A Shade of Vampire 27: A Web of Lies (9 page)

The witch stooped down and gripped his ponytail, lifting his head to a forty-five-degree angle. “Hand me the necklace,” she said to me.

I dove into my pocket and gave it to her. She swung the pendant to and fro a little in front of Jude’s nose—I guessed deliberately prolonging the tension—before pressing the clear transparent jewel in the center of it and causing the USB drive to reveal itself.

“This contains a folder filled with files that have been encrypted with IBSI technology,” Arwen said.
We think
, I added in my head. Arwen’s eyes flickered to Jude’s badge. “Since you work in the IT security and maintenance department, opening them should be a cinch. And that is exactly what you’re going to do if you ever want your voice back.”

The hunter’s eyes bulged.

“You have twelve hours to return to this same beach I snatched you from with this thumb drive intact and the files unlocked and readable. Is anything unclear?”

Since he was frozen, as well as speechless, we could only go by the look in his eyes. He certainly didn’t look like he had accepted what Arwen had said. I exchanged a worried glance with her.

I tugged at her sleeve. “Could I have a moment?” I whispered into her ear. She vanished us several feet away from Jude, out of earshot, where we turned our backs on him.

“How exactly are we thinking we’ll pull this off?” I asked. “What if there is a witch working for the IBSI in this Hawaiian branch? She could undo your spell of silence for Jude and then they’ll have the thumb drive.” I instinctively reached out and took the pendant from Arwen. I clutched it. “The contents of this could be valuable, and we weren't able to make a backup. It’s my only lead on Georgina. If Jude managed to figure out some other way to get his voice back, then we could have lost this forever.”

I wondered if it might even be of interest to the hunters. Anything that was of interest to them ought to be held onto.

Arwen shrugged. “Well, do you have any better ideas? It’s pretty clear that these files can’t be opened on a regular computer. He’s going to need to take the drive back to his base and open them up there. We just have to hope that either a) there is no witch easily available to Jude, or b) he’s too afraid to take the risk. If he knows anything about witches, he should be aware that they don’t all have the same level of power. I’m powerful, given my mother’s bloodline, and it’s possible that whatever witch they may have wouldn’t be able to undo my spell anyway.”

We had to hope that Jude would be too chicken to take the risk.

“All right,” I murmured.

We returned to Jude, who now looked pretty desperate.

“Now,” Arwen announced. “We have decided to grant you movement again. So you can go back to your base and get to work.”

Before lifting her spell, Arwen bent down and searched him for any weapon he might have hidden in his clothes. It turned out that he had nothing except a small pad of paper and a pen in his back pocket. He hadn’t even brought his cell phone.

Jude staggered to his feet. Reluctantly, I placed the necklace in his shaking right hand. As he hurried away through the bushes and back out onto the sand, we had no way of knowing whether he would ever return. I had no clue whether I had just kissed that necklace goodbye forever.

All we could do was wait.

W
e returned
to The Shade to wait the twelve hours. I ended up staying with Arwen in the Sanctuary. We both camped out on the sofas in her spacious living room and tried to get some sleep, but neither of us got much.

We had set an alarm for when we approached within fifteen minutes of the appointed time. As soon as it went off, we both sprang to our feet.

We collected Arwen’s laptop, since it was nearest to us, and placed it in a bag before she vanished us back to Latimer Beach. We waited among the familiar patch of shrubbery, watching the stretch of sand where Jude was supposed to emerge in just less than fifteen minutes. It being still fairly early in the morning, the beach was mostly empty, except for a few dog walkers.

I kept glancing down at Arwen’s watch as the minutes ticked by. When we had only five minutes left, I clenched my fists. I was so tempted to voice the question playing over and over in my mind, aloud—
Will he come?
—but I spared Arwen my nervous discourse. She already seemed tense enough. Her breathing was uneven.

Then, with barely two minutes left, we saw him. Jude Webb stumbled across the sand toward us. He wore the same clothes as when he’d left us, though he was looking far more disheveled. Tufts of hair had come loose from his ponytail and spiked out at odd angles. He looked pale and exhausted.

