The Breed Casstiel's Vow (4 page)

 He checked his
department’s answering machine, and the live feeds from the two hunter
compounds in the area they were currently monitoring. When nothing came up
urgent or abnormal, he decided to hit the gym.

As he worked his body on
the treadmill his thoughts wandered to the first place they always went; work.

Things had been too quiet
lately. Four years ago the hunters began slowing down their attacks, and within
the last two there had been zero activity from them.

Now every hunter compound
they were monitoring showed only normal life going on in front of the cameras.
Children playing outside, wives working in the compounds, every once in a while
they would catch a glimpse of one of the males, but rarely.

One day everything just…
stopped.

Everyone else in the Breed
world thought of this as a blessing. Maybe the hunters had given up their
pointless war? Maybe they had decided to live in peace with the breed after all?

Bullshit
Cass thought viciously to himself.

Those bastards were up to
something, and it was driving him to the point of insanity that he couldn’t
figure out what.

The war had been raging for
longer than Casstiel had been alive. He refused to believe, after all those
generations of human sons following in line after their fathers, they had
suddenly decided to stop.

Across the U.S. however,
all four Embassy’s were reporting the same thing, ‘no activity’, from any known
Hunter location.

If in the next six months
there was still no activity he was seriously considering taking some time off
and doing a reconnaissance mission himself. Maybe the scouting teams had missed
something, or maybe the embassy should start to employ humans for the sole
purpose of infiltrating the hunter compounds and figuring out what was going
on.

There was no way in hell
the hunters had woken up one morning and just decided to call it quits.

A sneaky thought crept into
the back of his mind. Maybe the war really was over, and he just couldn’t let
it go.

Bullshit.

If the war really was over he
would be as happy as any other member of the Breed. It would give him time to
focus on himself; he could get a hobby, or join a club.

A vicious snarl escaped his
lips at the thought.

“Cass,” a male voice behind
him called.

Ghost was standing in the
doorway of the gym, as usual looking like a gothic nightmare. He wore a long
trench coat, tight muscle shirt, black pants, big leather boots, and of course
his dark sunglasses. Cass had a pretty good suspicion as to why he always wore
shades, but seeing as Ghost wasn’t exactly the sharing information type he kept
his assumptions to himself.

“You’re here early,” he
grunted, slowing down the speed of the treadmill. 

Ghost being early was also
a pretty usual affair, like Cass, the job was an obsession for him.

“Our facial recognition
program got a hit off of the Manhattan subway 5 minutes ago,” Ghost replied,
straight to business as usual.

“Hunters?”
He asked barely able to keep the hope out of his voice. 

“Missing person, the case
was filed by your brother a year and a half ago,” he replied, his arms stiffly
folded across his chest.

“
Lemme
shower up and I’ll be down to check it out,” he said, turning the treadmill
off. He vaguely remembered Sebastian discussing the situation with him, and if
his brother was looking for someone he wanted to be the one to find them.

 When he looked up
Ghost was gone.

Smirking to himself he
headed off to the showers.

Ten minutes later he
rounded a corner and walked into his squad room, buttoning his silk shirt
around his thick muscles.

“What have we got?” he
asked drawing attention from his now fully assembled team.

“10:17 am our surveillance
cameras monitoring the lower Manhattan subway line made a four point match using
our facial recognition software to a registered missing person,” Kain began to
explain while ghost pulled up the live feeds on one monitor and the recorded
feeds on another.

Cass walked over to the
computer monitor that had freeze framed on the face of a young man appearing to
be in his late twenties.

“Four point match? It’s a
seven point program,” he pointed out crossly.

“Right.
 
The image is pretty distorted so the computer was only able to register four
out of the seven points, but that’s enough to send out an alert,” Kain
continued.

“Which means there’s a
thirty percent chance that this isn’t him, pull up the rest of the feeds from
the subway line and find a better moment to freeze frame on him,” Cass
demanded.

“Well that’s where things
get weird,” Jax chimed in, rubbing his 5 o’clock shadow, “This is the ONLY
image we have of him.”

“That’s ridiculous” Cass
scoffed, “We’ve got over ten cameras stationed inside that subway system alone,
and two stationed at every exit out of it.”

“Yeah that’s the other
thing,” Kain replied, “We also don’t have any images of him leaving.”

He looked down at his
watch, 10:49 am. It would take Jax and Kain at least 20 minutes to make it down
to the subway to check things out, but it was either that or stare at the live
feed until this guy decided to come out from where ever he was hiding.

“Alright you two get your
asses down to that subway and figure out what’s going on. When you find him
approach with caution, if it’s not him I don’t need you giving some human a
heart attack on his way to work. Find him, get a good facial shot and send it
to ghost, then we’ll run the match over again and see what the computer says
this time,” he delegated.

The boys were out of the
door practically before he had finished his sentence.

 “I’m gonna give
Sebastian a call and get the full story on the missing persons he filed, maybe
there’s something else about him that can help us identify him. Keep monitoring
the cameras and if you get anything call it in to the boys. Even the Breed
can’t just up and disappear,” he shook his head.

Casstiel paced the room as
he and his brother had a quick but detailed conversation. He now remembered
when they had first discussed the case, and how ridiculous it had seemed. He
looked over at Ghost for a status report.

 “You need to see
this,” he replied, instantly setting Casstiel on edge.

