Page 3 of Truthfinder’s Promise

“I’m not moving out.”

“Why the fuck not? Getting out of my house was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Yes, well, you got out of your house and into the loving arms of your new husband, Meredith thought.

“I’m just not.” Moving out felt too much like losing, like letting her mother win.

“Are you drinking?” Val asked.

“No.” Meredith didn’t take the question personally. “But while I appreciate you asking, I’m assuming you didn’t call me at four in the morning to find out if I’m having a gin and tonic.”

“I’ve got a lead on the last one. Enough for you to Track, I think.”

The last one. Valkyrie’s deceased father, Elijah Winters, had spent years secretly performing illegal experimentation on people’s Aspect. Mostly children, because the power that ran in an Aspecter’s veins was more malleable the younger they were, and because they were easier to control.

He’d gone undetected for most of his life, but his work had crashed into the public eye when Siren Savage had stumbled into Aspect Society. She’d been one of Elijah’s first experiments, her power trapped inside her for most of her life, building up until she contained more power than anyone in the history of the Society. It was Siren who had made them aware that someone was performing illegal experiments, but it had been Valkyrie who’d discovered it was her own father. Discovered it, and taken care of the problem.

In the six months since Elijah’s death, Siren, Valkyrie, and Meredith had spent practically every waking moment combing through his files, trying to find all of his victims. He’d fancied himself a scientist, and they’d eventually found a file buried deep in his cloud storage that held a dossier of every experiment he’d ever performed.

After sorting the dossiers into two piles—one for those that ended with the conclusion deceased, and one for all the others—they’d known how many kids they were looking for. Diligent cross-comparison of the facts within those files had led them to several of the locations where he’d worked and kept his subjects.

While a few of the victims had been placed in individual settings, most had been in group homes run like prison-style boarding schools. To date, they had tracked down eight locations and liberated fifty-eight children who varied in age between three and eighteen, most of whom now resided at The Refuge. It was a home and school Siren had founded for them, overrun with teachers, caretakers, and the therapists Meredith herself refused to see.

There were thirteen remaining dossiers. Thirteen kids they hadn’t found yet. Based on similarities in the file notes, they were relatively certain only one facility remained.

“What did you find?” Meredith asked.

“A kid at The Refuge was apparently shuffled around to a few different locations before Elijah settled him long-term. His therapist realized one of the places he was describing wasn’t any of the locations we’d already found.”

“The therapist broke confidentiality?” That was a massive breach of trust, even for something as important as this.

“No. She told the kid what she thought and asked if he’d be willing to talk to us. He agreed.”

“At four in the morning?”

“He had a nightmare and he’s an empath with projection capabilities. He woke the whole damn house up, the therapist went to talk to him, out came her realization, and now I’m on the phone with you. So what do you say? Think you can Track a memory?”

Meredith shrugged, even though Val couldn’t see the movement over the phone. She’d Tracked stranger things lately. “Anything’s better than sitting here.”