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“Augmented reality features,” Theo said, gesturing to her floating head. “The RV is loaded.”
“Petra is a tech whiz,” I said, and offered a wave. “Hello, Petra.”
“Hello, Elisa and Theo and Connor and Eleanor of Aquitaine.”
The cat jumped onto the counter opposite the dinette, tried to paw at Petra’s image.
“I know, pretty girl. I miss you, too.”
Eleanor of Aquitaine meowed coyly.
“You’re friends?” I asked, staring between them.
“Of course,” Petra said, shifting her gaze back to us. “Are you not?”
I had to work not to show fang.
“All righty,” Petra said. “I have a mediation later tonight—the sedan did not survive its dunking in the Chicago River—so let’s get this going.”
“Did you find anything about the symbol?” Connor asked.
“Of course. Its source and possibly some of the explanation for what you’re seeing.” She glanced down at Theo. “If you would?”
“Sure,” he said, and swiveled the tablet on the table to face us. On its screen was an image of the symbol I’d found on the shutters, the lines jagged and cut into what looked like gold.
“A carving?” Connor asked.
“A signet ring,” Petra said, and the image zoomed out, showing a gold ring with a round flat top on which the symbol had been carved. The ring looked like an antique, but not an antiquity.
“How old?” I asked.
“This ring is from the nineteen sixties,” she said. “From a cult called the Sons of Aeneas, Aeneas being the heroic ancestor of Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome.”
“And suckled by a she-wolf,” Connor said, and she nodded.
“And they supposedly took in all the power of the wolf in that process,” Petra said.
“That explains the ‘RR’ on the ring,” I said, sitting on the sofa across from the table. “What was the cult about?”
“The group was started in the nineteen forties during World War Two. A quartet of friends from New York was about to shipoff to some really hairy fighting in France. Someone made a joke about how they needed to be heroic and strong like wolves, and they started the club. All but one of them survived the war, and when they came back, they formalized the group.”
“And how did it become a cult?” Theo asked.
“Evolution,” Petra said. “The original founders died, and you add in a little gang warfare, a little cocaine, and a social club becomes something a lot darker. Instead of just using the wolf as a symbol, they start to worship wolves. And it spreads across the country. Local dens start to open up. They pretend to be just another fraternal society, something like the Freemasons, and they put on a good face about charitable works and community service, and maybe that was true in some of the dens. But not everywhere.”
She looked away, eyes scanning as if she was reading from a source. “They took mythology very seriously, created their own tracts and treatises about wolves and their particular favorite—werewolves.”
“The wolf illuminati,” Theo said.
“Not unlike,” Petra agreed. “The cult bought into the Romulus and Remus mythology, decided werewolves were the perfect union of human and wolf—the chocolate and peanut butter of the human and animal kingdoms, if you will.”
“Hybrids,” I said, and she nodded.
“These humans weren’t wolves, or anything close to it, and they wanted to be. So they did a deep dive into Roman history and records, and found a spell intended to bring the power of the wolf into the human body, just as Romulus and Remus theoretically did.”
“Bingo,” Connor said. “Zane and the others found the spell, and they found a spellseller who was more than happy to do a little magic without telling anyone.”
“There are SOA dens in Minnesota,” Petra said, “and I foundall this stuff online with not too much hacking, so it’s pretty likely your shifters could find it, too.”
