Katie sat in the classroom where she was supposed to attend her first lesson from in her usual seat. In this lesson, she finally got to sit with her best friend, Sandra by her side. Kyle sat ahead so he could focus on what was being taught in the class. He needed that more than these two did. The life of a hunter, if successful was already determined as long as they remained diligent in their efforts to attain the abilities needed to combat the rogues and keep the peace. As such, Kyle was required to remain attentive even though it was tempting to hang out with the hunters. Nonetheless, he was able to make excuses when it mattered.
Katie couldn't shake the feeling of doom in the pit of her stomach. Something was badly wrong, but she couldn't put her finger on it. The Chase family trained to never evade one's intuition and Katie's intuition right now was screaming trouble. More trouble than it did the day before, but the worst part of this was that she could not figure out what the feeling was trying to tell her.
She tried looking outside for nature to distract her but found nothing. She then turned to the best friend, "Is it just me or does something feel off today?" she tried asking.
"Maybe you are worried about the prisoner we still have," she pointed out.
"Why do we have a prisoner when the boy passed the evaluation?"
"Because the boy doesn't know everything we need to know," she replied, "so they kept the prisoner around for an interrogation so that they can see if they can dig up anything new."
"What do you mean by the boy doesn't know?"
"The Rogue king sends all of the kids on missions that are different and they are supposed to retrieve different pieces of seemingly unrelated information which he can then use to decide his next move without even the spies knowing what it is that he is planning. As a result, the spies' main objective is to obtain the knowledge that is required of them," she explained.
"So that means…"
"Katie Chase…" the voice of the teacher alerted her, stopping the conversation in half. She looked at the teacher who beckoned for her to look at the door. Principal Brown stood at the entrance of the classroom clad in a black suit looking as regal as he could manage. Katie got up from her seat and walked to the door to speak to him.
"Follow me, Chase," he said. She excused herself from the class urging the teacher to go on as she followed Principal Brown. The principal led her out of the main building, keeping quiet the entire time they walked. Katie could tell where they were going yet until she noticed the infirmary. There didn't seem to be a reason why she would be going there and her mind couldn't figure out why. Remembering the events of the past day only made her feel like she was in more trouble than she out to have been in. They walked past the infirmary and went straight to the teacher's parking lot. A secluded parking lot that was much farther from the school entrance than the main one, which didn't make it ideal, even for the rulebreakers who wanted to use it just for the sake of breaking the teachers only rule.
The Principal walked by to her black Cadillac and opened the passenger seat for her to get in. There was no questioning him with the look he wore on his face. Katie got into the massive car and waited for him as he circled around to get to the driver's seat.
They were soon on the road driving at eighty kilometres per hour in pure silence. "Are you going to tell me where we are going?" she asked him after some time in the silence.
"We are going to the detention centre, the Hunter detention centre," she said. There could only be one reason why I would be summoned there and that was because of Shaemus. Hunters in wrong would be sent there and punished accordingly, sometimes interrogated.
"What did Shaemus do now?"
"Just stay quiet until we get there. You will know soon enough," Principal Brown had never worn this kind of expression. It was like he didn't know what to make of what he had found out and that nothing made sense. He gripped the stirring wheel so hard that his knuckles were turning white. This was only making Katie more and more nervous by the minute.
They finally reached the Hunter's Agency, a colossal facility that occupied a few acres of land. This was where most of the hunter activities took place and it acted as a base for the pro hunters that protected the town. As Katie entered the gate with Mr Brown, she couldn't help but feel uneasy with the eyes that were staring at her. No one greeted them as they went through and they were even permitted to skip the security check.
Katie tried waving at a few of them, but they would all turn away. Mr Brown finally brought her through to the three-storey building that served as the detention centre. Regardless of how big the building looked, it was partitioned into only twenty identical rooms, eight on each floor. The walls of the building were reinforced with concrete and the doors were made of steel. This was to prevent hunters with Prometheus gifts of strength from escaping. It was rare for a hunter to be guilty of a crime, but once they were suspected, there was a system for clearing their names and this was where they would put them to prevent them from making any further wrong decisions.
Shaemus now qualified to be in one of these cells although he did not possess the Prometheus gift it was meant to withstand. 'This is overkill,' Katie thought as the two walked into the building and went straight for the stairs. The corridor went straight through the middle with four rooms on each side, more like cells. Nonetheless, each cell came with a bed, a reading table and a toilet. The reading table was also meant to hold books and novels of the hunter's choosing to pass the time while their issue was being handled.
