The Rise-Book II

Chapter 40: Brownies

Bernard was not a fan of coming here to say the least, but I did everything that I could and borderline begged him. I had a feeling about him, a feeling that he could help. He may be sketchy as hell, but so were the damn bats that we had to deal with.

Somehow though, somehow I convinced him. I have no idea how, he was quiet for such a long time on the phone–a number I had to call Riley to help me dig up. Then he said yes. He said yes and that he wanted his own cabin. He would tolerate Derek, Elliot, Barrett, and Evie, but he wouldn't tolerate any other vampires there. Lucky for him Elliot was gone and Barrett was leaving as well to help Alex and Leo.

He said yes. He said yes and for the first time since Ethan left, I felt like I could do it–like we could do this.

The witches were coming back to, coming back so I could wring their damn necks. I was itching to march their asses to the spot where the wolves vanished and see the look on their faces when they had to answer to Levi and I.

"Charlotte?" Lyanna asked.

"Yes?" I replied as I headed home, the long as afternoon sun dwindling away. The trackers had gone through the area as much as they could and only found traces of magic, but even a trace gave us so much hope. A trace was so much more than we have had before.

"Come home, I found something."

I immediately shifted and ran hard to her cabin, passing wolves who eyes me curiously as I paid them no mind while my beast sailed through the forest. We made it home and shifted back into our skin, running right through the front door where Lyanna just rolled her eyes and tossed me a blanket.

"What is it?" I asked, my heart beating hard with anticipation.

She waved me over. I closed the door behind me then sat next to her where she had a few piles of papers stacked in front of her in organized rows.

"So, Deryl, Ajax, and some of the others sent over paperwork, which was well, overwhelming. I stuck with Jaxon's father's journals since we know there is already leads and former involvement, I thought that maybe there would be more.

"I found a list in one of the journal pages, and at first it didn't seem like anything until I looked back at it," she said as she flipped over a worn black book to a set of pages with rows and rows of items printed in neatly written black ink. "As you can see there is a date, then a coding, then another coding."

I looked on the pages to where she was pointing and saw that both pages were the same. There was a date, then a coding like 'VampHu,' 'BiWer,' 'VaVa,' 'WerHu,' or just 'Wolf;' at the end of the row was another coding that said 'resolved' or 'unresolved.'

"What are these?"

"Exactly," Lyanna breathed out. "The more I looked at them, the more confused I was. So I decided to see if there was a key to the code, or anything else that mentioned something like it. I ended up finding similar things in Deryl and Ajax's things that they sent over."

"Like what?"

She pointed to another stack. "So these are all reports from alpha council meeting from this region as well as the North American Council meeting for supernaturals. In both of them, there are sections where they talk about 'incidents' or instances when a supernatural has attacked one another outside what's appropriate specified by law or attacked a human. The list was similar to the one in Jeremiah's journal, but this one had different coding at the end, it said things like 'Being investigated,' or 'In progress,' or 'Closed.'"

"Ok, they're correlated?"

"Yes," she nodded. "I went back and looked through the journal and the documents. In the documents from the meetings, they made it sound like it was an effort that was being resolved in a way that was satisfying to our laws. However, in Jeremiah's book–"