The Wolves and the Vipers

Chapter 36 - The Unpunished

"What possible motive could someone have to burn down their own pack house?" I demanded.

Jace inclined his head. "That ... is a very good question."

"And why should we believe him?" I went on. "He has a lot of reasons to lie."

"We shouldn't. But I'd rather make sure there's no truth in it."

It was a frosty morning — the first of many, I suspected. The grass was crunching beneath our feet, and I could feel the cold biting at my skin, even hidden beneath my coat. The door we were approaching was not one I had used before. It led to the reconstructed part of the pack house, and that was a place Jace seemed to wilfully avoid. Even today, he had placed this particular engagement right before we were due to visit Shadowless Pack to make sure we didn't have to spend too long here.

When we came to the door, Jace looked back at my guards, who were trudging behind us. "This is as far as you come."

They stopped, while I followed Jace through the door. There was a man waiting for us in the hallway, and he was wringing his hands.

"Alpha. Luna," he greeted us. "Please, come upstairs. It will be easier to show you."

We began the assent slowly. The staircase was barely wide enough for two people, so I slowed down to let Jace get ahead of me before long.

"This is Gavin. He was the Fire Safety Officer for the pack house," Jace explained to me. "It was his job to check the fire alarms."

And the fire alarms hadn't gone off. Ah. I was beginning to understand why this man looked so nervous around Jace.

He turned around mid-step and stared at us. "I did check them, Alpha. I know that's not what has been reported to you, but it's true."

"The batteries were flat in three of them," Jace said mildly. "But go ahead — make your case. I've only heard your account second-hand, so I'm open to it. Start from the beginning, for Emma's sake."

"Yes, sir," Gavin murmured. "When the building work started, they followed the same floorplan as the old pack house. So these corridors match perfectly. Here would have been your room, Alpha, and your brother's. We'll go in there — it's where I have everything set up."

Well, I was intrigued now. I had thought Jace simply wanted to ask a few questions, and I was only here to listen. But when we walked into one of the two rooms, I saw that there was a table strewn with folders and plastic bags. Gavin picked up a sheaf of papers first and put them into Jace's hands.

"This is the record of safety checks," he told us. "You can see that only a week before the fire, I performed checks on all the fire alarms and extinguishers in this wing. One battery was changed."

Jace handed it back to him. "I've seen this sheet before, yes. The argument made at the time was that it's very easy to put a tick in a box."

"It is," Gavin agreed. "But if it was a simple question of laziness, then what are the chances that three fire alarms happened to break? Because if you look again at the record, Alpha, you'll see that they had all been working perfectly two months beforehand, when your brother burnt that omelette."

"I agree it's strange. But there was a fuse blown, wasn't there? Couldn't that explain it?"

Gavin shook his head. "The hallway detectors are connected to the mains with a battery to back them up. Inside rooms, they run solely off batteries. You're right, in a way. If the electricity had been working that night, the alarm would have sounded when fire was first lit. We think it started around here, you see."

He led us back into the corridor and pointed at a stretch of wall directly opposite where Jace and Jaden's rooms had been. I needed only to look up to see that there was a fire alarm directly above it.