Take Courage, My Heart

Chapter Twenty-Four

The week following our visit to the New Horizons Academy became dull and repetitive. Ezra and Keisuke spent their waking hours looking either for the auction or through Gerald's hard drive. They had made a list of all the boys that had been through the facility some of which they had been able to locate, living their human lives happily. Others who had been harder to locate had been noted down as loose ends. Leander was afraid that as the facility worked with vampires those boys could have been turned or sold off like I had been. Like Eric Morrison was. After the auction and Vincent, they would be our next targets or saving missions.

In the meantime, Leander and Annerose focused their time on training me to fight better as well as use weapons like knives and guns. As days passed with no new clues Ezra feared that Gerald's death and the destruction of the facility had scared off Gerald's associates. It was highly possible, but we didn't have time to sit and be sad about it.

"None of the names even come up!" Ezra exclaimed, clambering into the training room with a frustrated huff.

"What names?" Leander asked without a pause, as Annerose and I kept wrestling on the floor. In the past two weeks since the death of Turner, I had managed to take down Annerose a few times and had brought down Leander once. He had said I was a fast learner, and that he was proud of me.

"The names Turner gave you. Those vampires he worked with, Jeremiah Winters, Evelynn Bellerose as well as a couple of others he had written down in a file. We haven't been able to trace them or anyone they could be related to. Either they use aliases, or they are just too fucking old for us to track," Ezra said, kicking his shoes off and coming onto the mat just as I tapped Annerose in surrender.

"You got distracted," she told me as she rolled to the side. "You can't get distracted out there."

"I know," I reassured her. "So, we have nothing new? Not even about the auction?"

"Your little visit to Turner seems to have driven everyone underground," Ezra said, pulling Leander on the mat as Annerose and I stepped away.

"You don't know that. We have been overlooking the States for decades and had never even heard about an auction. It could be that they have always been really secretive and underground," Leander replied and started fighting Ezra.

"How have you been looking for it?" I asked my eyes following the way both of them evaded and counterstruck each other. Ezra and Leander's fighting was like watching an intricate breathtaking dance. All the years they had spent together had made their fighting style predictable to each other, so their fights always lasted a little longer than usual.

"What do you mean– we've been trying to find Turner's associates!" Ezra snapped mid-punch.

"Yeah, but I mean, isn't it more possible that you will find the auction by posing as an interested party?" I told him, folding my arms as Leander dodged the punch and countered with a swift jab of his own. It never landed.

"To do that, we'd have to create an interested individual, at least fake some papers and online presence. It takes time," Ezra told me.

"What if you already had someone with papers and online presence?" Leander asked, halting his movements with a sudden idea striking him. Ezra stopped as well and narrowed his eyes on Leander.

"Like who?"

"Frankie," Leander said as he folded his arms before his chest. "She doesn't advertise that she is a vampire to the world, but her presence is known. Hell, even Vincent probably knows of her."

"Who's Frankie?" I asked when Ezra seemed to think it over.

"The one who turned me. She was on the run back then, but she's four hundred years old and that gives her cred. Even back then, she was known," Ezra explained while keeping his gaze on Leander. "She doesn't know how to fight, if we find the place how are we going to send her in there defenseless?"