 “What am I looking
at?” he demanded, stationing himself in front of the monitors.

“I slowed down the feed to
practically a standstill and replayed it. I’m going to do the same for you now,
let’s see if you notice the same thing I did,” Ghost replied grimly then hit
play.

His eyes raced across the
screen.  With how slowly it was being played he could pick up minuet
details like the patterns on women’s hand bags and which people were wearing
head phones. Finally the man he was looking for came into focus.

 For some reason while
everyone else appeared completely normal, the missing person was only half on
the screen. The left side of his face was visible from underneath a white zip
up hoodie, and that was it. There was literally nothing of the rest of his body
on the screen and after two seconds even that was gone.

“Stop, what the fuck was
that? Don’t tell me that’s all,” he demanded, taken aback.

“Yes. No matter how much I
screened and rescreened the feeds he never shows up again on any of our
surveillance systems. Jax and Kain have nothing either,” Ghost replied.

“So what the fuck does that
mean?” he growled his pulse quickening. Nothing like this had ever happened
before.

“Either he really can
become invisible, or this man, whoever he is, moves faster than even our eyes
can follow,” Ghost explained, his words simple, but the equivalent of a bomb
going off.

“Get the boys on speaker
phone,” he demanded barely keeping the worry and confusion out of his voice.

 “Yeah,” Kain came
across over the speaker.

“Anything?”
Cass asked, hoping they had found the kid and this was all just a computer
glitch.

“Besides freezing my balls
off, nothing,” he grunted, “We split up and covered every inch of this place,
he had to have left before we got here.”

“There’s no sign of him
leaving on any of our cameras,” Ghost replied before having to be asked.

Cass roared internally.

“Just get back here, I
called Sebastian. This missing person is named Quinn Roberts.  Up until
two years ago he was a normal human male. Almost exactly a year and a half ago
Quinn’s sister reportedly sees him getting attacked and kidnapped by three
werewolves. There was
no body
ever recovered. Quinn’s
family turned to the Breed for help, but we’ve had zero luck in finding him
either, then all of a sudden three days ago a female agent from the LA embassy
spots him, now today we see him in our neck of the woods. I don’t know what’s
going on but I don’t like it,” Cass explained quickly.

“Werewolves
kidnapping a human?
There’s no way, what would they want with a human?”
Kain barked out,
quick
to defend his half of the Breed.

“What’s the plan Cass?” Ghost
asked after three beats of uncomfortable silence.

Casstiel let out a long
sigh.

“We’re gonna get a positive
ID on this guy from the family before moving forward at all. If that goes
through I want that sister’s ass in my squad room tonight and I want to hear
her story first hand, because nothing about this situation is making any sense.
We’re knee deep in bullshit on this one.”

Angrily he flipped open his
phone and dialed Sebastian for the second time in an hour.

~

“I’m just saying I don’t
understand why you bought another pair of those converse shoes, you have at
least ten pairs,” Nora laughed.

“Well how many pairs of
boots do you have?” Tessa demanded, struggling to carry all the bags in at
once, “It’s the same thing. Hurry up and open the door these bags are heavy!”

Nora very pointedly rolled
her eyes.

“I dunno,” she shrugged,
not really interested in a style discussion. “It’s like a family thing I guess.
My dad only wore converse high tops, so when me and Quinn were old enough to
pick out our own stuff we wanted to wear the same shoes as him, and it’s been
the same ever since.”

“So your brother has no
fashion sense either?” Nora joked as she finally got the door open.

“Nope.
We’re a family of jeans and sneakers and proud of it,” she stated, shifting her
bags to walk down the hall.

Nora came to an abrupt halt
three feet into the house.

“What?” she asked leaning
around her to see what was going on.

Twenty feet down the
hallway Sebastian stood, the sight of him chilling her to the bone. 

For Sebastian to be out of
his wing of the house, especially in the day light, something had to be wrong.

“Oh my god, what is it? Are
my parents ok?” Tessa demanded, her heart skittering to a halt.

“Everyone is fine, but I
need to speak with you now,” there was a sense of urgency in his voice that did
nothing to calm her nerves.

Sebastian turned away from
them and walked into the living room. After staring at each other for a moment
the girls quickly followed.

“Do either of you know that
my brother is an enforcement agent at the New York City Embassy?” he asked
calmly.

“Memphis has told me, he’s
gone out a few times to help your brother with cases, I think they’re good
friends,” Nora said as Tessa shook her head.

 “This morning he
called with interesting news. The Embassy’s have been using surveillance
cameras and facial recognition software to help them keep an eye on Hunters.
They have a data base full of known hunters and other enemies of the Breed, and
when any of those cameras makes a positive match an alert is sent to the
closest Embassy,” Sebastian began in a cold clinical voice.

“Well that’s great, but
what does that have-”

 “This morning my
brother called to inform me that the missing person I
reported,
had been identified on a Manhattan subway by this software. The only problem
with this,” Sebastian cut in seeing the immediate joy and excitement flaring up
in her, “is they were not able to get a complete match, and it’s possible there
has just been a flaw in the system. So I’m going to show you the photograph my
brother faxed me and I want you to look at it long and hard, because if this
picture is your brother, things are going to get very, very complicated.”

Tessa had hardly heard a
word Sebastian said after hearing that Quinn had been sighted. If this was him
in the picture, they could finally be a family again. Everything they had gone
through in the last year would have been worth it.