Cooper found me a while later, sitting at the top of the stairs, holding my now-silent phone and staring at nothing in particular.
“Tommy?” He rested his hand on my shoulder, his voice sounding worried. “Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I decided this was not the ideal time to point out that ghosts were real and actually a lot less shocking than what I’d just found out.
Instead, I reached for his hand, gripping it tightly as I pulled him against me. I needed that contact right now, and thankfully he was willing to give it. “It’s my family,” I murmured, still staring in front of me unseeingly. “You remember I mentioned my brother was born with his wings out, which isn’t normal? Thing is, he’s never been able to hide them, which is kind of an issue. My parents live in a pretty remote place as a result, so no one would ever see him. Well, more recently, anyway. They used to be able to hide them under his clothes so he could go to school when he was younger, but the older he got, the harder that was to make work and eventually they just moved out to some remove place and tried to homeschool him. They probably should have just found a supernatural-only community to live in, but, well, they didn’t really know of any. I’d offered to fly them to one if they found one they thought they’d be okay in, and Dad was looking into it, but…something happened.
“They live out in the middle of nowhere, no one should have seen him, but my parents were out getting their monthly groceries and Damion was home alone. He went outside because it was supposed to be safe but somehow some humans were hiking or something, saw him, and started a big fuss and then some humans ended up kidnapping him. Running experiments and stuff to try to understand why he has wings.” I couldn’t hide my horror at the idea. That was pretty much a supernatural’s worst nightmare and my brother was just a kid. He didn’t deserve that.
I glanced over at Cooper, seeing a matching expression in his face. “Some supernaturals rescued him,” I explained. “Apparently some of the council here in Avenglade heard rumors about an angel captured by humans and rescued him. According to the fairy lady who called, he’s been here for some months and is fine, physically, though he didn’t want to leave the doctor’s house. He was staying with his fairy doctor, apparently.” I explained. “Not at the hospital. He’s not there now, he’s moved to a supernatural-only community recently and is safe, protected by a demon pandemonium for some reason, but point is he is now fine. Actually, this is probably the safest place he’s ever been. The problem is, no one knows what happened to my parents after that.”
I frowned deeply. “The other problem is, they couldn’t find my contact information initially but they got in touch with Adelaide a while back to ask her. She claimed she didn’t know my current number, which is a lie, so the fairy had to get investigators to locate me so they could tell me what happened. It took them a while, so they weren't able to find me before Damion moved out of Avenglade. If Adelaide had just told them, I mean – Damion was here in town for months, and I didn’t know, and I could have at least visited him, maybe even had him live here, although maybe he’d be more comfortable with the fairy doctor, I don’t know. Either way, my parents are missing and I could have started to look for them a long time ago! This is her own sister and nephew that are in danger and she did nothing about it! I don’t – if this is some effort at revenge for me leaving the enclave, I really need to have some words with her,” I started heatedly.
Cooper stopped me by resting a hand against my arm. “Don’t talk to her now, Tommy. You’re angry and upset and you’re right, it sounds petty and wrong and awful, but don’t talk to her when you’re angry. Wait until you cool off, at least.”
I took a deep breath, trying to listen to him. He was right, calling her now while my temper was hot wouldn’t help anything.
“So your brother’s safe, right?”
I nodded, accepting the redirection back to my brother instead of my anger at Adelaide. “The fairy who called gave me a phone number to get in contact with him. I plan to call, I just – I’m still trying to figure out what to do.”
“We should probably start by trying to find your parents,” Cooper suggested. “If your brother is safe, then we don’t need to focus on him for now. Do you know what they’ve done to try to find them?”
I was thankful for him trying to direct my mind back to a problem we could hopefully – and needed to – solve rather than the frustration that was Adelaide.
“They’ve checked their bank accounts but nothing has been touched. No contact from their phones, none of their neighbors or regular contacts have heard from them.” I groaned. “Something is wrong – they would have reached out to me if they could! There’s a concern they might have been captured by the humans, too.”
Cooper considered this. “What if we got help from a techno vampire?”
I looked at him in confusion. “A…what?”
“Techno vampire. They’re a really rare hybrid race that’s crossed between witches and vampires. I know,” he added, apparently seeing my surprise that he knew something about a supernatural race that I didn’t, “I didn’t know about them either until I encountered one for work. She lives in the area and was helping me reinforce bank security after the robbery. They can basically use electronics to trace anything online. Your parents might be off the grid, I guess, but if there’s another facility out there that humans might have angels in, I bet she could find evidence of it.”
