They were also, every single one of them, shifters.
And now they knew I was, too. I tried to keep my heart rate down, tried to keep my breathing slow and even. I swallowed down the saliva building in my mouth and forced calm. Control.
I would not let them see me lose control.
Not ever again.
“Where is the last Elder?” I asked, when I thought I had myself and my voice steady and even. There should have been seven.
They glanced at each other.
“He is absent,” Porter answered.
“Obviously,” Hart remarked dryly. “Perhaps you would care to provide some additional information about both his identity and his whereabouts?”
Porter glanced at me again. “Bartholomew Mays is currently missing.”
Bartholomew Mays. My father. My father was now an Elder.
The Elders may well have known about, possibly even sanctioned, my mother’s murder.
Shit.
Hart reacted as though none of this was news, simply jotting down something on his tablet. I couldn’t help but be impressed. “And none of you have any idea where he is or when he’s expected back?”
They all glanced at each other again. “No.” This time the answer came from Obediah Stewart, who was at least eighty if he was a day. “We do not know when he will return to us.”
I noticed both that Stewart hadn’t answered the first question and that Hart hadn’t missed that fact, either.
“Then we’ll have to get started without him.” Hart’s lips were pressed in a thin, vicious smile.
“That was completely useless,”I complained, disappointed that my extreme anxiety about the meeting hadn’t at all played out as justified. I was also annoyed that we hadn’t learned anything revelatory.
“On the contrary,” Hart replied cheerfully. “We’ve learned quite a bit that I don’t think they know we know.”
I turned to look at him, incredulous, as he started up the car. “What did we learn, exactly?”
“They’re allsomething,” Hart said, glancing over. “Not shifters, then?”
“Oh, they’re all shifters,” I answered grimly.
“Even the terrified woman who brought us coffee?”
I frowned. “Mrs. Crawford? No.”
“Well, she’ssomething.Arc-human of some sort.”
“Really?” Arcs didn’t have a particular smell that was any different than humans, so unless someone told me they were an Arc-human, I wouldn’t know any better than anyone else. Less well than Hart, apparently.
“Elves can feel magic,” he informed me. “So I could feel that everyone in that room had magic. Just not whatkind.”
“Why does it matter that they’re all shifters?”
“Because that seems like an awful fucking coincidence, doesn’t it?”
“Many of the families are interrelated,” I told him. “If there was an Arcanavirus outbreak, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if many people ended up with the same kind of transformation.”
Hart turned on the track that led up to the house. “And that’s another fucking coincidence, don’t you think?”
