Raising Innocence: A Rylee Adamson Novel(23)

“I want to meet the Tracker first. I’m not going to the police station until I meet him.” I had to dig my heels in on this—there was no other way. I had to figure out what was stopping me from Tracking these kids. Had I lost my ability somehow? I harboured a fear that this sudden change had to do with the demon venom I’d carried around last month. Shit, as if almost dying wasn’t enough, the venom had to leave me useless too?
Alex picked up on my tension and let out a whimper, but said nothing. I’d told him that he couldn’t speak a word while we were in London unless there was no one else around. So far, he was remembering.
“Ms. Adamson,” Agent Valley said. “Our number one priority should be the children, shouldn’t it?”
Guilt tactics, fuck I hated them. I used them on myself enough. I didn’t need the agent piling on the weight.
Time to get seriously tough. “They’re dead. Correct?”
He flinched as if I’d hit him. “Yes.” He was going to have to learn how to hide his ‘tells’. Already, I was gaining the upper hand; something I’d never managed with O’Shea.
“Then they won’t mind waiting another couple of hours.”
With that argument, I won out and was taken to the hospital where Jack Feen was slowly dying. We pulled up and I stared out at the tall, greyish concrete building, the exterior as depressing as no doubt the interior was with all the sickness and death hidden behind the walls.
I leashed Alex, and tugged him tight against my leg. This was the first time I’d taken him to a hospital and I was worried he might be overwhelmed, not only by the smells, but the strong emotions. As I’d learned last month, the werewolf was sensitive to the emotions other people threw off. Which was not necessarily a good thing.
But Alex tucked in against my left leg, heeling at my side like a well-trained mutt. Which is all the humans would see, as long as his spelled collar stayed on.
I turned and looked down into the car. “Aren’t you coming in?”
Agent Valley shook his head. “No, I will be heading to the local station. I’ll send a car round for you. You have one hour, Ms. Adamson.”
Giving him a sloppy salute and swirling my wrist like a girly girl, I spun on one boot heel and walked away. Alex snickered under his breath. “Funny Rylee.”
“No talking,” I said, though my voice was far from harsh. Even with the fear of losing my Tracking ability, even with the loss of Giselle so sharp, I was excited. I was about to meet someone who knew what the hell he was doing, and he could share that knowledge with me.
We stopped at the front desk, I gave told them Alex was a therapy dog, and got directions to Jack Feen’s room. He was on the fifth floor. Alex and I took the stairs. Elevators mostly worked for me, but with Alex too, it might be too much for the technology to handle. Today was not a day I wanted to get stuck in an elevator.
I thought about what Agent Valley had told me on the plane, explaining the science behind the truths I’d lived for most of my life.
“We’ve found a very specific vibration that supernaturals give off, almost like their own EMP pulse, though with some subtle differences. You each have a radius, and the more supernaturals, the larger the radius of technology that is affected. There are a few things that can protect equipment, iron plating coated with a skin of silver is the best.”
I’d stared at him somewhat blankly. They were studying supernaturals? Though I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised, it unnerved me. The more the FBI learned about us, the easier we would be to corral. Control. Not what I had in mind. So I asked questions.
“So why don’t guns work?”
Agent Valley tapped one tooth with his index finger before answering. “The best way to explain it is that everything has positive and negative vibrations of energy.”
My eyes widened. Crap, this sounded like he’d actually done some research and believed what he’d found.
“And the primer in explosives of all types has a, more or less, negative energy.”
“That’s not surprising,” I said.
He grunted and kept going.
“Most supernaturals have a positive type energy that they throw off. When the two come into contact, the positive energy does, for lack of a better explanation, weird shit. It’s why bullets swerve, guns misfire, and occasionally everything works fine. It’s literally a crap shoot.”
Well, that explained a number of things I’d always just taken on faith. Don’t play with guns and don’t touch technology. That shit will break on your ass when you need it the most.
Blinking, I looked up at the door I stood in front of. ‘Jack Feen’ was etched into a small nameplate. Somehow, I didn’t think it was a good thing that he had his own plaque.