Darkness Unbound (Dark Angels 1)

I frowned. “But I talked to them at the hospital, and they made no mention of threats. And Stane’s letter didn’t threaten him”—I paused and glanced at him—“did it?”

“No, but maybe the threats came after Hanna’s death. You know the type—this is what we can do. If you don’t want your husband to die as well, sign the papers.”

Maybe. I glanced at Stane. “Anything else?”

He shook his head. “The Directorate is handling Handberry’s case, but I can’t find much information on it.”

Stane probably couldn’t find anything because Uncle Rhoan was the guardian in charge, and he only ever wrote reports when he had something to report. “What about Handberry’s true identity?”

“Ah, now that is interesting.” He scrolled the screen over. “A month after his appearance in his current—and last—identity, Handberry was involved in an altercation and was arrested. He was never charged, but they did take print and iris scans.”

“And you found a matching print in the system?”

“Not in the police system, and not in Australia.”

“Really,” I said. “Then where?”

“In England, in the cached files at the Criminal Records Bureau.”

“Meaning it’s an extremely old record? As in, several hundred years?” Tao asked.

Stane nodded. “There’s no iris scan, and they’ve been around for a very long time now. The matching print belonged to Gordon March.”

“Who is obviously more than just a criminal if your sudden smugness is anything to go by.”

Amusement crinkled the corners of his honey-colored eyes. “I did a background check on him, and discovered his father wasn’t listed on the birth certificate. Which wasn’t an unusual thing for unwed mothers at the time. So I checked his mom’s background, and discovered she was placed in a sanitarium by her parents not long after Gordon’s conception.”

Sanitarium being a polite term for “loony bin” back then. “Did the records say why?”

The little crinkles at the corners of his eyes grew. “Now, this is where it gets really interesting. It seems our unwed mother claimed to have been visited by an angel, and that Gordon was the result.”

I blinked as the information hit me. Gordon March—the man we knew as Handberry—was a half-Aedh.

One I hadn’t sensed, even though I’d been close enough to touch him.

It was a fact that might be unrelated to anything else that was going on, but I had a strangely bad feeling that things had suddenly gotten ten times worse.

“THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE,” I SAID, EVEN THOUGH I HAD no doubt it was very possible. After all, I only knew one half-Aedh, and Uncle Quinn had an energy force as fierce as any full blood. But that didn’t mean all of us half-breeds did.

And Lucian had thought I was a full blood, which in itself implied that half-breeds didn’t always get the Aedh powers.

“They’ve recorded her statements,” Stane said. “You can read them if you want, but it’s the same type of story I’ve found recounted hundreds and hundreds of times.”

Meaning he’d been doing some research on the Aedh. Interesting. “So why the hell would a half-Aedh disguise his identity, come to Australia, then buy a dump like the Phoenix?”

“If we find the answer to that, we might just have our first real clue as to what the hell is going on,” Stane commented.

I knew what was going on—if Azriel and Madeline Hunter were to be believed, that is. And right now, I wasn’t exactly trusting either of them. There was more running under this than what they were saying, and until I discovered just what that was, the only people I was going to trust were the people I’d trusted all my life.

But by the same token, I couldn’t tell them too much or ask any more than I already had. It was just too dangerous.

“I’ll ask Lucian if all half-Aedh inherited the Aedh gifts, or whether it was just a few.” Which wouldn’t tell us much more than whether Handberry had been disguising his powers or not, but at least it was a start. I hesitated, then added, “I don’t suppose Tao asked you to run a search on an investment adviser named Lucian, did he?”

Stane snorted and glanced up at his cousin. “I told you she’d ask. You owe me a fiver.”

Tao glanced at me, expression sorrowful but eyes amused. “And here I thought you knew me better than to think I’d do something like that.”

“If something happened to me, Ilianna would insist on taking over the accounts, and we both know what a disaster that would be. So, naturally, you’re protecting your investment by looking after me.”