Chapter 142: Searching For Pali
I was at the shop, sitting behind the counter and glancing at the door every few minutes. Still no sign of my boss. The silence in the store was starting to feel heavy when the bell finally chimed. A woman walked in, and I straightened up, assuming she was just another customer. I greeted her with the usual customer-service voice and told her to feel free to pick out whatever she wanted to buy.
She didn’t head for the aisles, though. She just wandered for a bit, her eyes scanning the shelves and flowers but not really seeing them. After some time, she came to the counter with empty hands. I looked at her, waiting, and asked what she was looking for.
"Don’t you remember who I am?" she asked, her eyes searching my face.
I paused and stared at her, squinting as I tried to pull a name from my memory. She definitely looked familiar. There was something about the way she stood and the sharpness in her gaze that I’d seen before, but I couldn’t quite place the moment.
She saw my struggle and introduced herself as Pali’s aunt.
Of course. The fog cleared instantly. Now I remembered. She was the old woman I had met back in Blackwood, the one I had bought the wolfsbane from. The memory of that transaction came rushing back, selling that wolfsbane for $500, and I shifted my posture, greeting her properly this time. I told her right away that Pali wasn’t around, thinking she was just stopping by to see him.
She sighed, her expression darkening. She told me that his absence was exactly why she had come. Her nephew used to send her supplies every week like clockwork, but she hadn’t heard a single word from him for about four weeks now. She looked exhausted and genuinely worried. Pali never missed a delivery. He was too disciplined for that.
I felt a pit form in my stomach as I explained the situation to her. I told her everything I knew, how he said he had a meeting to attend, then sent a text the next day, and then his phone went dead. It had been off ever since.
Hearing that made her look even more worried. She paced a small circle in front of the counter, wondering aloud where he could be. It didn’t make sense. Pali hardly ever left Oakland. He was tied to this place. Even when she had practically begged him to move to Blackwood and work for her, he had refused. He told her he wanted to stay put to keep his mother’s legacy alive.
So now it was clear. Uncle PP was in real trouble, and we couldn’t just sit around waiting for him to check in. We needed to find him. My hands were shaking slightly as I pulled out my phone and texted the group, telling them to get over to the shop immediately. We were starting a search party right now.
While I was waiting for the others to show up, Aunty Sali didn’t just sit idle. She started clearing a space to make a location potion. She asked for my help gathering the herbs she needed from the shop’s stock, so I came out from behind the counter to pull the jars from the shelves.
As I handed her a bundle of dried plants, she caught my eye and smiled softly. She told me she was glad I didn’t go through with it.
I didn’t smile back. I looked away and told her not to flatter herself. It wasn’t about her or what anyone else thought. It was my decision. Choosing to have my pups was a choice I made for myself, and nobody else.
She didn’t push the subject. Once she finished stirring the mixture, she looked at the swirling liquid and said she needed someone who had a strong connection with Uncle PP to make it work. I stepped forward and offered myself, thinking my bond with him as an employee and friend would be enough.
She looked at me and asked point-blank if I had ever been intimate with him.
I felt my face heat up. Obviously not.
She shook her head and explained that it had to be someone with a much stronger bond, either a direct blood relative or someone he had been intimate with. I frowned and asked why she couldn’t just do it herself since she was his aunt. She sighed and said she wasn’t a werewolf but a were-witch, so her blood wouldn’t connect the same way for a physical location.
I rolled my eyes privately. She could have just said a werewolf he’s slept with instead of giving me that long, technical explanation.
I racked my brain. I didn’t know much about Uncle PP’s private dating life, but then a memory surfaced. I remembered my brother mentioning once that he used to date Sasha’s sister.
I called it in. I don’t know exactly how Sasha managed to convince her, but eventually, Shelley showed up at the shop. She didn’t look happy to be there. She was skeptical about the whole thing and stood over the potion, asking a million questions about how it worked and why we were doing it this way. Her voice was sharp, and the constant questioning started to grate on my nerves.
"We get it," I snapped, finally hitting my limit. "You’re an officer. You can investigate his whereabouts with your badges and your paperwork. But right now we need to find him, and we don’t know what state he’s in. So how about you shut up and drink it?"
The shop went quiet. I didn’t even realize I had snapped like that until the words were already hanging in the air. Maybe it was the guilt eating at me. We should have started looking for Uncle PP weeks ago instead of assuming he was just busy.
Shelley looked offended, her eyes flashing, but she didn’t argue. She took the cup and drank the potion anyway.
As soon as she swallowed it, you could see the change. Her eyes unfocused for a second as her connection with him strengthened. She became like a human map, her head tilting as if she could hear a sound we couldn’t. She was ready to lead us straight to wherever he was being held.
We moved fast. Haley, Sasha, and Shelley piled into one car. When I had texted Sasha earlier, she happened to be with Yuki, and of course, she had told her everything. Yuki wasn’t about to stay behind. She insisted on coming too and had brought her own car.
Then there was Princess. She wanted to come as well. I hadn’t specifically told her to join, but Malo was with her when the news broke, so she tagged along. She kept claiming she just wanted to help out, making it very clear she wasn’t there just because Yuki was involved.
I could already feel the tension building between them, and I really didn’t want to deal with any unnecessary drama while we were trying to save Pali.
So, when Yuki offered me a seat in her car, I purposefully chose Princess’s instead. I just wanted a bit of peace. Aunty Sali came with us too, following right after me the moment I climbed into the passenger seat.
The engines started, and the tires crunched on the gravel as we pulled away from the shop. And just like that, the search for Uncle PP began.
