Chapter Twenty Six
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.