Being reminded that she had not yet visited her mother after returning home, Nita wished to end this discussion as quickly as she could.
"You can go visit her," Uri suggested when he saw the impatience so evident on her face.
However, Nita did not like to leave things halfway and shook her head to indicate that she was not done yet.
"Who was the tracker?" She questioned without beating around the bush.
Each vampire was born with something that they were extremely good at.
They called this trait their 'gift' given by the ones who created them but one could even call them their powers.
While all vampires had heightened senses, these gifts took their senses to a whole other level.
For example, some vampires had such great eyesight that they could gaze in a direction and clearly see something that was miles away from their position.
In the same way, a tracker was someone with a heightened sense of smell, allowing them to make out the scent left behind by any person and use this residual scent to track them.
There were various other such gifts, some rarer than the other, which were used by vampires in numerous ways.
Nita was sure that there were quite a few talented trackers among the Valken guards and thus had asked this query, curious to know who had been in charge of her brother's case.
If a tracker had gone to the scene of the crime and checked for clues then they must have found something to help them track Detrim's current whereabouts without fail.
'Or even catch a whiff of the one who caused this mess.' She added in her mind while she waited for an answer.
"Your cousin Jodie." The old man answered as his gaze flitted to a certain direction in this room.
Nita's eyes blinked in incredulity at the name she had heard and before she knew it, she had blurted something out.
"That drunk!?" She scoffed with a disgruntled look on her face, unable to accept that someone like him had been sent to track Detrim's whereabouts.
"Hey! I'm right here!" A certain young man cried out with an embarrassed look on his face when he heard what his cousin had just called him.
At this outburst, Nita's eyes shifted to the side where the two blonde men from earlier were seated together on one couch.
As soon as she had directed her gaze in that direction, she found one of them looking at her with glowering eyes while the other was covering his mouth to stop his… cough?
"Did I say something wrong, Cousin Jodie?" She retorted while tilting her head as she directed this question towards the one who was glaring at her.
At these words, the other blonde man chortled which also garnered a glare from his immediate neighbor.
'So he wasn't coughing?' Nita realized that his trembling shoulders were caused by his attempt to stop his laughter which he seemed to have failed now that he was laughing out loud.
The man addressed as 'Cousin Jodie' was alternating his glares at Nita and the older-looking man seated next to him.
"I'm not a drunk!" He growled which made the men seated opposite him narrow their eyes.
"Watch how you behave before your elders!" One of them lectured in a fierce tone.
Nita knew the people seated in this room as they were relatives of the Valken family in some way or the other.
The two blonde men from earlier were Rowan Tuskar and Jodie Tuskar, brothers who were cousins to the Valken siblings.
Rowan was the elder brother who was a year younger than Detrim while Jodie was around the same age as Nita.
The two pairs of siblings had grown up together and Nita knew just how much of an alcoholic the teenage Jodie had been when she still lived in this country.
However, from what she had just heard, it appeared that he had changed his wayward attitude in recent times or at least pretended to have changed in the presence of the elders.
On the other hand, the two men with darker colored hair were from the Trenant family, a close associate of the Valken family and one which paid too much attention to the hierarchy that had been prevalent since the older generations.
The man who had chided Jodie just earlier was the current patriarch of the Trenant family, Obadiah Trenant, a man in his mid-fifties.
He was a faithful follower and confidante of her father, one on whom Uri Valken could depend at any time.
Nita had met this man a few times in the past and just like today, he always had a fierce expression on his face.
Her eyes then shifted to the man seated next to him and frowned as she had never seen him before.
Based on the close resemblance between the two men, she assumed that they were father and son but since she had never met him before, she chose to ignore him and move along with what she had to say.
"Father, how could you send Cousin Jodie to track Brother's whereabouts?" She complained without caring that Jodie was looking at her with his mouth gaping wide open.
Rowan bit his lip in order to keep his calm and not laugh at his little brother's reddening face as this was not the time or the place to be joking around and having fun.
His close friend and cousin had gone missing which was an unfortunate situation but he just could not control his laughter every time he saw Jodie's flustered face.
'She is just the same.' He remarked as even in the past, she was the only person who could make Jodie lose his cool with just a few words of hers.
"What is so wrong with me!?" Jodie clamored before the old man of the Valken family could even reply.
He was the best tracker, even better than the guards of the Valken family so why could he not be assigned this task?
He admitted that he had been a tiny bit of a rebel back when they were still teenagers but he had grown a lot and matured during the period that Nita had been gone.
He honed his skills and had earned the privilege of holding the title of the best tracker among the men in the Valken family forces.
He had spent a lot of time and effort to achieve this position hence he was furious to hear her belittling him the moment she returned after running away so many years ago.
To express his disapproval of her wrongful assumptions about him, Jodie glared at her without restraint.
"Is that so?" Nita sneered, unaffected by his glare as she narrowed her eyes right back at him.