It was hard to believe Jamie, Aaron, and Hannah had all been here so many years ago when the tragedy had taken place, but it was true just the same. Only she and Aurora, who was twenty-seven, hadn’t been born. Elliott was still in Oklahoma at the time, and Cadence realized she had no idea if he’d ever met her grandfather or not. The question would have to wait for later as the conversation on the tape took a shift.
Skelton was going on about a tracking mechanism that sounded similar to the one they used now to locate Vampires, though the technology was behind their current capabilities, and Jordan said it all sounded good, that he should check in with Christian to see if he had any thoughts. “He’s our go-to man when it comes to those sorts of things. Aaron helps out, too,” Jordan continued, and Cadence remembered Aaron had actually come up with the device Jordan was wearing to collect the conversation they were listening to, “but we’re trying to hand all of that business over to Christian. Major Henry’s your man.”
“All right,” Skelton said and then gave a little high pitched laugh. Cadence had heard it before a few times, earlier in the tape. It sounded like a nervous cackle. She couldn’t remember him doing that when she was sitting with him outside, but then, he’d been all over the place. “Well, Janette, if you’ll just get me that newspaper clipping, I’ll be on my way.”
Her grandmother had been so silent, Cadence hadn’t even realized Janette was in the room. When she spoke, it was apparent she was close to Jordan as her voice was loud and clear. Hearing it brought tears to Cadence’s eyes, but she fought them. “It’s in the back. I’ll fetch it,” Janette said.
There was a creak that sounded like chairs or a couch shifting. “I’ll see ya to the door,” Jordan said, and in the background, Cadence heard footsteps leaving the room and assumed that was her grandma.
There was a bit of shuffling, as if the two men were crossing the room together, and then Skelton started talking in a voice similar to the one he’d used earlier that day, when Cadence had met with him. “I don’t want to,” he said, frantically. “I don’t want to. No! I won’t.”
“Skelton? Are you okay?” Jordan asked, his voice full of concern, but not alarm.
“I can’t! It won’t matter; it can’t help! She’ll never love me!”
“Skelton? Calm down, now. I’m not sure what’s wrong, but we can help you. Let me fetch Jamie.”
At the sound of his name, Cadence’s friend grimaced. She didn’t blame him. It had to be hard to know that Jordan had been seeking the Healer’s help just a few moments before he died.
“No, Jordan. It’s too late. Nothing can stop him now. He’s too powerful. I’m sorry. It’s not my choice.”
“What are you talking about, Skelton?” There was no answer to Jordan’s question, and then her grandfather yelled, “Janette!” The sound of a gun firing had Cadence jerking up out of her chair, even though she had been expecting it. Elliott and Aaron both reached for her, Elliott’s larger palm on her shoulder, and her husband’s on her knee beneath the table. Even with those comforts, it was still jarring. She thought she saw tears in Jamie’s eyes, something she hadn’t seen since Elliott died, and at the end of the table, Hannah was dabbing underneath hers with a tissue.
“Jordan?” Janette’s voice called from a distance. “Jordan? What was that? Oh, my God! Skelton! Wh—what did you do?”
“I didn’t do it! It wasn’t me!”
“Oh, my God!” Janette screamed again. There was more shuffling, likely as she dropped to her knees to assess the situation. “Oh, my God!”
“I didn’t mean to!” Skelton shouted. “I’m sorry! It wasn’t me!” and then the door opened and closed as Janette continued to call Jordan’s name, sobbing.
Aaron turned the tape recorder off, and Cadence let out a slow breath. Part of her wanted to hear what happened next, to listen to the attempts to save her grandfather’s life, to assure Jamie that he’d done everything he could. But there was no point. They were listening to the tape in order to assess Skelton’s disposition, not relive that fateful night. If the sound of a single round exploding had her jumping out of her skin, a noise she’d heard a million times in the last two years, she couldn’t imagine how unnerving it would be to hear Jamie and Aaron fighting to bring Jordan back from oblivion.
The entire team was quiet for several moments. Jamie and Hannah needed time to compose themselves, and Cadence didn’t want to be the first to break the silence. No one else seemed to want that designation.
Eventually, Aaron assigned himself the difficult task of pressing on. “Sounds like he never really did take responsibility. I hadn’t noticed before how insistent he was that it wasn’t him.”
“So... the ‘he’ Skelton was blaming... are we to assume he’s referring to Daunator?” Aurora asked, her voice soft and cautious.
“I guess,” Aaron replied with a shrug. “Who knows what he was thinking back then. It would be easy enough now to come here and pretend that’s what he’d meant, assuming he even remembers what he’d said that night.”
“But if it’s not Daunator, who else could it be?” Cadence asked.
“I have no idea,” Aaron admitted. “When I’ve listened to it before, I just assumed he was blathering on, trying to shirk responsibility. I didn’t ever pay careful attention to what he was saying, except that it wasn’t his fault.”
The table went quiet again, eyes darting around as people thought and tried to read each other’s minds. Hannah broke the silence this time. “Well, we really can’t take going over there off of the table. Christian is there, and he needs our help. So... at least a team of us have to go and rescue him, even if we don’t try to stop Daunator from what he’s doing in Europe.”
“But we have to do that, too,” Aurora added. “We can’t just let him keep taking people. If those creatures Eliza was fighting are really people, we’ll need to stop him from claiming more.”
“I don’t disagree,” Hannah continued. “I’m just saying, we have to go.”
