Free A Shade of Vampire 27: A Web of Lies by Bella Forrest Page B

at the pendant she had been fiddling with. To my shock, the bottom quarter of it had detached from the rest… like a cap. And where the bottom casing had been was what looked like…
    Oh, my God.
    I grabbed the jewelry from Arwen and stared at the thin metal protruding from its bottom half. A thumb drive. It was a thumb drive, hidden within this odd-looking, rectangular necklace.
    “What did I do?” Arwen breathed, gazing at the object. “I think I pressed that small jewel in the center.”
    I tried pressing the small, round transparent gem myself, firmly, and indeed… it gave way, pushing downward.
    It was a button.
    This pendant was a camouflaged thumb drive.
    Urgency coursing through me, I grabbed Arwen’s hand. “Take us to my bedroom!”
    We might not be returning this necklace to Georgina’s room so soon, after all…

Grace
    I was in such a hurry to get my laptop started, I almost dropped it as I removed it from its case and planted it down on my desk. I slotted the necklace thumb drive into the side of my machine before waiting for it to start up. I hurriedly navigated to the right place. This USB device contained a single folder titled “FOEBA” .
    “Fo-ee-ba,” Arwen muttered, staring down over my shoulder at my screen.
    I opened up the folder to find it filled with dozens of small files whose names were just a jumbled string of numbers and letters. I tried to click on one, but got a popup message informing me that I didn’t have any program installed on my computer that could open it. The extension of these files was… strange. Certainly not any type of document that I had ever had to open before. I ran a search on the file type to see how to open it, but not even a single search result came up.
    “Seems this really is an uncommon type of file,” I murmured. I scrolled down the list of files, frustrated. “Ugh.” I looked at Arwen. “Any idea how we can get these open?”
    Arwen shrugged. “I can’t just magic them open. This requires the expertise of a computer hacker, not a witch.”
    “Do we have any hackers on the island?” I wondered, more to myself than to Arwen. I began thinking over all our residents. Eli was smart and could figure most things out by himself, but even if he was here, he wasn’t a real whiz at computers. He knew how to work them, but he was by no means a hacker.
    “You could ask Jason,” Arwen suggested.
    Jason was Anna’s oldest son. He worked in the IT department at school and was basically the go-to guy whenever we had a problem. But although he could set up and maintain our school computers, I doubted he could deal with complex problems like this. Still, he was the only person I could think of right now. Our island wasn’t exactly filled with tech experts, many of the residents being hundreds of years old…
    I closed my laptop and tucked it beneath one arm. Then Arwen vanished us to the townhouse Jason shared with his vampire wife, Lara. Jason had been turned into a vampire when he was just a boy—when the island had been under the shadow of the black witches, his parents had believed that he might be at risk of being targeted due to his mother being an immune. Once all was safe again, Jason had taken the cure and turned back into a human in order to grow up. When he’d reached the age of twenty-one, he’d resumed being a vampire, along with his girlfriend at the time, Lara.
    Luckily, we found Jason at home. He led us through to the kitchen. I planted my laptop down on the counter, pointing to the USB device, along with the list of files.
    My heart sank immediately when I saw the clueless expression on his face. “I’ve never come across this type of file before,” he said. “So I don’t want to get your hopes up. Have you already tried searching for information about this file type?”
    “Yes,” I said. “I can’t find anything.”
    Jason sat down in front of the laptop anyway and fiddled around with the files a bit. He tried various back-door