Greykin Valley

| 19 | That Ominous Feeling

That made Jackson feel sick. This whole time, Lyca Corp—El'Vorian Industries—was torturing innocent people. How could people do that? How could they sleep at night after spending their day cutting and stabbing someone?

"They had to hide their shady business, right?" Wilson mumbled. "So, that's why they hid all those deliveries using El'Vorian."

"Seems that way, yeah," Sebastien mumbled.

"So...how did they get on the Nosferatu's radar?" Julian asked.

"That's where things get a little...personal. Not for me," Sebastien said, glancing at each of them. "But for my bosses. All three of them, actually. You've met Heir Lucian—"

"Did something happen to him?" Jackson asked with a frown.

"Not him, no. He has a cousin, and the Zenith is his primary father. Lyca Corp took him when he was a child, and both the Zenith and Lord Caedis spent the next fifteen years trying to find him. But Lyca Corp. is tricky. They have so many locations, underground and hidden facilities, and they hid behind more than El'Vorian industries. Despite all their power and resources, the Zenith and Lord Caedis couldn't find him."

Jackson grew sicker. A kid? They took a kid. These people were disgusting, and he was beginning to understand that more and more as Sebastien continued. But how did this tie in to—

"How does that tie into you guys looking into the cadejo virus?" Wilson asked.

"I was just gonna ask that," Jackson said.

"Well, the kid is a demon, and evidently a very powerful one since the Zenith is a father of his."

"Wait, primary father? A father?" Julian questioned.

Sebastien rolled his head around a little and grunted. "Ugh, yeah. Demon stuff. They used a matriarch as his mother; it's a sort of like...build your baby practice."

"What?" all three of them questioned.

"You know like...well...like...." Sebastien grunted irritably. "Like a recipe, right? You want a bit of power from this guy's bloodline and a bit from that guy's, and oh, what about a bit of that guy's power, too? And then you take each piece and give it to a matriarch and boom, you got a baby with three dads and access to three different demon bloodlines. Make sense?"

Jackson, Julian, and Wilson glanced at one another.

"Uh...yeah," Jackson drawled, setting his eyes on him again.

"Anyways, so, yeah. Super powerful demon baby. Of course, Lyca Corp. would do anything to get their hands on that kid to use in their experiments."

"The wolf walker-demon hybrid experiments?" Wilson asked.

"Yeah. As for the cadejo virus, that's been around for like...a hundred and fifty-five years. That was when I first encountered it. I was sent to an estate in DeiganLupus to investigate a strange sickness killing townsfolk, and...there was something there. It looked like a huge black wolf. And months later was when the first cadejo started turning up. I wasn't kept in the loop—I don't know what happened for the next year or so—but when I was called back into the Nosferatu, they told me that black wolf was the result of Lyca Corp.'s experiments."

"The hybrid Lord Caedis is looking for?" Jackson questioned.

"Yep," Sebastien confirmed. "Only we didn't know Lyca Corp. was involved until they took the Zenith's kid."

Wilson exhaled deeply. "What a fricken mess we've gotten ourselves into, huh, Jack?"

Jackson rolled his eyes. "As always." But as he glanced around, he locked his gaze with Tokala's. The orange wolf was staring at them—he'd obviously been listening—and when he saw Jackson had noticed, he frowned and looked away.