Page 211 of Caelum

“No.” That came from most of my Pack, but Eren rubbed his chin and mused, “Coding language, yeah? Mindfuck in coding form?”

Samuel nodded. “It’s—” He pulled a face. “Difficult to work with.”

Stefan frowned. “So?”

“I write programs in it.” His smile was tight. “For fun.”

“That’s pretty extreme,” Eren blurted out, his eyes wide, evidently impressed by Samuel’s claim.

“Yeah. It’s just something I can do. Languages and numbers.” He shrugged. “It’s a Vampire thing.”

Was that true? I’d never heard anything like that before, but then again, each creature had traits that were unique and also secret to them. Shit thatwas pretty much a part of our bro code, things we didn’t learn until our souls finally settled on one creature, and we were going through the motions of dominating the fuck out of the others.

It was well known, for example, that Weres had insane sex drives. What wasn’t known? Throw in the Were giving a bite so deep it bled, and it was game over for us in the form of knotting.

Yup.

Like a fucking dog with a bitch in heat.

Sex + blood = a Were and his woman of choice being stuck together for a good two hours.

That was shit you didn’t want other creatures to know because it could be used against you, so learning that Vamps had mad skills with two seemingly contradictory aspects of life—words and numbers—didn’t come as much of a surprise as it should have.

Reaching up to run a hand through my hair as I processed what this meant for us, I eventually mumbled, “So, it’s ancient, then.”

“Yeah.” Samuel tipped his chin. “I’m thinking so. Esoteric, old…” His eyes spaced out like he was thinking and not looking at anything in particular. “So, we need someone to translate. Someone who wouldn’t ask questions and wouldn’t freak the fuck out at the idea of a tattoo appearing from out of nowhere.”

Stefan, ever grounded, snorted. “Yeah, because that won’t be hard to find.”

“It depends,” Reed retorted, his eyes snapping with his Hell Hound’s temper at Stefan’s snark. “Humans know shit about us, but there are still people who believe in witches and fairies. Christ, Satanists and?—”

Samuel clicked his fingers. “Someone who studies the occult. Maybe a professor? They’d probably be psyched to see something like this. Maybe they’d recognize the language if it’s ancient. Some kind of, I don’t know… parapsychology unit, if that’s even a thing?” He reached for his cell phone—his was the only one we hadn’t left back at Caelum because he had his own SIM card and the cell was his, not the Academy’s—and began tapping on the screen. “Well, apparently parapsychology is a thing.”

“Of course. Haven’t you seenGhostbusters?” Eve stated.

Even I had to laugh at that one.

Nestor grabbed Eve’s hand and squeezed. “That wasn’t real,meu amor,” he teased, but she stuck her tongue out at him.

“I know. I learned that on day one at Caelum when that alien burst out of that woman’s belly.” She rolled her eyes, and the others snickered around me. I’d been unconscious when Eve arrived, so I didn’t get to share in thejoke, but from the way my brothers were hooting and Eve was a mixture of pink from amusement and mortification, I guessed it had to be a doozy.

Samuel was the only one not smiling, and not because he was a jerk but because he was reading. He’d made space by stacking his dish on top of Reed’s and was looking down at his extra-wide screen phone. I’d seen that shit on my newsfeed earlier this year at a developer’s conference. How the hell he had his hands on that tech before it went live, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Still, it had the extra advantage of being wide enough that I could see what he was doing.

He’d leapfrogged from a search on parapsychology units at universities in the Northern hemisphere—why not the South, I didn’t know—and was now cross-referencing for occult departments.

“We’re near the African coast,” I pointed out. “You know they have witch doctors and shit. Maybe they’d know?”

Eren shook his head. “Wrong religious tree.” When I blinked at him, he huffed. “Did you listen to nothing in RE?”

“I heard that it’s all bullshit and that’s all I needed.” I’d loathed Religious Education and had been grateful we only had one class a week for a year, right at the beginning when we were inducted. It was considered some of the least scary shit we had to learn, so we studied it early on.

“Then you weren’t listening right,” Nestor retorted with an eye-roll. “Dumbass,” he muttered under his breath.

Eren smirked at me before saying, “If you’d listened, you’d knowtonguesis what the apostles spoke.”

“I knew that!” Eve piped up. “I even asked Merry if that was the same language.” She frowned. “She said no.”

“Religion, as humans know it, as you were taught it and me as well as Nestor and Dre, is different than the reality,” Eren explained while fiddling with some crumbs on the tabletop in front of him. “There’s a basis of truth to every lore and legend.”

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