AVA
“AVA!” Callum shouted, his hands on my shoulders, shaking me. “Fuck, she’s not breathing.” He
sounded really far away.
I felt Oscar and Noah drop to their knees beside me, each of them holding one of my hands, Callum’s
hand stroking my hair.
“Come back to us, Ava,” Callum whispered, tears in his eyes. “Please, come back to us.”
I suddenly snapped awake, sitting up so quickly I headbutted Callum in the face.
“Ava! You’re okay!” He flung his arms around my neck, not even caring that blood was streaming
down his face from where my head collided with his nose.
“Fuck,” I whispered, voice hoarse. “Water, please,” I mumbled.
Noah and Oscar helped me sit up whilst Callum grabbed me a bottle of water. Apparently we were
back at the training ground.
I sipped it slowly, soothing my sore throat.
“What happened?” I whispered.
“You blacked out, Ava. You suddenly stopped, your eyes clouded over, and you collapsed. You
screamed as if you were in pain, and stopped breathing.”
I rubbed my chest; that explained a lot.
“I had a premonition,” I whispered, still not able to talk properly. “Well, a vision.”
Their faces around me were stoic. “What happened?” Callum asked.
“Theo,” I replied, eyes filling with tears. “I saw Theo. Matthew has him, he’s torturing him.” The
tears were coming thick and fast. “Matthew’s pumping him full of wolfsbane and silver, it’s why we
can’t link him. I know he’s alive, I can feel it, I can feel his pain.”
“Do you think you can show us what you saw?” Oscar’s voice was low, pained. “I don’t want to make
you relive it, Ava, but one of us might recognise something that will tell us where he is.”
Artemis was howling in pain at the thought of seeing it again. “I’m sorry, Artemis,” I sobbed. “I don’t
want to see it either, but we need to find Theo.”
She nodded, calming herself down. “Okay, let’s do this.”
I took a deep breath, before reaching out for the three of their minds, and starting showing them what
I saw. Tears were streaming down my face as I showed them what I saw. I wove my fingers through
Noah’s, squeezing his hand reassuringly.
NOAH
The field was silent, except for the sound of Ava’s sobs. I was furious that Matthew had taken my
brother, and I was just as furious that Ava had to see that.
I wrapped my arms around her neck, pressing a kiss to her forehead as I tucked her in against my
chest.
“Did any of you recognise anything?” Ava asked, her voice small, muffled against my chest.
“He’s being kept in a basement by the look of it, but I swear I could hear a train coming past, and
pretty close too,” Oscar replied, deep in thought. “There can’t be many train lines running through
either his or your territories, Ava. There’s only one in our territory.”
Ava nodded. “I thought I could hear wind banging against a building or something, so it must be quite
exposed.”
Ava started sobbing harder, so I pulled her in even tighter against me, running my fingers through her
hair, helping her calm down.
Ten minutes later, she had. She sat back up, wiping her face, before putting what I like to call her
‘boss lady’ face back on.
“We already have a map up in my office that shows the locations for rogue attacks we’ve had recently.
That should show train lines. Hopefully from there, we can whittle down the list of possible
locations.”
AVA
It was late afternoon by the time the four of us were back in my office, pouring over maps. We’d left
Jacob and Alex leading the search through the territory, looking for anything that Matthew might have
left behind, or that might give us any information about where they might have gone.
The secondary reason for leaving them behind is that I was still cautious about Jacob, and I knew
Callum was too.
There were considerably more train lines than we thought there were in Matthew’s territory. Ours only
had two miles of train lines, and Eclipse Mountain, my pack, only had five miles.
Matthew’s, however…
They had thirty miles of train lines. Considering his territory was away from humans and had almost
always been a wolf area, that was surprising. Werewolves run pretty quickly and can go as the crow
flies, so most wolf packs don’t have a use for trains.
“We have thirty seven miles of train line across the three territories. Thirty seven,” Callum growled.
“It’s more than I thought we had, I’ll be honest,” I replied, around the cookie I was forcing myself to
eat.
I tilted my head to the side, dragging my eyes across the map.
I stood, walked across the room, grabbed a marker, and crossed out a couple massive chunks of rail
line. “It shouldn’t be in any of these places,” I motioned to the chunks of line I’d crossed out. “These
are viaducts, and narrow ones too. There’s no way the train would have sounded that close if it was
that far above ground.”
“I agree,” Noah replied. “We can also cross out this section here,” he pointed out using a laser pointer
he’d found somewhere. “There’s a tunnel that takes the train through the hills.”
I nodded, contemplating the rest of the line.
“Let’s start with our two miles,” my voice was stronger now, I was in Queen mode. “Can we
immediately eliminate any of that space?”
Callum crossed out about half a mile of line. “This section here runs along the bottom of a cliff.
There’s a shear wall on either side of it. No trains have used that stretch of track since before any of
our time, the cliff there is not what you’d call stable. Some of that line has possibly even been
removed by now.”
We carried on working through the train line in our territory, whittling down areas that didn’t make
sense until we had just half a mile left to sweep. “That’s doable,” I said, a slight smile on my face.
“We can run that strip of land with just the four of us.”
They all nodded in return.
“The five miles in Eclipse Mountain… I’ll reach out to the current Alpha, and see what anyone
knows… and then we’ve just got the masses of track in Matthew’s territory.” I growled. “We’ve
eliminated about four miles of track so far, but that means he still has another twenty six we haven’t
thought about yet.” I rapped my fingers on the table.
“So we know he’s in a basement of some kind. In whatever form, he’s underground. And we know he’s
near a train line that’s still in use.” I sighed, letting my head fall into my hands, before suddenly
having a brainwave. “What time did I have the vision?”
“About 1pm, why?” Callum asked, voice suspicious.
“I think I saw everything as it was happening. When I felt his pain… that backs it up. Can we find out
which stretches of line had trains running on them around 1pm?”
“Yes!” Oscar was excitable. “Let’s do it!”