The KnightShift: A Knight of Wolves

Chapter 12:

Elfrida

After going through all 36 of the files, it was around 5am before the three of us went to bed. I don't think I could have forced myself to look at the faces of all those females that hadn't been found any longer. When Tavi and I crawled into her bed I wrapped my arms around her and didn't want to let go. When I finally did fall asleep, I dreamed of the women. Well it was more of nightmare as they all blamed me for escaping and not dying for those assholes. They proceeded to rip Tavi from my arms and dragged her into a vat of blood.

I woke up that next day covered in cold sweat. My energy was low, and I really didn't want to get out of bed, but I did. I showered and got dressed slowly and by the time I made it down to the conference room we had been working out of, Tavi was sitting there with Mel and a man I didn't know.

Tavi introduced him as a colleague of hers from medical school. They had been going through the notes on the experiments for over an hour. It looked like the first round of females they kidnapped were for finding out what makes magical beings tick but after that they hit the ground running. The only good news from all of this was the fact that they had been unsuccessful in creating super soldiers until the third group of females. After that they had begun mass producing different serums to be injected into infants, toddlers, kids, teenagers, and adults. That meant there were either more missing person's cases that we hadn't found or there were humans volunteering for this.

We really needed to catch the assholes behind this mess. Unfortunately, Tavi had to work, so Mel and I headed to Minnesota to start talking to the families of the first group of victims by ourselves. 24 cases came from a couple cities in Minnesota and in our first day we only got to talk to about 8 families, so Mel decided to rent a hotel room equal distance from all of the houses for the remaining two days it would take to talk to all of the families. It ended up taking a little over 3 days to speak to all of the people mentioned in the files that Malik had sent us.

By the time we were headed back to Milwaukee, I was spiritually and emotionally drained to the point of exhaustion. The only thing we actually found out was that all of the first twenty-four females had loving friends and families unlike the first group in Wisconsin and most of the group Tavi and I been a part of. Mel figured the people behind this decided to pick on the homeless and forgotten because the 24 families of the females from Minnesota had held press conferences, protests, and search parties all over the state. It was a lot easier to get away with kidnapping a bunch of people if no one was looking for them. The thought made me sick to my stomach.

I was grateful to share Tavi's bed again. Mel was nice enough to give me a day off, so I went into the office so I could start writing the article about this case. The SFS agreed that if I helped catch the people behind this that I could have the exclusive rights to the real story. It was weird not having Syn in her office when I got there but I knew she would be busy dealing with the Osther pack for a long while yet. When I had talked to her last, she said that they were making very slow progress trying to figure out who helped the new Alpha by poisoning Tavi and O's uncle Quintus.

Our lives had gone from mostly ordinary to up shit creek without a paddle in a manner of a few weeks. Part of me wished we could go back to before I was kidnapped but I knew that would mean that Emersyn would still be alone, and I would still be pining over a woman who had made it clear she no longer wanted to be with me. For the most part the two of us were better off now than we had been before all of this happened.

After my day off we got back on the grind and started tracking down the families of the females from Wisconsin. Out of the 26 of us from Wisconsin Tavi, I, Amanda, Nubia, Narcissa, Rosetta and Lorelei were the only ones with people who actually cared about us. The rest either had no family whatsoever, they were better off with them, or had run away from home and hadn't been seen since.

For me this was worse than all of the sad families that we had met in Minnesota. How could anyone truly turn their backs on blood kin so completely that no one cared that these females were most likely dead. I wanted to smash some heads in but refrained. Action while enraged wouldn't solve anything.

Mel assumed that the only way the rest of the women were alive is if there was another facility and given the fact that we didn't find anything suggesting that the gene therapy was taking place in the facility where we were being held, there had to be another research lab. The thought made my skin crawl.

After spending so much time talking to families, I was glad to be going through the tons of files we had taken from the lab as well as the computer that we had found in the house that was connected to the tunnel from Dr. Claw's office. Mel was hoping we would find something linking the murder victims to whoever owned and operated the lab.

Tavi and I didn't get to spend much time together with me working at the office from 8am to 4pm and then working with Mel from the Osther in the evenings and her having the clinic open 12 hours a day just to accommodate all of the patients she had to reschedule when we were up in Superior. It was hectic and we rarely had time to focus on our moon ceremony, which I knew she wasn't happy about but until this was all over, I had no idea when we would even be able to have the ceremony.

Malik was helping us go through the deeds for the house, the land and the buildings themselves as he had connections in all the right places to get through the epic paper trail that was hiding the people behind all of this. I was grateful for the help because I had no clue how to even attempt to begin to track through it all. It would have been better if Emersyn were here. She would know just what to look for.

I just wanted to go back to working on normal stories, not region wide kidnapping and experimentation rings focused on preternatural females. Once this was done, I vowed to stay away from stories this big. I wanted to win a Pulitzer but not bad enough to kill myself doing it. Working this story had killed my energy level. I wasn't eating, I was barely sleeping and when I did close my eyes I was constantly plagued by nightmares.

Once we finished up with this, I was going to have to find someone to cleanse my aura and my spirit. I couldn't go on with this weight on my soul. It was like being followed around by a storm cloud that never went away, even after it rained. I was glad that the negativity of this case didn't seem to have affected Tavi at all and if I could help it, it would stay that way. Every night I prayed to the Goddess Danu and the Moon goddess that this case wrapped up quickly and neatly.

Our next big break didn't happen until after almost a week of running into dead ends and I knew Tavi wasn't going to be happy about Mel and me following up on it on our own, but I didn't care. This lead could be the one to help us catch the bastards behind it all.