She finally got to Shaemus' cell on the first floor. The guard who had come with them immediately started fumbling with the keys to open the cell. "Shaemus said… that you were the one who organized that whole fight and made sure he took the blame for everything," Principal Brown said, the words rolling off his tongue slowly. Before Katie had a chance to react, the guard pushed her through the door and slammed the door shut behind her. She rushed back to the bars that did not allow much visibility of the outside. "Hey, what is this?" she yelled.
"Talk to Shaemus. Maybe you can help us make sense of this. We'll be back in an hour to see how much progress you will have made," with that said, they left. The sound of their receding footsteps proved this was no joke and that they were serious.
"EXPLAIN THIS TO ME RIGHT NOW. WHY AM I BEING DETAINED?" she yelled, rage flowing through every vessel in her body while she did so. 'This is an outrage. They know who I am. I have no time to waste in detention,' her thoughts rumbled in fury. She punched the door, making sure to add some added power of the strength Prometheus gift to it. She continued to punch the door, making it scream on its hinges and sending the vibration through the entire cell. The door was sturdy and would not budge one bit.
"That won't help," a voice startled her out of her rhythm. A voice she knew all too well. She slowly turned to see Shaemus lying in the bed face up with, book in hand. He looked comfortable in the bed and for once, Katie could see the same look in his eye that he used to have before he started causing chaos at the school.
"If it isn't the reason I am here," she said to him.
"I'm sorry about this. I really needed to talk to you," he began.
"Oh, quit it. You knew there was going to be an attack at the clearing, didn't you?" Katie asked, a hint of anger in her voice.
"Could you keep your voice down? The walls have ears," he spoke in a hushed tone. Katie held back on her next outburst so that she could hear the junior hunter out.
She pulled the chair from the reading desk and took a seat leaning forward with her chin on her hands, "What is it that you can tell me?" she asked him.
"You make this easy so quickly, but I'm glad. Thank you," he said.
"Just cut to the chase."
"My mother is missing." He said, keeping quiet to let it register in her mind. Shaemus was a child to a single mother who was a hunter. His father had died in a mission to a location that they believed to be the Rogue King's hideout, but it had turned out to be wrong information and a bomb went off when they arrived. The rogues had then come in and killed all the survivors of the bomb blast. A merciless ambush that only fueled the hunters' hate towards the rogues even more.
"I'm listening," Katie said to him, going silent to allow him to explain the whole story. The reason why he'd been acting so much out of character.
"It was about a week ago. My mother went missing, but before I could say anything to the Hunter Agency, they called me. They showed me proof of my mum being alive, a live video of her strapped to a chair and gagged. Her vitals were also being monitored. She was at their mercy and they had her bound in chains strong enough to withstand a Prometheus gift. That only told me that she had been ambushed or tricked since her gift is agility. My hands were tied… they warned me not to get any crazy ideas because they had ears everywhere. I didn't know what they meant at first until they started telling me things that I alone was supposed to know.
My last option was to hope that your intuition was good enough to pick up on everything that was going on. I was told to put on a good show and persuade a large turnout at the Hunters' training ground. I didn't want to, but what choice did I have. Any form of bad acting and my mother would be dead. I had to cause a commotion and lead a large number of civilians…" he couldn't stomach what he was saying at this point.
"Keep going Shaemus. As long as it's your mother involved, I can overlook everything you did, nobody died," Katie said.
"You might be able to overlook it, but I can't do that so casually when even now they still have my mother and might only be waiting to give me more orders that I'll have to carry out. I can't keep going for much longer, Katie," Katie could shake the feeling of relief and pride for her comrade. As much as he was in pain at the moment, she was only happy that he was still himself… as self-righteous as he had always been.
"Continue, Shaemus," she told him.
"When we got to the clearing, I wanted to find a way to tell you. The rogues were going to attack and I knew it, but I couldn't tell anyone. The only person I could trust in the entire school was you and simply because you are a pro hunter. That speaks for itself though I didn't know that you were a pro hunter until an hour before our meeting in the clearing. My last resort was to burn down the five minutes you gave me, wasting up all my energy, using it to try and relay the one message that I couldn't relay to you," he explained, chuckling at the end, "you have such a great intuition. I could see it in your eyes, the caution. The feeling that something was not right and all I needed to do was to help you confirm it."
"Do you really think they have spies that are always watching us?" he said.
