Jamie continued. “Whatever came back through the portal, it could be capable of sending out a signal, the same sort of signal Holland used to distract the team that night.”
The mention of Holland made the hair stand up on Cadence’s arms, but she pushed the thought aside. There was little to no chance that of all the Vampires in hell she would be the one to force her way through the portal. “So… you think the Vampires still have their trackers, they’re just scrambled or masked somehow?”
“I think that might be the case,” Jamie nodded.
Cadence turned to Christian, who was still nodding his head. “Is there any way that you can unscramble them—change the frequencies—anything?”
“I’m certain that’s not what’s happening—” he began.
“Humor me,” Cadence insisted.
A sigh of frustration emanated from his lips. “Yeah, I guess so. I don’t know. I’ve never tried it before.”
“How hard would it be?” Aaron asked.
“Like tuning an old television set, I guess,” he shrugged.
“Okay. Let’s give that a try to see what we come up with.” The Guardian Leader gave his tech guy a small smile. “You can work on it tomorrow, since I know you have plans.”
“You don’t think it needs to be done right away?” Elliott asked, eyeing Christian.
“No.” Aaron kept his voice calm, likely an attempt to keep everyone else just as passive. “It’ll be all right for a few hours.”
“Something else,” Cadence said, moving around to the other side of the table so that she was positioned between Elliott and Jamie. “When I was standing over there earlier,” she gestured back toward Aaron’s desk, “I noticed that the formation of the Xs look different than they do up close.”
“Maybe we should all take a few steps backward?” Hannah suggested.
“What the hell happened to your desk?” Elliott asked as he turned around. “Everything’s all off-kilter and askew.”
“Oh, I, uh… decided to do some rearranging. Didn’t get it all finished,” Aaron shrugged.
Elliott began to giggle like a schoolgirl. “Uh huh. Hope Mrs. Carminati’s got some good earplugs.”
“Anyway,” Cadence said shoving him fairly hard so that he also had to take a few steps back, “from further away, the Xs almost seem to take on shapes, don’t they? If you just look at the blue ones, for example,” she pointed at the maps that only had blue Xs, “you can begin to see some groupings. And then, there are fairly large sections of the map with none.”
Once again, they were back to staring silently, with only Christian’s occasional loud exhale of dissatisfaction at being told that one of his toys wasn’t working properly and Elliott’s “Hmming,” before Hannah said, “Wait a minute. Aaron, do you mind if I borrow a pencil?”
“Knock yourself out,” he replied, and Cadence could tell that he was hopeful his friend had stumbled on to something he’d missed.
“I’d Lysol that down before you use it if I were you,” Elliott said as Hannah grabbed a pencil out of the container on Aaron’s desk.
“Seriously?” Cadence backhanded him in the shoulder, hard.
Hannah did look at the pencil suspiciously but didn’t heed Elliott’s advice, and she crossed back over to the maps. Cadence heard Aaron make a stifled yelp as Hannah began to connect the blue Xs on one of the maps. “Don’t worry. It’s pencil. It will erase. That’s what this pink thing is for.”
“Oh, that’s what it’s for.”
Cadence wasn’t sure if Elliott was trying to make another lewd joke or just being sarcastic.
Hannah spent another minute or so messing up the right side of one of the maps, the area by California, Nevada, and Utah, and then she stepped back.
“Circles?” Elliott asked, his bushy eyebrows knit together.
“Not exactly,” Hannah shrugged. “Look again.”
“Bullseyes?” Jamie questioned.
“Maybe,” Hannah nodded. “But… why?”
“Wait. Holy shit….” Aaron stepped over and took the pencil from her and near the center of each bullseye, he drew a star. And then, forgetting his own advice, he turned toward the center of the map and did the same thing Hannah had just done over Missouri and Kansas, placing another star in the center of the bullseye, near the northwest corner of the Show Me State.
“Christian, we might need you to try the trackers a little sooner than originally expected,” Cadence muttered, looking at the map over Aaron’s shoulder.
“They really are bullseyes,” Jamie said, clearly just as shocked as Cadence was.
Aurora was standing directly across the table from Cadence, and she could tell her friend was lost but didn’t want to say anything at the risk of sounding like she didn’t deserve to be there. “In the center of each of the rings, is an area headquarters,” she explained. “The rings are Vampire sightings, hunts, attacks, etc. over the last three weeks since the portal opened.”
“And when you overlay the red, you can see the circles become more defined,” Aaron said, picking up the map of the United States with the red Xs on it and moving it on top of the blue, which showed the recent missing persons reports. Cadence had noticed Aaron had added more since their last meeting.
“But when you put the green on there,” Hannah said, pulling it over, “you can’t see the bullseyes.”
“Because that’s where they were—where they were supposed to be. Not where they are,” Elliott concluded. “The red would be a closer proximity to where the ones we have tagged are now; the blue may be new ones we don’t know anything about.”
The thought of all of those people—hundreds of them—including the recently turned, made Cadence clench her fists.
“So… they’re coming. For us.” Aurora’s eyes enlarged.
“Looks like it.” Aaron looked up and met her eyes across the table.
“And… how many?” the redhead asked.
“We won’t know unless we can get the trackers on, but if I had to guess….” Aaron’s voice petered out.
Cadence concluded, “All of them.”
