Chapter 39: The Council Auditor Just Tested My Wolf And The Numbers Don’t Add Up In Her Favor?!

The woman in the doorway was not Joan.

She was shorter, broader across the shoulders, and she carried a metal case in her left hand.

Council insignia on her collar, gold thread on black, and the family resemblance hit him two seconds before the name did.

Hira Vasquez.

Lior’s aunt, not his father.

The Council had sent the sister instead.

"Soren Kane," she said, looking past Selah and Maren to find him on the bed.

"You’re awake, good! The classification scan was scheduled for six this morning but your roommates informed me you were indisposed."

"He was recovering from a bond recalibration," Selah said, still blocking half the doorway with her body.

"I can see that." Hira didn’t comment. "Bring the wolf to the assessment hall on the second floor. You have twenty minutes."

She turned and walked back down the corridor, the metal case humming with each step.

Maren closed the door the second she was gone. "Tell me you have a plan."

Soren looked at Grimm.

The wolf was pressed against his hip, ears flat, tail still.

Through the bond he could feel Yara’s shadow sitting directly under the floorboards.

Her equipment reads spectral signature bands. I know those machines, master.

"And?"

The recalibration changed something. My shadow aligned with Grimm’s bond frequency during the six hours. We’re layered now. When she scans Grimm, she’ll get my post-recalibration frequency on top of Grimm’s base output.

"How long does the mask hold?"

Two weeks. Maybe less if I push my suppression field too hard.

A notification dropped into his vision.

[DING! — Bond frequency mask detected. Post-recalibration alignment is suppressing external scan accuracy. Duration: estimated 14 days before natural decay.]

More than enough time to get through the audit, assuming nothing else went wrong.

Which was not an assumption Soren was willing to make.

◆◆◆◆

The assessment hall was a converted classroom on the second floor with the desks pushed against the walls and Hira’s equipment arranged in the center.

Three scanners on tripods, a calibration tablet on a folding table, and a containment ring drawn on the floor in white chalk mixed with something that glowed faintly blue.

Grimm walked into the ring without being told.

She sat in the center and waited with her ears pointed forward.

Hira powered the first scanner.

The hum in Soren’s skull got louder.

"Bond classification for the primary entity," Hira said, reading from the tablet. "Species: Shadow-type canine. Current tier designation?"

"Tier 3. Consolidated."

"We’ll verify that." She tapped the scanner.

A beam of pale light swept across Grimm in a slow arc, passing through her body and projecting a spectral readout on the wall behind her.

The readout was clean.

Soren could see Hira’s expression shift by a fraction when the numbers populated. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

Tier-3, Shadow-type, standard bonding frequency within expected parameters for an E-rank tamer.

Every data point fell right in the center of the acceptable range.

Nothing that would make a trained auditor look twice.

Which was exactly the problem, because a trained auditor looked twice at perfection.

Hira ran the scan again, adjusted the scanner’s frequency band and ran it a third time.

Identical.

"Your wolf reads clean," she said.

"Should she not?"

Hira didn’t answer that.

She wrote something on her tablet, then moved to the second scanner.

This one was larger, heavier, with a dish at the top that rotated slowly when she activated it.

"Hold still," she told Grimm.

The second scan ran for forty seconds.

The readout was the same.

Tier-3 Shadow, nominal across all bands, not a single flag.

From the doorway, a low sound. Gold light catching on a mane.

Lior was leaning against the frame with his Crowned Lion beside him, the beast’s massive head turned toward Grimm in the containment ring.

The lion’s mane flickered gold, then deeper gold, then almost orange, and the beast made a sound in its chest that Soren could feel through the floor.

The lion could sense what the scanners couldn’t.

Beasts didn’t need equipment to read each other.

They felt bond signatures the way humans felt temperature, and whatever the lion was picking up from Grimm right now was making it uncomfortable.

"Interesting company you keep, Kane," Lior said.

"Your aunt invited me."

"My aunt does what the Council asks, my father asks the Council." Lior pushed off the doorframe. "Your readings are too clean."

"Take it up with the equipment."

"I’m taking it up with you."

Hira cut in without raising her voice. "Lior. You’re observing, not participating."

"I’m noting an anomaly."

"You’re noting a suspicion, those are not the same thing and the Council doesn’t accept the second one." She turned back to Soren. "I’ll need your wolf to demonstrate a combat ability for active-bond verification. Standard protocol, nothing above training intensity."

Grimm stood up in the ring and looked at Soren through the bond.

What do I show them?

"Shadow Step," Soren said out loud. "Short range. Ten feet."

Grimm dissolved into shadow and reappeared at the edge of the containment ring.

Standard Tier-3 mobility, nothing special.

Hira noted it. "One more, offensive class."

"Shadow Bite."

Grimm’s jaws opened and a crescent of dark energy snapped forward, hitting the containment ring and dissipating against the chalk line.

The scanners recorded the output as mid-Tier-3.

The lion’s mane went from gold to deep amber and stayed there. The beast took half a step forward before Lior put a hand on its head.

"Steady," Lior said to his lion.

Hira closed her tablet, powered down the first two scanners, but left the third one running.

"Classification recorded," she said. "Tier-3 Shadow-type, bonded to E-rank Tamer Soren Kane within acceptable parameters."

She paused.

"I’ll need to scan your secondary bonded entity next."

Soren’s blood went cold in a way that had nothing to do with Selah’s proximity.

"Secondary?"

"Your bond registry shows two active links. The wolf and a humanoid-type, ice-elemental classification pending."

Hira checked her tablet. "Bring Selah Young in for classification."

Dani appeared at the edge of the doorway behind Lior, her moth sitting on her collar.

She caught Soren’s eye and slid a folded piece of paper between two fingers, holding it low against her hip where Lior couldn’t see.

Soren walked to the door.

On his way past Lior, he took the note from Dani’s hand without breaking stride. He opened it in the hall.

Vasquez Sr. filed three more data requests overnight. All about Primordial-class entities.

He folded the note and put it in his pocket.

Selah’s bond hadn’t been recalibrated.

Her readings were still running on the old F-rank frequency because the recalibration with Yara had only aligned Yara’s signature with Grimm’s.

Selah was still raw and her bond data was full of anomalies that Joan had spent weeks burying under Bureau jurisdiction.

If Hira scanned her tomorrow, every single one of those anomalies would surface on a Council scanner that Joan had no authority to suppress.

Master, the ice girl’s readings will show everything.

Soren looked back into the assessment hall where Hira was packing the scanners into their cases with efficiency then he looked at Selah standing at the end of the corridor with her arms crossed.

"When?" Selah said.

"Tomorrow morning."

She looked at him for a long time.

"Then we have a problem..."