Page 14 of Let's Talk One True Mate

“Lil bit’s tough as shit,” Burton said.

No doubt.

“They fought,” Timber said, speaking fast and loud. “Bad guy boss grabbed bad guy and the pendant and took them to the Pravus and that was the last we saw of bad guy for months. Wade invited lil bit and her family to come live in Serenity—the end!”

Timber put his arm up for the ball, Canyon threw it. Timber caught it, spiked it, then did an endzone celebration dance around his desk.

Burton watched Timber, then growled, “Forget the demotion. I will bury your ass in the backwoods—less paperwork.”

“You better be nice to me,” Timber said, retrieving the football and tossing it to Canyon. “Or I won’t get you an electric wheelchair when you’re old and feeble.”

“I’ll never be old and feeble,” Burton said. “Besides, Canyon’s building me a jetpack for my twilight years. Ain’t that right?” Burton said to Canyon.

Canyon nodded.Yep. Bionic legs, too.

“I better be getting a jetpack,” Timber said.

Canyon gave him a thumbs up.

“Hell yeah. Now what was I saying before I was so rudely interrupted?”

Wade invited lil bit and family to live at VF.

∞∞Abigail White Investigation

“That’s right, that’s right. While Wade and the others were in California, we were here helping Sebastian with the new Abigail White investigation, because the month before, when Crew talked to Paisley in the hospital—Wade, Crew, and the rest of them left to find Crew’secho, leaving a patrol officer with Paisley White and her family—and when the officer went to the bathroom, the entire family snuck Paisley out and disappeared into the night. This time they didn't even sign out AMA, they just left. As soon as patrol realized, they sent a unit out to the house where the child had been taken from. The place was empty, and no one who lived on the block has returned since that day.”

Burton quirked an eyebrow. “Suspicious behavior.”

“We still weren’t thinkingfoxen—which we should have been—but Conri, Bruin’s brother, says Abigail White creates some sort of magical hoodoo smoke screen that keeps us from recognizing her and her family asfoxen.”

“Messed up,” Burton said, his expression hard.

Canyon crossed his arms and nodded.Very messed up.

“How manyfoxendo you think live in Serenity?” Timber asked Burton.

“I don’t know, 20? 30?”

Timber nodded. That’s what he used to think, too.

“Am I wrong?”

“Maybe. We'll have a better idea once we get up the bluff. Seems like at least 40foxenlive just in this one little village, but we've got to get in there to be sure.”

“That’s not too many.”

“This is only one family—the Van Crimsons.” Timber stopped to measure Burton’s response to the name, but kept talking when there wasn’t one. “We’ve tried to talk to a few of them but none of them will say a word to us. It’s clear they’ve been schooled by someone on how to avoid us. There’s a few Vin Boesons in Chicago who will talk to us, and that’s how we’ve learned what little we know.”

“Vin Boesons—related to Boe?”

Canyon and Timber exchanged a look. There was a lot to this investigation and everyone, including Burton, was on a need-to-know basis, as far as they were concerned. Canyon gave him an ‘it’s up to you, bro,’ nod, clearly rolling with whatever Timber decided to do.

“Yeah, seems like it,” Timber said. “We’ve heard some crazy stuff, and we don’t know what’s true and what’s not, but we’ve got an informant who swears he can trace his family line back to Boe himself in 1720.”

“Making Boe over 300 years old.”

“Right. This informant says Serenity was full of Vin Boesons in the 1800s, but they all moved away sometime around 1870, which was when their tether to Khain was broken. Most of them went to Chicago.”

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