Page 204 of Caged

By making her cry.

By trying to get some vengeance for my broken packmate.

He gestures at the makeshift murder board I threw together.

“This doesn’t look like you’ve been sidetracked. This looks like you’ve been hyper-focusing.”

I lean my forearms on the table. “Yeah, well, that’s the big problem. I can’t make sense of any of the data I’ve pulled.”

He eyes me, and I know he caught how I ignored the first half of his question, but he lets it go.

“Alright,” he props both feet on the table, crossing them at the ankles. “Let’s hear it then.”

So I spend the next thirty minutes catching him up on everything I know. All the unexplained events, the reports from the FAA, NOAA, USGS, and other organizations. The satellite imaging, the solar flares, the flight logs, and first-hand accounts from terrified or just plain creeped-out civilians. The whole mess.

“And then we’ve got this blood Vae swears smells like magic. It damn near set off his Curse when he was in the field. That hasn’t happened in decades. Then there’s a missing megalomaniac we’re ninety-nine percent sure is heavily involved in the influx of missing Omegas. And, of course, there’s this—” I gesture vaguely toward the words pinned between my maps.

“Ah, yes, the Twin Prophecies,” Riven smirks, taking a sip of his whiskey.

“Please tell me you didn’t give those ramblings official names.”

“It’s only official if you capitalize it,” he tosses back, grinning like an asshole who absolutely plans on capitalizing it.

I sigh, pressing my palms into my eye sockets.

“The issue is that, if it weren’t for the fact that every lead ends in a dead-end, delusional soundbites, and Omegas glowing like a lighthouse in a storm, I’d almost be tempted to consider this all just a random coincidence.”

I fall into a chair, wrung out.

“Except you hate coincidence.” Riven points out unhelpfully.

“Because there’s no such thing. There’s a logical explanation for everything, Riven. I just need to put the pieces together.”

“Yes, I know you think⁠—”

“I do,” I snap.

He raises a hand, palm out to stop me. “Let me finish. I know you think everything has to have an answer backed up by a pie chart and six peer-reviewed sources, but sometimes the logical answer is just because. You know what my Nana used to tell me?”

“The one who hated kittens or the Catholic one who almost became a nun?” I ask, trying to remember if he’s ever bothered to tell me their names before.

Where the hell is he going with this?

“Nana Josephine,” he says, like that clarifies fucking anything at all.

“When I was a kid, I asked too many questions—why this, and how that. When she got sick of me running circles around her logic, she’d look me dead in the eye and say, ‘Boy, it’s because that’s how God made it.’”

He leans back and stretches his arms wide, like he believes he just imparted some kind of divine truth.

I stare at him, unblinking. “I’m sorry, are you going somewhere with that?”

Rolling his eyes, he stands, snatching a stack of maps I haven’t pinned up.

“Only that sometimes, you’re so busy trying to explain the impossible, you miss the fact that it’s already happening.” He smirks. “Whether you want it to or not.”

“Which of these shows the geographical locations of disturbances in the last thirty-six hours?” He asks, flipping through the maps.

“This one here.” I point, joining him at the wall. “These are exact locations of each event I’ve found recorded since the night Caelan was taken.”