“You said I’d have a chance to speak!” William shouted at his father.

“So I did,” Mathias relented. He took another deep breath and took his seat on the bed as he pulled on his shoes. He wasn’t listening. He was to focused on how to get through the next couple of days. Too distracted to care about what William had gone through or even why.

What was there left to say really? He was sorry? He wasn’t.

His father glanced at William over his shoulder, a silent order lingering on his face. “If you can’t tell William, I have to leave. Say your piece. Whatever is on your mind. For you, I can manage to be a few minutes late. This,” he gestured to Wiliam and himself, “this is important.”

He couldn’t find the words to explain himself. He had so much to say, about everything, but nothing he could think of made any sense. He figured he might as well start with what his father wanted to hear. “If she’s not Enhanced, then she’s got to be a monster.” Okay, maybe not exactly what Mathias was expecting, but admitting that there was a possibility that she might not be Enhanced at to be some sort of middle ground.

His father gave him a doubtful look.

“I know how it sounds, but…” Thinking about the way the shadows moved through and around Astral as though she existed in a separate reality, out of sync with the rest of the world, sent shivers down his spine. He glanced to the E.M.I. who guarded his only exit. Both held supernatural traits but not as extreme as some of the others he had seen today. William just his chin toward the woman, “Her hair is on fire.” He was calm about it. She inspected a lock of her blond hair and arched a brow. “He’s got weird pale moon shapes all over his skin.”

To his father, he said: “You’ve got like… you know when you see an animal in a shadow or something and the light hits them in a certain way? Your eyes do that. Seth is like a smoky window with a fire burning inside. And Astral… she’s just pure black. Empty.”

Mathias nodded to himself, pressing his lips together in a tight line. He gave his son’s arm a squeeze before rising. His father didn’t believe William. “Do you remember living at the monastery?”

William nodded. He was so happy the day they told him that his father was coming to get him. “You used to see monsters everywhere. In the usual places of course. Under the bed, in the closet, in the cellar. All very normal expressions of fear for a child of that age.” His father explained.

“At first they thought that you were struggling with the loss of your mother. You had been left alone for days. No child should have had to have endured such neglect. But then they found your mother’s body and they suspected that you had seen her attacker, which in turn manifested in a child’s mind as monsters. Monsters, everywhere and in everyone.”

He didn’t remember his mother. He had photos. She was beautiful. But he couldn’t remember her smell, her voice, or anything about her really. “Did she want me?” William had to ask. He didn’t like talking about his mom, but the question nagged him.

“Yes, very much so. She wanted a different life for you, something of your choosing instead of being told where to be and what to do. She didn’t like that we couldn’t shape our own destinies,” Mathias explained.

“Do you miss her?”

His father hesitated. “I’m ashamed to admit that I barely remember her. We married so young, she was fourteen, I was sixteen and a newly appointed Master Hunter, the youngest ever. I was selfish and full of myself.”

“Wow, fourteen. Wait didn’t you have to serve in the war?”

“As a practicing Hunter I did not. I’m to serve my lifetime hunting demons within the Council’s registered safe zones. We moved a lot. It was soon after you were born that I took a mission at the Killing Fields to root out a nest. I never saw your mother after that. We’d been married less than six months.” Mathias lingered on the memories.

“When I returned from the mission, your mother was gone. She had taken you to God knows where. I was assigned mission after mission, until one day I was told that they had found you at one of the monasteries. I learned later, that you had attacked a number of the practitioners of the faith, seriously harming many of them, claiming that they were monsters.”

“When you came to live with me, your fear was very real. There were many sleepless nights for both of us. I know you won’t want to hear this, but the first time that you slept the whole night through, was when Astral came to us. It was her first sleep over. She was nervous. I was nervous. I didn’t know how you would react. But she crawled into bed next to you, with me on the other side of you. You were terrified. To scared to scream even. She sang and you fell asleep, and all of the monster went away.”

“And now the symptoms of your trauma have manifest again. I have to wonder is it psychological or a sign of mental illness. That said, I’m told by many sources that you appeared during a stressful situation, where game participants had turned on one another. Is that fair to say?”

