Page 8 of Sins of the Fathers

“He was human,” she finally said. “But he wasn’t a bad man. He fixed my stove when it broke a few months ago. The people I called asked me for three hundred dollars to fix it. Can you believe that? But he did it for free. He didn’t even ask me to pay for the part he needed to fix it.”

“He sounds like a good man.”

“I was wary of him when they first moved in, but he was. What happened to him was horrible.”

“I agree, and I don’t like that the police haven’t looked into it.”

“Well, you are now. You’re one of us.”

“Which is why I’m going to do everything I can to find out what happened to him. Are you willing to talk to me about whatever you saw?”

“Not much. I don’t make a habit of spying on my neighbors, and Petra and Daniel were pretty quiet. They had their routines, just like everyone else. I know Daniel was alone that day because Petra was at work, but he did shift work, so he didn’t usually have the same days off week to week. I didn’t hear anything. I would’ve tried to do something if I had, even though it probably wouldn’t have helped.”

“And is there anything else you can think of that might help me?” She was only the first person Archie had talked to, so he wasn’t yet desperate for information, but considering how little he’d found out until now, he suspected this case was going to be complicated.

He’d known that would be the case as soon as Petra had told him that Daniel had been a hunter. There was something about hunters that made Archie’s skin crawl, even though Jasper had been one.

“What about the other dead hunter?”

Archie blinked. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

The lady looked around, but no one cared that they were talking. Archie had noticed a few people looking at him, but that was probably because they didn’t know him, not because they suspected him of something nefarious or because they were spying.

“My daughter lives a few cities over with her family. There was a case that ended up on the news of an ex-hunter getting killed.”

“I didn’t know about that.” Fuck, Archie hadn’t thought to check. He’d thought that the hunters were probably involved in Daniel’s death, and they were a local organization. They wouldn’t have a reason to kill a hunter, or an ex-hunter, in another city.

But maybe the hunters didn’t have anything to do with this. Maybe Archie needed to dig deeper.

“Do you know anything about that, ma’am?”

She grinned, exposing her two rows of fangs. “You can call me Gladys.”

“Well, Gladys. Do you know anything else about that?”

“Only what I saw on the news.”

She managed to give him a few more details, like where that had happened. As soon as Archie was done talking to her, he took out his phone to research it.

He knew the cases were connected when one of the blog articles he found on the case had a drawing of the symbol. He wasn’t sure how the author of the article had found out about it, but it was almost identical to the one found in the case of Daniel’s death, and whatever differences there were could be attributed to the author of the blog not getting a good look or having to fill in the gaps.

Archie needed to dig into this. The symbol might be a coincidence, but it also might not be. Was this second hunter dating a monster, too? Had he been present at the same case that caused Daniel to leave the hunters?

As always, talking to the neighbors had left Archie with even more questions, but this was the part that he enjoyed about this job. It was like a puzzle he had to put together, and once he did, he’d find who was behind the murders.

* * * *

JASPER COULDN’T STOP thinking about the symbol. When he left Archie’s office, he was supposed to go back to work, but he texted his boss to tell him he’d see him the next day. Thankfully, his boss wasn’t a hunter, and he knew what Jasper was going through. Jasper hadn’t wanted to lie to him after he found out he was part monster, so he’d told him, half expecting to get fired. Instead, his boss had told him that he expected to see him at work the next day, and that had been that. It had been a relief, and Jasper would always be grateful for that.

He was also grateful that his boss allowed him to run around getting involved in hunters’ business even though he wasn’t a hunter anymore. He was extremely lenient, and Jasper would have to remember that when Christmas came.

So he’d gone home, knowing he wouldn’t be able to focus on work, and had paced the living room for a while. The apartment had been empty and still was. Corey and Kerry were at work, and they wouldn’t be back for a while. That gave Jasper entirely too much time to waste. Maybe he should’ve gone to work, after all, but he would’ve been too distracted to be useful.

Since he vaguely recognized the symbol Archie had shown him, he decided to go through his old pictures and files. He’d kept some things since he’d left the hunters, and while they hadn’t come in handy yet, maybe they would this time around. He just needed to know if there was anything there for sure. It might not solve Daniel’s case, but if it could help Jasper stop obsessing over what was going on, it would be enough.

He brought the box of old documents to the living room and turned the TV on, but he wasn’t listening to it. He hadn’t looked into the box since he’d left the hunters, and he hadn’t ever expected to have to again. In truth, he wasn’t completely sure why he’d kept it. Maybe it had been nostalgia, but it’d probably been that he’d wanted to be sure he had something to defend himself with if the hunters came after him. They never took it well when a hunter decided to leave the organization. They allowed it because they didn’t have a choice, but before it came out that Jasper was part monster, the hunters had been trying to get him to come back. They’d tried talking to him many times, and his answer had always been no.

It still was, but it wasn’t a problem anymore. The hunters didn’t want him. He was part monster, which meant he didn’t belong with them, no matter how many of them he’d fought next to. He didn’t care, but he thought it was a little funny.