Page 30 of Snag
“I think so,” I say. “Hard to confirm without being near her.”
“You don’t need to be near her,” he says with a note of warning.
I ignore him, settling my hand down on the corner of the desk and peering at the still frame on the screen.
Bellamy’s eyes are hidden behind sunglasses. Her skin ispaler than before. But in a photo, I have no idea if that’s a side effect of the corrupted power she wields or just her natural complexion. Her lips are outlined in blood red, then glossed over in a pale pink.
She’s looking directly toward whatever camera or vid feed Coda caught her on.
“Where is this?” Rath asks, his phone in his hand and already texting.
“Newport,” Coda says. “I’ve texted Zaya the coordinates.”
“Send them to me as well,” Rath says.
“What’s the magic word, Daddy Dragon?”
“When?” I ask, interrupting the argument sparking between Coda and Rath. The tech does not, and will not, answer to a shifter. Not even an Outcast lieutenant. Also, I’m a little creeped out by the ‘Daddy’ moniker. Rath is only a couple of years older than Coda, if that.
“Ten minutes ago.”
I straighten. “Where’s my phone?”
“Wait!” Coda says. “That’s not the important part.”
“What could be more important?” Rath snaps.
Coda toggles a key on the laptop. And the image of Bellamy shifts, rewinding a few seconds. So not a screenshot, but a paused vid. “The dire mage was occluding all the other vid I found between the salon yesterday afternoon and this ten minutes ago.”
“What? How?” Rath asks.
Coda flicks their long fingers toward the screen, as if all three of us aren’t already riveted to the footage playing out on it. “Until this …”
On the laptop, Bellamy looks directly at the camera, then raises her hand into frame with her red-polish-tipped forefinger and middle finger extended in aV. Or like scissors. Because she then pantomimes snipping something, straight at the camera.
The vid glitches, then the camera feed disconnects or goes dead.
“What the fuck?” Rath murmurs. “Did you lose the connection?”
“No,” Coda says, sour to even be asked that.
“She showed herself deliberately,” I say, slightly shocked that a dire mage can snip the energy flow of tech in that fashion, like Coda can manipulate such things.
Coda rewinds the vid and plays it through again. “Yep.”
“Proving she can walk where she wants,” I say, “go where she wants. All without us being able to track her.”
Coda minimizes the vid, which is running on a loop, then pulls forward the footage from the salon that the tech found earlier of Kris and the so-called seer. “Same person. Skin color is off, different makeup. Or a glamour, maybe. But the angle of the camera clearly isn’t optimized, so I can’t get a hundred-percent match.”
“Knocked out of alignment,” I murmur. I already noted that. “And the paler skin color … might have something to do with how much power she burned to manipulate and kill Kris remotely.”
“She doesn’t want us to see her full face,” Coda says, nodding in agreement. “Same with wearing the sunglasses in the more recent footage. Plus the vid was partially occluded until you cleared it up for us, Zaya.”
“She showed herself deliberately in the salon as well,” I say. “But … like it’s a game.”
“She wants to get caught?” Rath asks incredulously.
“No,” I say, knowing I’m correct even as the assertion falls from my lips. “She wants an in-person confrontation.”