It was something, at least, and right now I needed anything to try to do to find my parents.
I hadn’t told Cooper the worst fear. The fear that they were already dead and that was why they had so thoroughly disappeared. I only hoped this techno vampire could give us good news.
It took a few minutes for Cooper to call the vampire, whose name was Anna, and get her to agree to meet us. She ended up deciding to come over to our house so we could talk freely.
The techno vampire was fair skinned with long, straight red hair. She listened to Cooper explain what happened before settling down at my computer and starting to quiz me about everything I knew about the case, then about more general information on my parents. The whole time we talked, her eyes were fixed on the computer screen and I assumed she was looking for information, though with the speed of the sites and images flashing across the screen, I wasn’t sure how she could process anything.
“Okay, so here’s what I can tell you,” she said after the talk had finally died off and we’d just watched her for a while. “There’s no other facilities like that one in the area and no mention of any reported prisoners taken to another facility or any mention of casualties. So it doesn’t look like your parents were killed or taken by the human government.”
Well, that was something of a relief. It still didn’t answer where they were.
But apparent Anna had an idea. She had stopped on a forum page and was zeroed in on an entry. “This is the only thing I found that might give a clue – one of the humans that reported seeing your brother initially and caused the fuss that resulted in him being kidnapped also mentioned that they wondered whether he lived alone. They claimed they went back to the house to take a look – apparently they have no concept of privacy – but any personal items like photos had been removed by then. That doesn’t appear to have been done by the people who took Damion, so I presume that was your parents.”
I considered that. Dad and Mom would have been freaked out to come home and discover Damion missing, with apparent signs of a struggle. They might have even found the site mentioning seeing someone with wings and realized what happened. If so, then they intentionally disappeared after ensuring they couldn’t be traced from the house.
“So they likely disappeared on their own, but no mention of them since?”
She gave me an apologetic look. “No, sorry. But that actually does tell you something – people can’t live off the grid easily. They’re not at their house, they’re not using cell phones, credit cards, bank accounts, anything. They’re staying out of the technology grid. Look for places where they could do that, then maybe you can find them. In the meantime, I’ve set up an alert so if anything comes up on the internet that seems related to them or your brother, it’ll alert me and both of you.”
“Thank you,” I told her softly, relieved that we had any starting point at all.
She hesitated, then awkwardly patted my arm like she was trying to offer comfort but didn’t know how. “I know what it’s like to be held prisoner against your will. Your brother’s case was a lot worse than mine, and I’m glad he got out of it. I hope you find your parents soon.”
When she left, I turned to look at Cooper, trying to remember everything my parents had ever said over the years. Any tiny clue.
“Dad once mentioned having a safe house,” I said slowly, “and I know he kept cash on hand. Mom grew up wealthy and never had to really think about stuff like that, but Dad had lived on his own for years and was used to making contingency plans. I doubt he planned for this exactly, because I can’t imagine he’d ever have let Damion fall into danger knowingly, but he probably had some cash and some idea of where he could go in case an emergency situation came up.”
Cooper considered this as he leaned against the back of the couch. “Anna didn’t find any trace of real estate under either of their names – or yours or Damion’s, other than their house you already knew about and this house, anyway.” Anna had been pretty thorough on that subject, to my relief. “What if the safe house wasn’t actually a house?”
I looked at him, confused.
“My family used to go camping,” he explained, the pieces starting to fall together in my head. “You can move easily, live somewhere off the grid, and your only concerns are food and gas, if you have an RV or trailer versus a tent. If they have enough cash, that might not be a concern, but if they’re backpacking or something then all they’d really have to worry about is food, and they used to live in backwoods country, right? There’s a lot of camping sites in places like that, and probably a lot of food someone could forage, too, though I’m not exactly an expert on that.”
“Mom would be,” I said softly, trying to think through all the possibilities. “She’s a botanist, specializes in identifying plants. She works remotely for a university helping them when people come in asking what the weed in their backyard is or stuff like that. She would know what would be safe to eat or not.”
But that opened up a lot of complications. My parents could be anywhere in an entire mountain range, for all we knew. There was no good way to track them down unless they came out and tried to contact me, but if Dad was concerned about being traced…he probably got rid of their phones. Definitely didn’t charge them. Which left what, exactly?
Cooper’s face suddenly lit up. “Your plane, Tommy! We can fly out there and try to see if we spot a camp site that could be them! I mean, it could be any campers, but you can fly and I have binoculars and I know what they look like from the pictures you’ve shown me. Maybe we can find them that way?”
It was worth a shot.
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