Page 76 of A Fury Of Shadows

Her stomach growled loud enough to raise eyebrows. She flushed at his smile. “Yes, please.”

It was Cortes who brought up the subject of their next move after they’d eaten.

“What do we do now? We still have no idea where the Dark Council went to ground.” He sipped his coffee and indicated Mae with a wave of his hand. “SinceRevealdoesn’t appear to be working, we can safely assume Oscar was nowhere near the places we checked out yesterday.”

“I’ve been thinking about something,” Serena said pensively.

“You have?” Mae asked.

Serena met her puzzled gaze. “There’s no way for us to find Oscar and the Dark Council. But there might be a way to find Dietrich.”

Vlad furrowed his brow. “How?”

“Gallium.”

Mae blinked. “Gallium?”

“As in the rare metal?” Cortes said. “The one that’s a liquid at room temperature?” The Columbian’s mouth thinned at their stares. “So sue me, I paid attention in chemistry class.”

“Oh.” Lou’s face brightened. “It’s one of the elements making up our nanorobots.”

Tom blinked. “It is?”

This earned him dirty looks from several super soldiers.

“You’re just a pretty idiot, aren’t you?” one of them muttered.

Tom grinned. “Why, thank you.”

“I was thinking we should track down recent orders of Gallium to Europe,” Serena explained. “You need a license to import the stuff. Dietrich would have had to get his hands on a lot of it to use on those devils.”

Vlad drummed his fingers on the table.

“That’s assuming the Dark Council used legal methods to obtain it,” he said with a frown.

A dangerous half-smile curved Serena’s mouth. “Don’t worry. We know a couple of black-market experts who can trace pretty much anything.”

“Oh.” Mae stared. “Are you talking about those guys Jared called last month? What were their names again?” She chewed her lip for a puzzled moment. Her face brightened. She slammed her fist into her palm. “That’s right! Howard and Jordan.”

Serena shot a faint frown at Violet and Miles before fixing Mae with an inscrutable stare. “You know about them?”

Violet grimaced. “We only mentioned them in passing.”

“It’s true,” Mae said.

“Who are they, exactly?” Vlad said in a hard voice. “Jared seemed pretty quick to rely on them last month, so they must be powerful in some way.”

“You might as well tell them at this point,” Lou grunted at Serena.

A resigned expression dawned on her face.

CHAPTER29

“Howard isthe CEO of STAEGH Corp,” Serena said. “Jordan Banks is a genius who works for Dimitri Reznak, one of the Immortals who helped rescue us when we were children.” She hesitated. “Dimitri negotiated the first peace treaty between the Immortal races when they were still at war, hundreds of years ago.”

Surprise jolted Mae. “There was an Immortal war?!”

“Yes.” Serena’s tone turned embittered. “Most humans are unaware of it, but it has shaped their history for over a millennium.”

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