Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [987]
“Someone who’s been around the shelters for a long time and might be able to identify past residents from a basic sketch,” Savannah said, gesturing to the hand-drawn faces tacked to the walls.
Jenna nodded. “Those sketches represent women who’ve been in area shelters?”
“Those sketches,” Alex said from beside Jenna, “are Breedmates being held by Dragos as we speak.”
“You mean they’re still alive?”
“They were a couple of months ago.” Renata’s voice was grim. “A friend of the Order’s, Claire Reichen, used her Breedmate talent for dreamwalking to locate Dragos’s headquarters. She saw the captives—upward of twenty of them—locked in prison cells in his laboratory. Although Dragos relocated his operations before we could save them, Claire has been working with a sketch artist to document the faces she saw.”
“In fact, that’s where Claire is right now, she and Elise both,” Alex said. “Elise has a lot of friends in the Breed civilian community here in Boston. She and Claire have been working on a couple of new sketches, based on what Claire saw that day in Dragos’s lair.”
“Once we have faces of the captives,” Dylan said, “we can start looking for names and possible family members. Anything that can help bring us closer to who these women are.”
“What about databases for missing persons?” Jenna asked. “Have you compared the sketches to profiles listed with groups like the National Center for Missing Persons?”
“We did, and we’ve come up empty everywhere,” Dylan said. “A lot of these women and girls in the shelters are runaways and orphans. A lot of them are throwaways. Some of them are walkaways, who deliberately cut all ties with family and friends. The end result is the same: They have no one to look for them or miss them, so there were no reports filed.”
Renata grunted softly in acknowledgment and seemed to speak from some experience. “When you have no one and nothing, you can vanish and it’s like you never existed in the first place.”
From her years in Alaska law enforcement, Jenna knew how true that could be. Folks could disappear without a trace in big cities or small interior communities alike. It happened every day, although she never would have imagined it happened for the reasons that Dylan, Savannah, Renata, and the other women were explaining to her now. “So, what’s your plan once you have identified the missing Breedmates?”
“Once we have enough of a personal link to even one of them,” Savannah said, “Claire can try to connect via dreamwalking and hopefully bring back some information about where the captives have been moved.”
Jenna was used to quick digestion and comprehension of facts, but her head was starting to spin with everything she was hearing. And she couldn’t stop her mind from searching for solutions to the problems being laid out before her. “Wait a second. If Claire’s talent led her to Dragos’s lair once, why can’t she just do it again?”
“For her talent to work, she needs some kind of emotional or personal link to whomever she’s attempting to find in the dream state,” Dylan answered. “Her link before wasn’t to Dragos but to someone else.”
“Her former mate, Wilhelm Roth,” Renata put in, all but spitting the name like a curse. “He was a vile individual, but next to Dragos, his cruelty was nothing. No way could we ever let Claire try to tap into Dragos personally. It would be suicide.”
“Okay. So, where does that leave us?” Jenna asked, the word us slipping out of her mouth even before she realized she’d said it. But it was too late to take it back, and she was much too intrigued to pretend differently. “Where do you see things going from here?”
“Hopefully, we can find Sister Margaret and she can help us figure that out,” Dylan said.
“Do we have any way to contact her?” Renata asked.
Dylan’s excitement dimmed a bit. “Unfortunately, we can’t even be sure she’s still alive. My mom’s friend said she would be in her eighties by now. The only good news for us is that the sister’s convent was based in Boston, so there’s a chance she could be local. All we have to go on right now is her