Chapter 45: Chapter 45

“Anyone else want coffee?” Elliott asked, pushing up from his seat. He smiled at me, knowing I wouldn’t want any but also feeling sorry for me for an entirely different reason than the one I was currently focused on. I managed a small smile.

“I’ll take a cup, if you don’t mind,” Hannah said. No one else wanted any, so Elliott headed toward the door. Mrs. Carminati has a Keurig out by her desk.

“What kind?” Elliott paused with his hand on the knob.

“Barista prima, please. No creamer.” Hannah smiled at him in thanks, and I let out a deep breath.

“You okay?” Jamie asked me as Elliott left the room and Aaron got up to grab something off of the printer. I could’ve gotten it for him....

“Yeah, fine.” He nodded but I could tell by his expression he wasn’t buying it. I was so ready for this to be over.

Aurora flew in the door and rushed to her seat. “Sorry I’m late. I got hung up. New recruit with a lot of questions caught me.” She was flustered and out of sorts. I knew the feeling.

“No problem,” Cadence assured her from across the table from me. “We haven’t started yet.”

Elliott came back in and set Hannah’s coffee in front of her. “Here you go.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The oxygen in the room shifted. Aurora was sitting two seats down from me, and I could feel her emotions rolling off of her as she made a “hmmm” sound and jabbed the lid on her ink pen. I am not an emotional empath, but I could read that.

Elliott was back in his seat. He looked around at all of us to see if we were aware of the situation. Of course we were. Aaron looked busy, but I could sense he felt the shift even more severely than I did since he is an emotional empath. “Somethin’ on your mind, Roar?” Elliott asked, his tone light but cautious.

“Aurora to you, thank you, and no. Nothing.”

I felt Jamie tense up next to me. Nothing didn’t mean nothing. Everyone knew that.

Elliott said, “Okay,” as if it were actually okay.

It wasn’t. “It’s just... other people like coffee, too. That’s all.”

I felt my eyes bulging out of my head. Gosh, if that’s what it’s like to break up with someone you work with, I never want to be in that situation. Except that I was. I hoped Brandon and I never talked to each other like that.

Maybe Elliott would let it go, ignore it, remind himself she was baiting him. She was being unreasonable. “I asked if anyone else wanted any, and no one did.”

I felt sorry for Hannah. Her mouth was slightly open like she was about to jump in. Aurora didn’t let her. “You didn’t ask me.”

“You weren’t here.”

Someone needed to do something! I wondered if Aaron or Cadence were sending any messages on their IAC to calm this situation. My nails were digging into my leg as I fought against the horrible uncomfortableness of it.

Thankfully, Jamie hopped out of his seat. “Smells good,” he said, heading toward the door. “I think I’ll have a cup.” Jamie had a bottle of water on the table in front of him, so I was certain he didn’t actually want any, but I was thankful he’d decided to stop the madness. “Aurora, how do you take yours?”

“Oh, no thanks, Jamie. I’m not thirsty.”

“O....kay,” the Healer said, shaking his head as he went out the door anyway. Aurora took the lid off of her pen and pushed it on again. Passive aggressive much?

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Elliott muttered, and I saw my sister’s arm move, imagining she’d reached under the table for Elliott’s hand or to squeeze his leg so he’d stop. Someone had to stop.

“We done?”

Every eye in the room shifted to the head of the table where Aaron was standing. I wasn’t even the one in trouble this time and I felt like a kid in the principal’s office. There was no need to answer that question because we were all done.

Jamie took his seat, but his expression told me he was a little lost at everyone’s stoic expressions. He raised an eyebrow at me. “Principal McReynolds lowered the boom,” I said to him through my IAC and saw him stifle a chuckle.

Still not playing, Aaron jumped right in. “Cass has just informed us that we have hundreds of missing people in and around the two target areas where we know Daunator and Holland were most recently spotted. This is a list of those missing persons.” He dropped a chunk of papers on the table thick enough it made a loud thunking noise. I wasn’t surprised, though everyone else was. The urge to say I told you so was so tempting.

“If we enlarge the radius to take up all of Eastern Europe, we add this many people.” He dropped another stack, this one not as thick but large enough. “This is the rest of Europe.” Another chunk. “And this is the rest of the world.” He dropped the rest of the stack, a hefty little pile, though not nearly as large as the first one. That did surprise me. I hadn’t been paying attention to anything outside of Europe. I wondered how he’d gotten all of that so fast but didn’t go there at the moment.

“How many are there?” Hannah asked. I wanted to yell at her, “Too many!” Why didn’t she know the answer to that question? Wasn’t she the one left in charge?

“In total, in the last twenty-three days since we destroyed Holland and Hines, in Europe alone, eight hundred people have gone missing. An additional two hundred people are missing elsewhere.”

“Holy moly,” Elliott mumbled for all of us. I knew about the first 650, but the rest of the numbers were still breathtaking.

