“Enoch.” Lucien put his hand on the doctor’s shoulder, interjecting, much to Enoch’s evident frustration. “Rest comes after retribution.”
The hospital director seemed extremely tired all of a sudden, as his shoulders slumped with obvious defeat. “I’ll talk to the Imperative, ask for their help to keep the agents at bay.” He paused and caught Lucien’s gaze with a grim one of his own. “Keep me updated, Lucien. I need to know you’re safe.”
“Will do,” Lucien promised.
I gave Enoch a nod of my own, curbing my curiosity as to what the Imperative was, and said, “It was nice meeting you.”
Enoch’s smile returned as he responded, “The same goes for you. Take care of him, yeah?”
Lucien sighed. “You’re aware I’m six foot four of pure muscle, right?” he drawled, shooting a mock-annoyed look at Enoch.
The hospital director arched a brow. “And we all saw how that worked out for you,” he said quietly, motioning at Lucien’s back.
I was half afraid the mood would sour again at the joke, but Lucien surprised me again when he chuckled. “Touché, old man, touché,” he said, his French accent slipping heavily ontouché, and causing me slight confusion, since Enoch was far from an old man.
In any case, there was no more time for ruminations, and soon after, we left the hospital, and the real hunt finally began.
Chapter 12
The Price of Betrayal
Once upon a time, when I was really young, my father used to watch the Discovery Channel every Sunday. Even back then, when we were on good terms, he wasn’t the warm type, more absent than present, and being a small girl, all I wanted was to get his attention in some way.
So even though I was bored out of my mind, I watched shows about nature with him.
Many times during those shows, when a leopard, for instance, was on the hunt, it lay in wait in the grand savanna a couple of miles away, watching its prey—usually a zebra, for some reason—like a hawk as it waited for the right moment.
In these shows, the narrator always said predators can be very patient when it comes to hunting their prey. A stakeout like this could sometimes take hours, and sometimes less than ten minutes. It depended on the prey’s movement, whether it was alone or with a herd, and even unforeseen natural elements.
I hardly ever listened to the narrator when they said those things, though, because the edit made it seem like only three minutes or so passed before the predator jumped into action.
Now, as I sat alone in a café near the hospital, I finally felt the clock ticking, and it was excruciating, since I could not let my guard down even for a moment and had to stay tense and alert for any possible openings. Staying in that kind of state was absolutely exhausting.
After we left the hospital, Lucien had explained his plan very briefly. “We have to wait for the right timing,” he had informed me as he led me to the café. “That’s a good vantage point to watch over the hospital entrance area. Be sharp, and tell me if you notice two tall men and one woman arriving together.”
“Aren’t you coming with me?” I’d asked, perplexed.
He’d shaken his head. “No, I’ll be someplace else. But here, take this.” He handed me an old, heavy Nokia that made me frown in confusion. “It’s a burner phone, very hard to trace. Text me the moment you see them. I’ll be around here.”
He was gone soon after, leaving me in the café all by myself.
I felt awkward, sitting alone in a café full of friend groups and families, especially without anything to do. If I wanted to be fully on guard, I had to be focused.
What I did bring with me was each traitor’s profile, since it included their headshot as well.
Readjusting my glasses over my nose, I scanned the parking lot outside and the hospital entrance on the other side of the road, feeling excited and agitated despite my exhaustion. It was four o’clock in the morning now, still utterly dark, and it was hard to see anything in the dim streetlights. I squinted my eyes, too, as if it would help.
Still tense and alert, I nonetheless took breaks to commit the three images to memory. The two historians, Alby and Dianna, looked as average as any other person, both with dark hair and eyes, Dianna’s hair longer and pulled into a tight bun. They could pass as everyone’s next-door neighbors in a nice suburban neighborhood.
Mack Page, the Beta, on the other hand, looked like what I imagined a werewolf would look like.
He had a bodybuilder physique, thick neck, and hair to his waist. In the image, his face was almost deadly, contorted in that same chilling way Lucien’s face had been back in Enoch’s office. He still looked human, but everything about his expression seemed inhuman. As though the wolf inside him was brought to the surface in all ways but his true form.
I wondered why Mack Page wanted his headshot to have this expression. It made him seem like an absolute vile menace, which he apparently was, considering the fact he tried to kill Lucien. But I thought he wanted Lucien fooled, for Lucien to trust him? That face screamed anything but trustworthy.
Or perhaps that’s how I saw it. Maybe there was a different reason for this that I, a mere human, didn’t know about. I wrote down a reminder in my pocket pad to ask Lucien later.
Sipping my strong Americano, I returned my gaze to the outside and almost spilled the drink all over my clothes. Because three people had just rounded the corner of the street and approached the hospital. Two men and a woman, one of those men long haired.
