Page 212 of Secret Shifters Next Door

“What? This chick is the one you think is the hunter?” he’d asked.

“I do. Either that or she’s working with them. There’s no magic in her scent, so I don’t think she’s another witch like Emily. We can be pretty certain of that. You’d have to be there, Blayne. She’s one big act. Fake as fake can be. Celina hasn’t hadenough experience with people to really see it the way I do. My entire life is looking at stuff and calling ‘bullshit’ then diggin’ up the real truth.”

Blayne had held his hands up in surrender. “Okay, I get it. Dangerous lady. Do we have a full name to work with?”

“Felicity Cruz. Celina told me her name after our drive to the mountains earlier this morning.”

Blayne raised an eyebrow. “The mountains?” He grinned, “Did you take her to your waterfall spot?”

“For fuck’s sake, man, can we get some work done or not?” I’d hissed in anger.

That was when Steff and Tate had walked in. Tate glanced back and forth between us. “Do you ladies need some time to work this out?”

“No,” I grumbled. “Blayne’s just being an ass.”

Blayne smiled. “Happily guilty.”

Without any more preamble, Blayne had begun his search. The rest of us had sat there watching the big screen on the wall that he used as his monitor. Most of what he was doing was like watching someone type gibberish. The computer wizardry he was capable of was mind-boggling. At one point, he’d pulled out an ancient notebook full of thousands of lines of code, saved passwords, and IP addresses.

After half an hour, he’d managed to find a hundred-and-sixteen different Felicity Cruzes in the United States. He’d then narrowed it down to anywhere within a five-hour drive of Lilly Valley. That dropped the number to twenty. Blayne hacked the DMV and pulled all twenty driver’s license photos. A quick glance at all of them was pointless.

Irritated, he’d gone ahead and pulled the rest. I went through them quickly and realized none of the women was the Felicity I was looking for. We’d then sat there for several minutes trying tothink of another way to find her, since it looked like Felicity Cruz was a fake name.

Steff finally sat up straight and snapped his fingers. “Your apartment complex. Does it have security cameras?”

I had nodded. “Yeah. They’re in the stairwells, the parking lot, and on each landing aimed toward the apartment doors.”

Steff slapped Blayne on the shoulder. “Hack into that feed. See if you can pull up footage from the last time Felicity left. When was that?” he had asked, glancing back at me.

“Uh, yesterday,” I said. I was annoyed that I hadn’t thought of the cameras before.

It took Blayne all of five minutes to find a good angle of Felicity walking toward the parking lot. Steff pointed. “Freeze that. Zoom in and crop her face. Only the face.”

“Oh shit,” Tate mumbled. “Facial recognition?”

Steff pointed at him. “Bingo!”

Blayne smirked and did as Steff asked. Once he had a clear picture, he pulled up an online program and ran the image through it. I clasped my hands together as I watched the image on the screen get analyzed. Then a blur of images flashed by. The program scanned billions of pictures, paintings, video clips, and news clips. Every time a possible match came up, it flashed across the screen in a blur. Finally, twelve images popped up as the most likely matches. One was a fairly photo-realistic painting that looked like it had been an advertisement from the fifties or sixties for dishwashing liquid, and another was a screenshot from what seemed to be some type of fetish porn. Both looked somewhat familiar, but were definitely not her. The rest? That was all pay dirt.

The pictures revealed what we’d already discovered. Her name wasn’t Felicity Cruz. It was actually Mariana Lowery, daughter of billionaire business mogul Antonio Lowry. She was beside him at ribbon cuttings, museum openings, ground-breakings at factories, and political fundraisers. We’d not only found her real name, but possibly the leader of the hunter’s organization.

“Holy fucking shit,” Tate had murmured as he looked at the screen.

“Right?” Blayne said, his fingers already speeding across the keys, digging deeper.

The further we dug, the clearer the picture became. Antonio’s wife had died several years prior in what was called a tragic ‘accident’ in the news clippings. They had been estranged for some time, and Mrs. Lowry had been in a new relationship. This obviously had to be the dragon alpha that Ryland had told us about.

We couldn’t find any direct information on what the wife’s cause of death was—all we could find were allusions from the press that she’d gotten involved with the wrong people and had ended up dead after getting into some less-than-legal things.

“Bullshit,” I spat. “The only thing that happened here is he murdered her for running off with a shifter.”

“Yeah,” Blayne said. “Looks like she took Felicity, er, Mariana with her when she left. Then, after she turned eighteen, Mariana reappeared alongside her father. I bet she found out the guy her mom was shacking up with was a shifter and ran off to tell daddy dearest she’d left him for some magical creature.”

Steff had aimed his finger at the screen like a gun. “Billionaire Billy here freaks. Not only did his wife leave him, but she left him for someone who wasn’t even human. Mental collapse, fully unhinged. In his rage, he hires someone to wipe out the whole pack. Men, women, and children. Sick fuck.”

Blayne had typed away at something on a separate laptop before looking up at us. “Looks like the slaughter of the dragon pack coincides with this Antonio’s fade from public life. He sortof disappeared.” He frowned at us. “Do you think, maybe, he didn’t intend for the wife to get killed?”

Tate had nodded. “This feels like a revenge thing. He definitely wanted the quote-unquote monsters dead, but I bet he wanted to bring the wife back alive. Reconcile with her, maybe? That, or he wanted to kill her himself. Either way, she’s dead. He turns his eyes on all shifters. Now he’s financing the hunters himself. Probably used this whole religious angle to get the people with the right mindset.”

---