Page 61 of Call of the Blood

“In person. Get here so we can get this work started.”

“Yes sir,” I muttered and hung up on him. He didn’t want me for the mission. He was yanking me away from my uncle, and I didn’t understand it.

Walking back to Henry, I saw him on his phone as well.

“I have to go. Work,” I said to my uncle.

He put his phone away, sighing. “Called away, huh? Well, you… probably won’t listen to any complaints I have about that. We’ll reschedule?”

“Definitely!” I waved, then started walking to my car, my thoughts spinning as I wondered what Alexius was thinking, forcing me to walk away from a simple hangout with my uncle. He used to be really supportive of me finding him or dealing with him however I wanted to deal with him. Alexius had tried to help find him but never could. I believed Isaiah had helped and was stumped. Did Maria just hide him and refuse to engage? Did they even ask her if she knew of him?

Since Isaiah was a control freak, it was probably the second. They probably never even asked her.

24

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Istormed into the house, finding Alexius standing in the living room, waiting on me. I said nothing as I closed the distance, but kept the love seat between us, staring at him. I dropped my things on the loveseat, kicked off my shoes, and stared at him.

“You want me to start,” Alexius said, nodding slowly as he realized I wouldn’t speak. “Okay… You finding Henry Abbott here is bad news.”

“How? He’s part of Maria’s nest.”

“He’s not.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but Alexius lifted a hand and kept talking.

“He’s not a member of her nest. I knew that already, but while you were driving home, I called and asked her one more time. I had asked over a year ago, but since you found him, perhaps it had been a situation like with Declan, taken in for protection. Maria said Henry Abbott is not a member of her nest. Would never have been without notifying me since I was actively looking for him for you. It would have been common courtesy.”

That made my eyes go wide as he explained. I reached out to the arm of the loveseat and slowly sat down.

“Okay… but that doesn’t make him a problem. He’s not unknown. He’s not one of those vampires. He’s well established. He has friends. He goes to Court of Coffee.”

“I forgot to tell you something.” Alexius looked away, and for the first time, I saw him look truly unsure. Insecure in something. He sat down on the couch, leaving us at an angle to each other, able to see each other’s faces.

“Before you tell me what it is, tell me what made you forget to tell me,” I said, feeling that if I heard that first, perhaps I’d be more understanding of what he needed to say.

“I learned something at Isaiah’s. We both know what happened there. I was severely injured. I needed a lot of recovery time from the fire damage. You had a broken femur. It just…” Alexius shook his head. “I forgot, because I had intended to follow up on it more, but then nothing else appeared, so I never thought to tell you the first part. And then it slipped my mind entirely.”

“What did you learn?”

“Everly, Isaiah and I looked through all of Jacob’s old records, the old paper records. Things saved from the destruction of the nest. We found his file on your uncle, and it told us why Henry disappeared from your life.”

I stiffened and could only immediately offer what Henry had told me.

“He told me he needed to get away. That losing my father was too much for him, and he was tired of the grief of watching his human family die after he got attached. He and Jacob had agreed, and so Henry left.”

“Jacob exiled him,” Alexius said softly. “Jacob felt he did something so wrong that he threw Henry out of his nest, with no resources except what Henry had to his name and no recommendation to transition to a different nest. It was the most severe punishment Jacob would ever allow himself to do.”

The world fell out from underneath me. Uncle Henry had been lying to me since the first conversation.

What else was he lying about?

“Why was he exiled?” I asked, searching Alexius’s face. “And how did that never get noted?”

“Jacob didn’t write down why… that’s what I had hoped to find out before telling you,” Alexius said. “And Jacob would have never told humans, so there was no way your mother knew, either.”

“So, I have been hanging out with a liar and not even knowing when you’ve known Jacob threw him out the entire time?” I couldn’t believe Alexius never told me.