"To prove it, they organized a meeting with one of them, a student in our same class passing as a human. There was no way I could tell that he was a rogue. Even as the student stood in front of me claiming to be a rogue, I couldn't help but laugh at him like it was some sick joke. That was… until he punched my gut," he closed his eyes cringing at the enemy, "that skinny boy packed a punch. I know superhuman strength when I see it. I just never thought it would one day hit me and not to mention from a fellow student. From that moment, everyone in the school was a suspect. I had no idea how many they were or who they were. There was even a possibility of being friends with them. The perfect infiltration, they called it."
"I met one of them. He went through a Prometheus evaluation and passed. He was just a child of fifteen years that I had saved the day before from Dexter. They are able to conceal their presence by suppressing their wolves using some pills. The downside is that the pills only work until they turn eighteen. Quite repulsive if you ask me," Katie said.
"That boy was still young. He is bound to have less information than the others who have been there for months. Rumour has it that some of them have been there for years," he said.
"The boy said the seven of them were all that were there and we killed them. I'm hoping he was at least right in that aspect. I have one question though. Why did you choose me?"
"I trust you, Katie. I have been put through hell in the past week. Of all the lessons that you taught me back then, one seemed to come back to me and that was trusting my intuition. The only person I could feel safe handling this information with no chance of being a spy was you. I just had to find a way to get the information to you without risk of anyone hearing us. And the only way that I could do that…"
"Was to frame me and have me brought here so that we can talk about this in private," Katie finished the statement, the entirety of Shaemus' logic finally settling into her mind. She couldn't blame him for trying to save his mother, but she also couldn't deny the fact that he still went through with the plan with no knowledge of how many of the rogues would be attacking.
"Exactly… I'm glad I could at least tell someone about it. It's been killing me," he laid back into the bed breathing out a heavy sigh of relief.
"Did they tell you why they wanted you to gather a group as large as that one?" Katie asked.
"No, they didn't. They would only say that they wanted the school to get a bit more interesting, but that was a lie, obviously. I came to the conclusion that they were planning an attack on the civilians that I would gather on that day. Once again, I'm sorry for the trouble I caused you," he said.
"It's okay… my only aim right now is to get all the facts right and make a full assessment of how much infiltration they went through," Katie said, "I still wonder why you went through with it. What if they were more of them that attacked us?"
"Even if they were more, they weren't going to attack at once with a Royal, three alphas and a pro hunter on the scene. I don't know what their goal was, but it was suicide to attack. One other thing I noticed is that they always kept their numbers a mystery like they were many. This could have just been a smokescreen to keep me paranoid about how they were everywhere. The more I thought of it, the more I saw the chances of the civilians surviving," he said.
"You call it survival when some of them are in rehabilitation because of the trauma they went through. In that commotion, it was very possible for them to die just from being trampled in the fray," Katie snapped at him. Shaemus closed his eyes, a painful expression gracing his face.
"I am not saying I justify what I did… what would you have done in my shoes?"
"You and I are very different people… especially when it comes to our power difference. That said, I'd probably hunt down the Rogue king. Something tells me he doesn't stay too far from the spies he wants to actively control like this. At the rate with which they are receiving orders, he can't be far," she surmised.
"Couldn't he be giving the orders through a phone?"
"That would be a convenient way to do it, but phone calls can be tracked and listened to. If anyone caught wind of a phone call that revealed their plans, his plans would be ruined," she said.
"You make a valid point, but what you are suggesting is…"
"The Rogue King is not far from here. He could be hiding in a hidden compound deep within the forest well out of hunter territory. And if I am merely overthinking it, he could be in town hiding in plain sight, that is if he found some way to mask his scent from every werewolf in the vicinity," She said.
"That would be a difficult task to achieve. If suppression of a wolf only works for underage werewolves as you said, it would be hard for him to mask his presence, not to mention the fact that he is among the high ranking wolves," he said. It was good to see that he could still reason even under all that guilt. The look was good on him, even after that, why couldn't she wipe the feeling of terror from her mind.
"Something is bothering me and won't let go of me," she said before she could stop herself.
"You mean like…" Shaemus was stopped when the rushed footsteps of someone running broke through the silence of the Detention Centre. Keys rattled along with the sound of the footsteps. The person was getting closer to their door. Katie checked her watch and it had only been thirty minutes since she was locked in and not an hour. Her feeling of dread got even more pronounced the closer the person came. She got up to her feet, her body shivering with the urge to get moving. After jiggling the keys into the keyhole frantically, the door swung open, a guard tumbling into the cell and dropping to his knees, completely out of breath that he could not speak even if he wanted to. Someone needed Katie's help and she wasn't going to make it in time…
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