“The police didn’t think so.” Woodbridge capped his pen neatly. “Not specifically, more of a general direction. They appear to be heading west.”

West was in our direction.

Prisha’s eyes hardened as she scrutinized her partner. “When did you talk to the police?”

He flipped back through his notebook until he hit the page he needed. “Three days ago.”

“And why wasn’t I, a member of the Tribunal, notified?” She waved a hand at us. “Or the two people this investigation impacts?”

“My office sent a letter.”

I could hear Prisha’s teeth grinding from where I sat. “You used the mail system at the Tribunal offices?”

“No,” Woodbridge pursed his lips, weirdly affronted by her question. “I sent a letter from the university.”

“Does that mean you used their internal system or had your assistant walk it to an actual USPS drop?” Prisha asked the question like she both knew the answer and dreaded hearing it.

Woodbridge blinked at her, his head collapsing on his neck like a myopic owl. “The university’s, of course. My assistant has better things to do than carry mail to the post office.”

“The university,” Prisha stated slowly, her tone carefully moderated, “does not have the best reputation when it comes to mail. They might not have even mailed it yet.”

Woodbridge waited, his face calm. The And? was clearly implied.

“That is important, time-sensitive material that we all needed,” Prisha continued in her overly patient tone, obviously surprised that she had to say it. I wasn’t. This was the problem with arcanists. They had a sort of ivory tower mentality where the only thing that mattered was research, data, and information. Living things? Didn’t matter in the slightest.

Or course, I couldn’t rule out spite. From what Van had told me, her father could nurse a grudge with the best of them. But it was also possible that we were just so far beneath his attention that it simply didn’t occur to him. At least, not after he got the data he wanted and needed.

Prisha annunciated each word carefully, biting them out. “Information you could have emailed. Or, and this would be even better, you could have picked up the damn phone!”

Woodbridge closed his notebook. The And? was still implied.

Prisha took a deep, cleansing breath. Her next words were calmer. “If I had known, I would have contacted them immediately to check the binding. I would have warned them to take precautions.”

“But that would have changed the outcome,” Woodbridge argued, his gray brows divebombing towards his nose. “And skewed the data.”

“I’m not a science experiment,” Declan said, the growl back but his words clipped and precise nonetheless. His teeth clenched, his eyes turning the ghostly shade of the wolf’s. I let go of his hand and wrapped an arm around him, pulling him closer to me in small ways. Prisha and Woodbridge would see what I was doing—Woodbridge would probably make a freaking note in his stupid journal about it—but I didn’t care.