William nodded, trying to pushed the faces of the masked players from his mind. “I… I saw them kill each other.” A vision of the kid he had drowned floated to the surface of his mind. “They tried to kill me! I told the Gaming Commission, but I’m pretty sure they’re just going to cover it all up!” He heard the panic in his own voice. Oh God! They knew that he knew what went down in the games. We they going to try to keep him quiet? Was that why the E.M.I. were here in this box a room, to make sure no one would get him?

“They who?” Mathias pressed gently. He placed a hand on William’s shoulder, pulling him closer so that the only person he could see was his father.

“I don’t know!” He wiped the tears from his eyes, his frustration breaking through. “The school. Maybe the Gaming Commission. I don’t know.”

“What did the Gaming Commissioner want to know?”

Everything was a haze. His memories fading in and out so fast, he didn’t know what was real anymore. “Standard stuff, I guess. He asked a lot of questions about who I was and where I thought I was. He asked a lot of questions about, I guess, on how I got into the games. But I don’t remember anything, so I just told him what I knew.”

“I see. Do you mind trying for me? Do remember how you got to the arena?” His voice was gentle and soothing.

William felt weird like he was in a trance, being forced to relive the memories in between memories, the parts that no one ever remembers. He stared at his father’s chest, fixating on a button. “No…not really.” He felt his memory shuffle as though scanning through a live-stream on fast rewind. “I remember crawling. Digging, I think. Then snow.” The snow was cold his hands, but he was so hot, and it was hard to breathe. “It was dark. I wasn’t buried…I was… going somewhere. I don’t remember where. I remember thinking, it was very weird to be crawling for so long in a straight line and not actually get anywhere.”

“Was this the day you emerged?” His father’s voice was distant.

“Yeah.”

“Do you remember blacking out at anytime? Before, or after?”

It was hard to think. He was so very tired. “I remember getting into the elevator with Astral. We were going to visit Seth in the medic ward. She wasn’t happy to see me.” An image of the dark version of Astral engulfed his memories, launching at him. He jumped back in his bed, away from his father. “I think I black out about then,” he said, wide eyed, trying to separate the memory from something that felt more like a dream.

His father didn’t reach out to comfort him, leaving his son to retreat to the corner.

“That was back in October?” His father pressed on, keeping his voice calm and gentle.

“Yeah, right after Squad VII’s game. It was close to curfew. I was worried about whether or not I’d make it back to my dorm, but Astral didn’t seem to care.” His world came back into focus. Now more than ever he needed to know that his father was on his side. “You believe me, don’t you?”

“I do,” his father replied.

“And about the part that the school was trying to cover it up?”

Mathias pressed his lips together, holding back until he found the right combination of words. “If it’s true, then it won’t be an easy thing to prove. That said, you’ve given the E.M.I. an approximate timeline to review.”

The soldiers exchanged a look. “That’s a solid month’s worth of data to comb through. It’s time intensive and will need a lot of man power. All I’m saying kid is: don’t go looking for instant results, ‘cause we can’t go promising none of that.” What she was saying was that his case wasn’t worth investigating. He wasn’t important enough to matter.

“I think it’s best, at least for the time being, that you keep your theory about the Academy’s involvement to yourself,” Mathias told his son as he got up from his bed. “If there’s something bigger going on, announcing your plan to the enemy isn’t exactly the best way to support your case. If it’s true and the school is behind it, you would not be their first victim. If it’s someone else’s doing, then you may not be the last.”

He glanced from his dad to the E.M.I then back to his father. “So…you’ll get someone to look into it?”

The female soldier shook her head. “Look kid, we’re security for the Daamon’s. I’m sorry. The tall and short of it is you seemed to have gotten mixed up in some real’ bad stuff. There’s a chance that your case may be connected to Lady Daamon’s case, but that’s the only angle we’re able to operate on. We can try to make a case for you, kid, but in all honesty, you kind of shot your leg off in public. If I were in their shoes… well, we wouldn’t be talking right now, and we wouldn’t be assigned to protect your selfish ass either.”

Protect?

Mathias glanced at his pocket watch, then nodded to the E.M.I. “I have to go. He does not leave this room under any circumstance.” His father handed the com device to the female soldier.

The soldiers saluted the Master Hunter and shuffled awkwardly to make enough space to let him out of the room.