascinated to do her job and protect these people. She wondered if maybe people dressed in black, carrying rifles and wearing Kevlar, were sneaking up on the house right now as she listened to the story Will told. The compound outside of Billings had apparently shown no evidence of the records.

  “What kind of evidence would you have left behind? What kind of records are they?" she asked.

  "They vary quite a bit," Will told her. "We actually have stone tablets for some of them, old bibles, probably worth millions in their own right."

  "Like people do with births and deaths recorded in the front?"

  "Very much like that. Some of this is on scrolls, written on ancient papyrus. Some on early paper that's falling apart. We've been working to document it digitally where we can."

  For a moment, her brain flashed back to a few small pieces of paper, documents she'd seen in her grandfather's lab. She had a brief moment to wonder if her grandfather had managed to steal some of the family archives. But she didn't say anything.

  "So they came now because the documents are all here suddenly?" GJ asked, noting from her partner’s expression that Walter was about to ask an identical question.

  "Almost," Will offered. "Previously we've kept them in a number of locations. We decided it was time to consolidate. We've lost several pieces over the years and the various moves. Our goal, like I said, was to digitize as much as we c
ould so that, should an original artifact be lost, the information wouldn't be. We thought we were being very good about it. No strange changes, no big packages, just small quantities of the documents moved at a time, and it's taken us about ten years to gather them here. We wanted them in one central location, where we felt we could protect them well."

  Walter raised an eyebrow. Small wooden homes? Farmers? Her partner didn't say anything out loud, but GJ could practically hear the words coming from Walter's brain.

  Will must have psychically heard them, too. "You've seen how well-trained my family is."

  Walter offered a slow, careful nod, acknowledging his point. And GJ understood. They grew tomatoes and potatoes to eat, and they practiced firing with sharp aim to keep their documents and their history safe. "So how did this group, this anti-wolf militia, figure out that you had all the documents here? Did somebody leak something on social media?" Once again, she'd meant it as a joke, and once again, she saw Will Little's eyeball twitch.

  He sighed, because by this time, he knew she could read him. He'd already been given permission to tell, so he didn't hesitate. "I don't think anybody tweeted anything out," he offered with a wry tone, "But one of the reasons for consolidating was too many people who knew too much. We wanted to keep the archives safe in a small number of hands. In fact, probably about seventy percent of the people here don't know that they're here. It’s part of the goal. We have a council and we voted on it."

  Of course, GJ thought. Naturally, there was a werewolf council. She wondered if they had to be able change in order to get in the door, or if simply being a family member was enough.

  She was tempted to get the genetics figured out and then test herself, curious if she might now give birth to a werewolf baby one of these days. Better that than Bat Boy, she thought absently. And there she was, getting snarkier from stress and lack of sleep. Her brain was going off the rails. Will Little's brain wasn't, though, and GJ tuned herself in again by sheer force of will.