***
Two days later Noah had his opportunity. He hadn’t seen Angela since she’d brought them lunch on Saturday, and he wasn’t sure when he was going to see her again. They’d not spoken much in the wake of it either, other than a few perfunctory “how was your day?” style text messages.
He and Hector were on the day shift, which ended around four in the afternoon. They turned things over to Charles and Chase, who had the night shift, and headed their separate ways. But only for a moment. Noah ran out the rear of the building, climbed swiftly to the roof, and then made his way silently across the snow-covered shingles to the front of the embassy. There he waited.
Several minutes later Hector emerged and headed on a straight line course to the complex that housed the women. So far, everything was as it should be, but Noah knew it wouldn’t last. Something was going to change. And halfway into his journey, it did. Noah had stayed on rooftops, well behind Hector and on the opposite side of the street. With it being wintertime it was already darkening outside, and the shadows would help conceal him if Hector ever turned to see if he was followed.
He did, once, and it was so unexpected Noah almost didn’t react in time. But he came to a halt and didn’t move, knowing that motion would attract notice. Hector swung his head behind him, but he only looked down at the street, never looking up. Once his vision began to sweep the street in front of him Hector immediately crouched down and almost out of sight, leaving just enough of his head raised to be able to see Hector when he moved off again.
This time almost due north. Away from the complex where Angela and supposedly Rachel and Hector lived. He frowned in thought as he followed. The embassy was on the eastern side of town, almost on the outskirts. The complex was on the south side, built upon an empty spot of land that had once been a huge dusty field.
Noah had exactly no information on what lay to the north. He’d never needed it. The bars and trouble spots were all downtown, such as it was in Cloud Lake. There was nothing that should have concerned him with the northern part of town. It had all been human housing, as far as he’d been concerned. Now, however, as he followed Hector through downtown and continued to the north, he had to wonder if perhaps that wasn’t entirely true.
Where are you going, Hector? And what are you up to?
Commercial buildings began to turn into houses, first townhomes and then fully detached units. The farther out they went from the core the newer the houses got, the larger they became, and there was more land between them. Eventually they reached the outskirts. It had long ago become impossible for Noah to continue upon rooftops, and he now followed Hector on foot.
At one point Hector came to a wide street, one that seemed to be the demarcation point for the town and the outskirts of it. Almost nothing was built past it. There were several driveways cut out of the forest that came right up to the other side of the road however, and as Hector continued that direction, Noah wondered about what might be hidden behind them.
He watched his mentor and coworker head up one of the driveways. Noah picked his way silently through the trees just enough to see what was beyond the curved, forest-lined driveway.
It was a house. A good-sized house at that. Hector walked up, took something out of his pocket, and used it on the door. He had a key. Noah knew something weird was up. It was flat out impossible that one of the women who had been rescued from the Institute could afford such a place. Only a wealthy human…or a shifter.
He inhaled sharply as he realized that Hector must own the house. But even as his brain was overwhelmed by those thoughts, it was hit with fresh information as the scents contained in the wind registered.
Shifters. A lot of them. Nearly a dozen different scents. As an embassy guard, Noah was familiar with all the shifters who were in Cloud Lake at any given time on vacation passes. He might not recall their names, but he was very, very good with remembering scents.
Only two were ones he knew. Hector and Gray. The rest were completely unknown to him. Unknown meant unregistered. Unregistered meant illegal. Suddenly he understood everything. He knew why Cadian Intelligence had sent a spy, and he knew what they were trying to find out as well.
Noah grinned as he crept back out of the immediate proximity of the various scents, not relaxing until they had all faded beyond even his impressive ability to track. He had the leverage now that he needed, the information that he could use to figure out who the spy was. The only question that remained was what was he going to do with it? Reveal the spy…or reveal what he knew?
On the surface, the answer seemed crystal clear. There were shifters in Cloud Lake breaking the law. They were living amongst humans without permission from Cadia. That was illegal.
For Cadian shifters.
He leaned against a tree trunk as he considered that thought. It was true, the humans didn’t outlaw shifters living among them. Not on this particular continent at least. The only law they had that applied was the one that restricted their ability to change within the limits of a town or city, along with—of course—the normal laws that applied to all humans. Noah couldn’t just kill another human and expect to get away with it, on the human or shifter side.
But he could live among them, if he wasn’t Cadian by nature. As the largest of the shifter territories globally, his homeland did try to enforce its rules upon the other territories, aiming for a unified code. But Noah had learned that many of them did as they pleased, owing no allegiance to Cadia. If he was from one of their territories, there was nothing that limited him from living among humans.
But most of the scents he’d recognized had been Cadian. Like accents, scents had a certain trace to them that would allow him to identify if they were from his home or not. But while many of them had been Cadian in nature, a decent chunk had not. Until he met each person and was able to put a face and homeland to the scent he wouldn’t be able to sort through them all and catalogue it, but Noah was confident that four or five of them had not been of Cadian birth.
Which made his moral dilemma even tougher. Eventually he pushed off the tree and started back toward the embassy. Finding the spy and revealing what he knew to them was what any “good” Cadian would do. What bothered him, and was stopping him from having done so immediately, was the knowledge that Gray, Hector, and possibly even Andrew were all involved in it. They all knew what was at stake. Which meant that Rachel knew.
As did Angela.
This was clearly what she’d been hiding from him. It had hurt at the time that she hadn’t trusted him enough to reveal the truth. Now, however, he fully understood her reasoning. She’d known him better than he knew himself, to the point that she’d recognized he wouldn’t be sure how to act. So Angela had withheld the information, forcing him to find it on his own, and make his own choice, without her interference.
Which made his choice all the harder, he thought, jogging up the embassy steps and inside. He waved at Charles and Chase, his mind elsewhere, ignoring their friendly jibes as he went upstairs to his room. He needed time to think. To decide what to do.
Notifying Cadia would result in a whole lot of people getting in trouble. Angela wouldn’t be one of them, of course—being human, she hadn’t broken any laws. But her friends would. Mates would be torn apart from each other, homes broken into and defiled as Cadia came down in force on the offenders. It would not be pretty.
And Angela would never talk to him again if he did. That part was obvious to him. She would hate him for the rest of her life. He would be the one who ruined, the destroyer, or any other number of names that would describe how he’d torn apart something that so far, at least, didn’t seem to be causing anyone trouble. Everything out there had looked peaceful, and there were no reports of shifters terrorizing the town of Cloud Lake.
It was almost as if they got along perfectly fine.
“NOAH!”
The bellowed voice finally got through to him where he’d been standing in the hallway outside of his room.
“Huh?” he said, turning to locate the source of the voice.
It was coming from Braden down the hallway at the top of the stairs.
“Yeah?” he called back, shaking his head to try and clear it of the loud thoughts bouncing around in it.
“You have a visitor.”