Drown Under Earth - Shadows of the Night 3

Chapter 22

Hi!

New chapter, new week. I'm dead tired, so I'll keep this one short. Hope you like it, and thank you all for reading this! Let me know what you think ;-)

Lara

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Chapter 22

I dreamed about beady-eyed ravens, ornamented crosses with rhombuses, and blood-soaked carpets. The moment I woke up I felt the restlessness in my head, a stir of thoughts and impossible scenarios on replay in my mind. The big question I had tried to suppress ever since I walked out of those freaking restrooms the day before resurfaced: What was I supposed to do?

The Raven was trying to blackmail me into handing him Alexander on a silver plate. Could I risk going to Brown with this? The lives of my friends were at stake here. The real question was: In how far could Medici track me and tell whether I disclosed information about our conversation to anyone else? He and his Inri Brotherhood members couldn't be anywhere and everywhere I went, right?

But why would he threaten me with it then? I knew Raphael Medici's history well enough to know that he didn't do empty threats. No, I couldn't risk going to Brown until I knew for sure the Raven couldn't know.

I should have tried to figure out how to handle the Raven's high-flying blackmail method. It would have been the logical conclusion; should have been on top of my to-do-list. Should have. There still were the case and the inconvenient matter of clarifying the secret purpose of the Bloody Warden, however. Alexander wanted to know about that one, badly, and I still didn't know what to tell him.

So I was going to do what I always did. Tackle one problem after the other and save the monumental problem of figuring out what to do with the Raven for last. If I had been honest with myself, I would have admitted that I was procrastinating, turning a blind eye to the things I didn't want to face or didn't have a solution for.

I started with the Bloody Warden and went through the recorded material I had so far, which proved to be a Sisyphean task. The difficulties began when I finally figured out how to play and replay what the bug had recorded. They ended when I realized that Chris didn't use her office as frequently as I had hoped.

The few conversations I had were mostly about business matters. No stilted conversations about the senselessness of the vampiric existence. No monologues about diabolical plans to free New York from the clutches of vampiric allure.

It only got interesting when I went over a conversation recorded the night before. Apparently Chris was upset about something, saying things couldn't 'go on like that.' Something had to have happened. My ears perked up when I heard the word 'Jolterhead.' I had heard it before. I remembered one of the witches saying that Chris put a momentary ban on 'proactive action' and that she put that Jolterhead-thing on hold, whatever it was.

Jolterhead. I let the word play out in my mind, let it roll off my tongue. Was it a code word? I listened to the whole two minute dialogue and pressed rewind. Then I listened again.

Apparently the Jolterhead was something Chris approved of herself after all. I had to piece it together from scraps of a conversation she had on the phone, but after listening to the whole thing, I believed that she wasn't as disinclined to pull 'it' through now as she had been a few days ago. From what I gathered and her responses to whoever she was talking to, it was supposed to happen within this week.

Damn. If I could figure out the Jolterhead mystery, I would probably know more about the true nature of the Bloody Warden's actions.

I went to my writing desk and switched on my lap top. I opened the search engine and typed in Bloody Warden, New York. I was rewarded with a boring run-of-the-mill web site. No call for arms, no denunciation of the walking dead, no anti-vamp paroles. The site didn't even have a secret link to a flashy anti-vamp-weapons website.