Page 17 of Midnight Salvation

Ash had spent weeks tracing old accounts that never made it into the new digital era. He spoke constantly to a man named Caleb who ran some accountancy firm with him. Together they were trying to form a clear picture of what had been happening twenty years ago.

The photographs showed prominent Council members talking to heads of state or high-ranking politicians that Ash suspected had been put in place by certain elements on the Council. His father featured heavily in a lot of the evidence that had been gathered. The discs were filled with account information, old-style spreadsheets that someone had been tracking huge quantities of cash through.

A whiteboard graced the back wall and Cassandra had a tendency to write on it to help her think and piece the information together.

Everything came down to money. It was the reason Cassandra had been left an orphan, and as more details emerged, I was convinced Jordan had lost his parents because of money and greed as well.

I stared at all the pictures on a pin board from Cassandra’s safety deposit box, one picture not matching the others.

“What is the picture of the books for?” I asked.

Cassandra looked up from the desk where she was sitting. “It was the position that Dad had hidden all the clues in his books in the library. The pattern is familiar but I can’t place it.”

I rested my hip against a filing cabinet and stared at them. “Was your dad a big fan of astrology?”

“He used to have a huge birth chart on the wall in our library when I was little. We used to pretend to read it together. He did my birth chart to show me which houses my planets were in. Why?”

“If you turn the picture this way, I swear that it looks like Sagittarius.”

Cassandra stood up and paced over beside me, rubbing her back that seemed to constantly trouble her since she was mid pregnancy. “We’ve been looking at this all wrong,” she muttered.

She cleared the table in the middle of the room and started to lay pages out on it. Then she placed items. Her finger traced over the map of the world that had been in her globe.

“It’s another zodiac symbol,” Cassandra said.

“What is the relevance of the zodiac?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but now that you’ve pointed it out, there are other patterns that fit it.”

I pulled my phone out to ask Ash because that man had a brain filled with an encyclopaedia of useless information.

Me:What is the significance of zodiac symbols?

Ash:Is this your idea of sexting, because I’m not getting the sexy vibe.

I rolled my eyes. Yeah, I’d dropped the ball on that topic earlier.

Me:That pattern in Cassandra’s dad’s library looks like Sagittarius, and some of these other items from the deposit boxes could fit with a zodiac connection.

My phone rang in my hand and I left the room to answer.

“Explain,” Ash demanded with one word.

“I understand patterns as an artist. Some of the stuff in that room fits with the patterns of the zodiac symbols I used to sketch. I noticed the symbols in some of the doodles in those books are similar as well.”

“Fuck!” He used the scary tone that made my skin crawl.

“You’re scaring me,” I said in a low tone.

“You have no need to worry,” Ash said. “Stay there until I get home. I need to do some research, but if I’m right, we need to seriously rethink everything.”

I walked outside. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Every day it feels like the world is closing in around me and my head is going to explode.”

He sighed and in my head I saw his face as he closed his eyes for a moment. “A few details never sat right with me. Something dick pic guy said, and some of the symbology I saw in Rome. They were parts of the jigsaw that didn’t fit, but if you change the angle of the puzzle, they all start to slot into place.”

“Are you safe?”

“Yeah, we’re about to get on the plane home. I need you to stay inside the house, no wandering off into nature to clear your head.” I smiled since he knew me too well in the short time we’d been together. “We’ll be home in a few hours and I’ll use that time to do some research.”

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