Arwen stepped out of the bushes and transported herself to him quickly before vanishing them both back. We each grabbed one of his arms and pulled him further into the shrubbery.

In spite of my nerves, I couldn’t help but smirk as Jude looked from me to Arwen. He had wanted a date. Well, he had gotten a double date.
Just not quite the type he would have expected.

“So, were you successful?” Arwen asked.

He nodded tiredly. He held out the thumb drive. I reached out and took it from him. Pulling out Arwen’s laptop, I switched it on and inserted the thumb drive. I hurriedly navigated to the files, barely breathing as I clicked on the first one. This time something different happened. A window popped up, but the message it flashed at me was certainly not what I had been expecting.

“Forced entry. File annulled.”

“What does that mean?” Arwen murmured behind me as she looked over my shoulder.

I quickly moved to the next file and tried it. Exactly the same window and message popped up. I worked my way down and tried to open five more. The same thing happened with each.

We both whirled on Jude.

“I thought you said that you were successful?” Arwen accused him.

“Let him speak,” I said.

As Arwen removed her spell, Jude gasped, “I did open them!” He clutched his throat, rubbing his Adam’s apple. “As you can see from the message, it was forced entry. I made them open, but they were encrypted with such a method that there was no way to do it without the files being destroyed. I did a batch operation and didn’t realize they would self-destruct until they already had… except one,” he added. “Go through them. It’s a file near the bottom of the list. That was the only one that wasn’t corrupted and that I managed to successfully crack open. Seems that whoever encrypted these forgot to apply the same fatal setting to that one.”

My eyes returned to the screen. I scrolled to the bottom of the file list and began frantically clicking on one after the other.

I kept receiving more “annulled” messages, until finally one of the files—about seven from the bottom—opened up in my browser.

My eyes widened as I found myself staring at a stream of black text.

“Um, Grace,” Arwen said, as Jude moved to scamper away again. She stunned him, causing him to fall to the ground with a yelp. “We need to decide what to do with this guy. Should I let him go?”

“I swear that I did my best,” Jude growled through gritted teeth. “I had no way of knowing that they were encrypted to self-destruct. There is no more that I could have done, or anyone could have done.” He let out a low groan. “Ugh. I’ve been up all night, dammit. Just let me go!”

I supposed that it was possible that Jude had corrupted the files on purpose and taken whatever information they might’ve contained for his own purposes. I sensed truth in Jude’s voice, but we had no way of knowing. He could simply be a good actor. At least we had one file.

I nodded toward Arwen. “Yeah, let him go.”

She relinquished her charm over his limbs. He raced away with barely a backward glance. Arwen moved to me and gripped my shoulder. The bushes surrounding us disappeared.

* * *

T
he witch made
us reappear in her living room. We sank down on a sofa next to each other where, finally, I could start reading without disturbance.

“October fifteenth,”
the first words printed in the top left hand corner read.
“The Old Fox.”

As my eyes fell to the text beneath it, I realized that this was some kind of journal entry. Georgina had been staying with her parents on… October fifteenth. The date rang a bell. A rather loud bell. October sixteenth. That had been the date that the papers had announced Georgina’s accident.

This had been written the day before she died.

“Weather today was gloomy, same as yesterday, and all of this week. Pleasantly gloomy, though. Funny how anything familiar brings comfort in times like these…”

A line of dots followed, trailing across half the page, as if she was contemplating what to type next.

“Early tomorrow I take the train back up north. Weather permitting, I will return in time to make my evening call to Seamus. I will find a way to confirm what I told him previously, that my week was spent in the castle. Hopefully, Josh will already be in bed and asleep.”

Josh
.

I paused for a second to gape at Arwen—who looked thoroughly confused—before fixing my eyes back on the screen.

“I still haven’t told Josh about the journey we’ll make the day after, of course. I will make a final visit to the grocer’s to collect some food for the journey, but even when I return for him and our bags, he won’t know. I’ll tell him that our destination is a surprise… and that as part of the surprise, he must remember his name is Josh.