“Why isn’t this all over the news?” Jamie asked.

“I honestly don’t know.” That was a phrase Aaron didn’t say very often. He was looking at me, and I wished he wasn’t. “Cassidy mentioned that a lot of these people may be invisible—homeless, no families, no jobs. But not all of them.”

“Could Christian have been controlling the media somehow?” Hannah asked. Again, I wondered why she wouldn’t know the answer to that question. What had she been doing the last two weeks? “Does he have that authority?”

“To some degree, but I don’t think he would’ve been doing that. Why would he?” Aaron asked.

“Maybe to keep things under wraps until you got back and we could handle it?” Hannah guessed.

I almost laughed. She had no idea.... No one else had any idea either, so I asked a question I’d been pondering for days. “Is it possible Daunator is doing that? Maybe he doesn’t want people to be afraid to go out because then he’ll have more trouble snatching them up.”

“If I said I had any idea what Daunator was capable of, I’d be lying,” Aaron said, shifting his weight as he pondered my question. “I guess that’s a possibility.”

“Does Mila have any idea why the media isn’t reporting it?” my sister asked Hannah. Why she thought Hannah would know that when she didn’t know anything else was beyond me.

“I didn’t realize it was this many people,” Hannah reiterated. I wondered why 400 hadn’t been too many. “When I asked Mila about the people who had gone missing recently, she said that it’s getting a lot more local coverage than it is out of the region. Some are saying it’s the second coming of Jesus, while others have other religious explanations. Still others are blaming the economy and saying people are going to other countries. Or they blame the government, saying these people are enemies of the state. For the most part, no one has an explanation. In the places where these people are disappearing, they don’t have cameras on every door and every street corner like we do here. And I’m sure the little footage they may have gotten, Christian has taken care of.”

I tried not to shake my head. Not recently....

“Who would be doing that now that he’s gone?” Aurora asked.

No one, I thought to myself, but Hannah thought she had an answer. “I think he may have spoken to Fannie about it. I’ll check in with him and see.”

Again, a giggle wanted to escape. She couldn’t do that. I bit into my cheek.

“Have you talked to him since he left?” Aaron sounded hopeful, like maybe it was just his IAC acting up that kept him—and Cadence—from getting the other Guardian. His illusions were about to be shattered.

“No, not since he left,” Hannah replied, a tone of concern in her voice now.

Aaron’s face scrunched up slightly with disappointment. “I wasn’t able to get him a few minutes ago when I tried. Neither was Cadence.”

“Why didn’t you just force him on?” Elliott’s question was legitimate, assuming he thought Aaron was just trying to be polite and not interrupt Christian’s vacation.

My sister answered. “We tried. Couldn’t get him.” She looked around at all of us, and I tried to match the disbelief and concern I saw on my teammates faces, but I had an idea that my nervousness was also apparent, especially when my sister’s eyes came back to me. I was really hoping she didn’t ask me to try to contact him, not yet anyway.

For now, they were still trying other methods. “I sent him a text, but who knows if he even took his phone.” Aaron sighed and looked at his own iPhone sitting on the table. Of course, it didn’t light up with a text from Christian because I already knew the answer to the Leader’s inquiry.

Aurora didn’t. “Surely, he took his phone with him. Who goes on vacation and doesn’t take their phone?”

“I hope he did, but until he gets in touch, I’ll be a little concerned about him.” Aaron’s face was still troubled. His reaction wasn’t making a whole lot of sense to me.

“Why? He just threw you in a portal.” Sometimes my mouth starts moving before I remember that I’m trying to keep attention off of myself. This was one of those times. Still, how could Aaron be so forgiving?

“I’ve known Christian a really long time,” he explained, looking a little too intently at me. I didn’t look away, though. “He doesn’t always make good decisions. In fact, he makes a lot of really horrible, dangerous decisions, but that doesn’t mean I want him to get hurt—or worse.”

Somehow, I could identify with that sentiment—the not wanting Christian to get hurt part, not the part about having known him so long. I’d known him long enough to agree that he makes poor decisions, though.

Nevertheless, I reminded our Leader, “I don’t think he’d say the same thing about you.” I mean, Christian had practically admitted to me that he’d wanted Aaron dead. And what he hadn’t said was in his thoughts. Why Christian didn’t want Aaron—his friend for so many years—in the picture anymore, I didn’t know, but I had an idea. My eyes flickered to my sister, and the look she was giving me was borderline parental. She wanted me to shut my trap.

“Well,” Elliott began, clearing the tension in the room with the tone of his voice, “I for one could care less if he fell off the face of the earth.” He had no idea how close he was to that being the case.

Aurora made a weird sound from down the table. “Couldn’t care less. If you could care less, it means you care a lot.”

“Want me to list the other things I couldn’t care less about?” Elliott glared at her, and I hoped they didn’t get into another argument. One was enough for one meeting.