Helping the Wolves (Madison Joshi and the Wolves series- Book 2)

|14| Madison

It was midnight by the time the flight landed. Well, midnight according to Californian time but it was around noon at Bangalore. The sun was shining brightly and people were bustling about while the four of them were trying hard not to doze off. The four of them picked up their luggage and caught a cab. The ride that was supposed to take half hour, ended up being for one hour because of the traffic. The cab dropped them at the hotel where they would be staying.

"It feels like a déjà vu," Maddy said as she looked around the room where she would be staying.

About six to seven years back, Maddy had visited Bangalore with her mom and her cousins during a trip. They had spent about two weeks here at Bangalore. Maddy couldn't remember the exact name of the hotel where she had stayed before, but a quick Google search told her everything she needed to know. She mentioned the hotel to the Alphas and voila! They were at the very hotel that she had stayed in years before!

The room that Alexa and Maddy were sharing was gorgeous. The entire color scheme was composed of earth colors like brown and beige, which gave it a cozy vibe. It was beautifully decorated and everything was sparkling clean. Even though she was feeling extremely sleepy and the bed looked very inviting, Maddy refrained from sleeping. They had work to do. It was better to try and finish everything while there was daylight. It was very difficult since there was a 13-hour difference between California and Bangalore, but Maddy managed to not jump on the bed and drift away to dreamland.

Alexa who found the bed to be very bouncy and was using the bed as a trampoline when there was a knock on the door. Alexa rushed to open it and in came Jeremy and Xander. They were staying in the room beside theirs to make it easier for communication. The four of them immediately started discussing about what the next step would be. They didn't have any sort of clues to start working on. They tried asking the matefinder for any sort of clue but the matefinder remained tight-lipped.

"We could try putting up missing posters," Xander suggested.

"But it might alert the people who have her that we are searching for Leia. They might hurt her."

It was somewhat of a catch-22. There was no way to search for Leia without asking the people of this place whether they had seen Leia. However, if the wrong people saw the posters, then Leia might as well be dead.

"How about this? We print four posters and each of us carry one. Leia is most likely being held by a werewolf since humans aren't aware of our existence. We can sniff the people to figure out if they are werewolves or if they have Leia's smell on them and if they don't, we ask them about Leia's whereabouts," Alexa suggested.

Jeremy nodded. "That could work."

"But I can't sniff people to figure out if they are werewolves!" Maddy said. The plan seemed good enough to work except the fact that she wasn't a werewolf.

"There are many ways to figure out if a person is a werewolf. We are usually bigger than a human. Also, if you look at a werewolf in the eye and smirk at them in a challenging way, there is a ninety nice percent that they'll get irritated because a human is challenging them," Xander said.

"I'll just ask the petite looking people. Smirking randomly at people is more of your kind of thing, not mine. That's just awkward."

Hypothetically, making a missing poster should have been easy but Maddy had a lot of problem in finding a picture for the missing poster. The others didn't have any recent photos of her since she stayed with them for only a month. The only one that they had was when Leia was 5. Not exactly helpful. Maddy didn't have her old phone so she didn't have any pictures either.

"Instagram!" Maddy exclaimed suddenly which made all the others jump. She quickly installed the app on her new phone. Although Maddy barely posted anything on Instagram, she did have an account. She logged in to her account and went to Leia's Instagram profile. There weren't many posts there either. Most of them were fancy photos of her with her head tilted to the side or pictures of her turning back.

Desperate, Maddy went to her chat with Leia. Who would have thought that finding a decent picture of her best friend would be that difficult?

"Isn't Leia your best friend? Shouldn't you have pictures of her?" Xander asked confusedly when Maddy couldn't find a picture of Leia.

"I have pictures of her, but they aren't the kind of pictured that you would put on a poster. I can't put a picture of her twerking her ass off on the poster, can I?"

"Absolutely not," Jeremy growled as he folded his arms across his chest.

"Don't you have any screenshots of her while you guys were calling each other?" Maddy asked Jeremy.

Jeremy shook his head and gave her an incredulous look. "That's violation of privacy."

Maddy snorted. Violation of privacy or not, Maddy had hundreds of screenshots of Leia in her old phone that were so ugly, that they made Voldemort look like a model.

Maddy scrolled all the way to the top of their chats and finally stumbled upon a decent photo. It was a selfie without any filters. It was good enough to use.

They spent the entire evening making the softcopy of the poster. They included all sorts of information that might be useful to identify Leia. By the time it was evening, the four of them were practically sleeping on the table because of the jet lag.

The next day, they went to a shop for printing the posters and got four posters printed along with some extras for backup. With renewed energy and determination, they set out to ask the public about Leia's whereabouts.