When we arrive at the airport, he’ll be distracted by the shops. And when we board the aircraft, I will try to cover his ears during announcements.

FOEBA files are already encrypted. I left backups safely, just in case.

But Seamus won’t know where we’ve headed…

Seamus
can’t
know.”

As my eyes reached the end of the text, I trailed back to the beginning and started all over again. I read the same passage four times before I found my voice again.

“By Josh, she must be referring to Lawrence,” I murmured. “Some kind of code name for him. Who else would it be?”
Plus, that was the first name Josh thought to call himself when I asked him to choose a name.

Arwen shrugged. “Then who is Seamus? Sounds like she was trying to escape from him.”

I rubbed my head. The fact that she’d made regular calls to him made me believe that it was a code name for her husband, Atticus. But why was she hiding things from him? Where had she planned to go with Lawrence?

My head was spinning. This journal entry revealed that the very same day she died, she had been planning to leave with Josh to somewhere she hoped Seamus would never find them.

“She was afraid of him,” Arwen commented.

“It has to be Atticus. Otherwise where is the mention of him in this letter? They were married. Supposedly living together.”

“Hmm… I wonder why she would feel the need to lie about her location to him—she’d been staying with her parents in the UK, and yet she led him to believe she was staying in ‘the castle’, most likely code for where Lawrence was staying with his nanny.”

Georgina’s apparent fear gave me chills. Was Atticus unsafe?
Where is Lawrence now?
I prayed that he was okay.

“And… what on earth is FOEBA?” Arwen went on.

I frowned deeply. FOEBA was the name of the folder in which all of the encrypted files were contained. Why had she encrypted the files in the first place? What was so secret about their contents?

“Maybe FOEBA is some kind of hunter terminology,” Arwen suggested.

I spent the next hour doing a thorough web search for FOEBA, but it did not bring up anything that sounded even remotely related.

“Great.” I sighed, slumping back in the sofa. It felt like we had hit another dead end. It was obvious that finding out what FOEBA was should be the next step in uncovering this mystery. “How do we figure it out?”

“Well, if I’m right in assuming that it’s hunter terminology,” Arwen replied slowly, “it looks like we will need to try to get the answer from them.”

“Jude again?” I asked.

Arwen reached for the necklace and ran her fingers along its silver chain before pulling out a long, brown hair that had gotten caught in the links.

The hair was too short to be mine, and off color. And it definitely wasn’t Arwen’s. Hers was too curly.

“Yes,” Arwen replied after a moment’s clause. She glanced at me with contemplation. “Looks like we’ll be using Jude again.”

I
t would be too
difficult to get our hands on Jude again. For one thing, I doubted that he would come outside again for a while. He would probably be traumatized. He would likely also tell his authorities about what happened, and as a result, they might impose restrictions on their people venturing outside base.

“We’re probably going to have to dig around a bit for an answer about this,” Arwen said. “It’s possible that many hunters won’t have even heard of the term FOEBA. We may need to pick the brains of several people before arriving at an answer. We’re going to have to play things differently this time… I suggest that you go in disguise. We have a strand of Jude’s hair. I’ll create a camouflage potion, and you could go in as him.”

I stared at the hair and began to picture all the worst-case scenarios in my head. Would I be able to gain entrance in the first place without some special code? I also didn’t know anything about Jude’s schedule or have any idea about where he was located within headquarters. I had never set foot inside any of IBSI’s buildings before, let alone this one. I would need to keep myself hidden as much as I could… if that was even possible.

“What if I bumped into Jude?” I wondered, shuddering at the thought.

“Well, you would need to keep a low profile,” Arwen replied. “But you’re right. Setting foot inside their base really is a last resort. Thinking it through, there are so many potential problems. The thing that I’m most concerned about is the potion wearing off before you get out.”

I hadn’t even considered that yet. “Yeah… that really can’t happen.”

“But since this is a head hair, the potion should last for at least a day. Those are always the most potent of body hairs for this potion.”

