Chapter 2

That’s where I was that afternoon a few days after my sister’s wedding, on the treadmill, when an obscure news article caught my attention. I was just glancing through the headlines when I noticed it in the corner of publication that translates European newspapers into English. Since Daunator was the only major threat still out there, I had been paying attention to the part of the earth he occupied, to our knowledge, so when this article out of the Czech Republic caught my eye, I had to read it.

The report was originally published in some off-beat newspaper in Prague, so it didn’t seem like the most reliable source in the world. But if what it said was true, we had a huge problem on our hands. According to the reporter, people were vanishing from the area by the dozens. In fact, it said over the last week, at least fifty people were gone from some little suburb of Prague I couldn’t have pronounced if I wanted to. That was a lot of people! Immediately, I searched the bigger newspapers from the area, hoping to read something similar because that would seem to give this little dinky paper validation. But I couldn’t find anything.

It was weird. Why would a small paper make up a story like that while the other papers weren’t reporting it at all? Did the writer sit down at his computer one day totally off his rocker? Or was there some reason why the other papers didn’t want to let the world know?

I wiped my face off on a towel and took a drink of water. I was running about thirty miles an hour, which will get a person sweaty pretty fast. With music playing through my earbuds, the only way I was going to know if someone needed me for something was if they contacted me through my IAC, but all of my friends know if they come to my door and hear the treadmill they may as well just hold off on trying to talk to me. I don’t like to converse while I’m running, and I absolutely hate being interrupted. So I figured I would have a chance to start digging for more answers while I pounded away at the fake pavement.

The article didn’t give any sources for how this information had been obtained. There wasn’t any, “According to local police,” or anything like that. It only spelled out how a resident, Havel Novak, had been begging authorities to help him find his missing wife for days, and no one would help him. It wasn’t until he took his story to social media that he discovered other families in the same situation. It was Havel’s story that sparked the report in this obscure paper, and even though there wasn’t much for me to go off of, I knew I needed to do some investigating myself. If there was even a small chance that Daunator was behind this, or any other Vampire, we would need to know so we could stop it.

Normally, I would go straight to my sister with something like this. But obviously, I couldn’t do that since she was on her honeymoon. Sure, I could’ve popped into her head any time, or called her cell. I didn’t think that would be a very cool move, though, especially since she was very clear about not wanting us to disturb either one of them unless the world was on fire or we were under a direct attack. Who wants to go to Fiji on their honeymoon only to have their phone ringing every fifteen seconds? So, yeah, I get it. I’d just have to handle the research part on my own and then take it to Hannah and Aurora, who were running the show while the real bosses were out of town.

Luckily, I knew how to check all of the places Christian Henry, our tech guy, regularly scans in order to make sure that nothing unreported is going on. He has a whole list of resources that will let him know if it seems like more people are missing than usual, and these aren’t just the newspapers. Most homeless shelters keep track of who has checked in recently electronically, hospitals also have electronic files we can access, police stations around the world don’t have a clue that their systems are hacked and we can see who they’ve got hanging out in their back cells. Checking all of those sources could give me an idea as to whether or not these people that were missing had actually gotten themselves into some sort of real-world problems or something far more sinister.

It took me a couple of hours, and I didn’t spend that entire time on the treadmill either. I’m a beast, but not savage enough to run over a hundred miles a day. I usually only do about forty. Anyway, I got off the machine, took a shower, drank a protein shake, and continued to pore through documents looking for any signs of Havel’s wife or the others who’d gone missing out of his village. I couldn’t find a single person from that location.

Not only that, there were definitely other people missing, too. It’s hard to say for sure from notes like, “No Ed today,” or “Kovach no-showed,” but when you see enough of those notes, day after day, and it doesn’t appear as if Ed didn’t show because he’s in jail or the hospital, or Kovach’s gone to a different shelter the last few nights, there’s a good chance those people are actually missing because something really bad has happened to them.

I thought about the situation in Philadelphia, back when I’d first been turned into a Hybrid. The Philly team had really dropped the ball on monitoring disappearing persons. It ended up that a lot of the people who’d been on the report we finally could access had been victims of Gibbon, the Vampire Giovanni had created in hopes of taking out my sister. By the time we’d gotten around to tracking down the ex-serial killer turned monster, it was too late for any of those people.

I was praying it wouldn’t be too late for Mika Novak.