“Hm…” I recalled a story my grandmother Sofia had told me. Soon after Kiev had arrived in The Shade with Mona and the rest of his crew, Sofia had been trying to bridge the gap between Grandpa Derek and Kiev. She had turned into both of them in turn, but she’d gotten stuck as my grandfather for much longer than Kiev, since she had extracted a head hair from him, rather than a leg hair, like she had gotten from Kiev.

“Before we decide,” Arwen continued, “I think there’s no harm returning to Latimer Beach tonight anyway just to see if we might get another opportunity to accost a hunter. I doubt we will, but we should try.”

I nodded, though continued to think about the camouflage potion plan.

* * *

I
t was just as well
that I had set my mind on our last resort already. We returned to the beach again that evening but we didn’t spot any hunters. Perhaps the authorities had called for everybody to stay inside while they investigated what had happened.

This, of course, would present an additional obstacle for me. I would have to go to the entrance and persuade them to let me inside as Jude, even though he was supposed to already be inside.

Still, one step at a time. I would have to overcome that obstacle once I came to it.

Arwen took me to her mother’s potion room, where she began brewing up the concoction. Once it was ready, I went through the rather disgusting process of taking it and then the most unnerving experience of turning into a guy. After the tingling in my body had stopped, Arwen signaled with a nod that the transformation was complete. “It worked!”

She couldn’t get the grin off her face. I, on the other hand—or rather Jude—was grimacing.

I’m a guy. This is so weird.
Grandma Sofia had described to me what it felt like, but nothing could have prepared me for experiencing it myself.

“I’ll get you some clothes.” Arwen chuckled.

Currently I had only a bathrobe wrapped around me. Arwen vanished before reappearing a few minutes later with a pair of black pants and a black shirt to match the type of outfit Jude had been wearing. The size looked like it would just about fit. I moved away from the mirror so I couldn’t see my reflection as I changed. I wanted to preserve Jude’s modesty at least a bit.

“Okay,” I informed Arwen in my new, deep voice. “I’m done.”

She approached, holding out a small golden square object in her palm. “Fit this onto one of your back teeth. It’s a tracker so that, if something goes wrong, at least I can sense your location.”

“Right,” I said, clenching my jaw. “Good idea.” Opening my mouth, I moved the tracker inside and fiddled around until I found a comfortable position. I pressed down the tiny object against one of Jude’s molars. Once it was secure, I could hardly feel it.

“I won’t swallow it if I drink some water, will I?”

“No. But just be careful all the same.”

I drew a deep breath, moving to the mirror again. I ran my hands through Jude’s shoulder-length hair before gathering it and tying it in a ponytail, trying to mimic his style. I rubbed my hands against his beard. Prickly and coarse. Ugh. I was sure that he would look better without a beard, like Lawrence had.

Lawrence.

Thinking about him made me ache inside.
I’ve got to know if he’s okay.

“Also, take these,” Arwen said, handing me a black hoodie and placing a pair of glasses on me. She looked me over. “So, are you ready?” she asked, planting a hand on my right shoulder.

“Yeah,” I replied.

Arwen returned us to the beach.

“You okay?” she asked as we faced the line of buildings.

“Yes,” I managed. “Do you have any idea which way I should head to reach headquarters? I guess it’s nearby?”

“Yes, it’s nearby,” Arwen assured me. “Walk along the promenade until you reach that red-colored restaurant on the corner, then take a left turn and you’ll find yourself facing a very long road. Right at the end of that road is IBSI’s compound. You’d have to be blind to miss it. You can already see it once you’re a quarter of the way along the road.”

“So you and Brock have sniffed around there already?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” Arwen replied with a roll of her eyes. “We just checked it out from a distance.”

“Okay.” I straightened my pants, still distracted by this weird male body. “I’ll start heading there. I’ll aim to be back within a few hours—but obviously it could take longer. So I guess don’t start panicking until after almost a day is up.” Though I definitely didn’t plan to wait an entire day. I needed to get in and out of there as fast as possible.

“Okay,” Arwen said. “I’ll be waiting on this beach, directly opposite the road.” She squeezed my hand. “I won’t budge. I promise.”

I let out a dry chuckle. “You’d better not.”