Kyren was laying in his bed when he first noticed the smoke. With the events of the last few days, Kyren was exhausted. After his daily training, he had locked himself in his room and just tried to relax. If he hadn’t been suppressing his senses, he would have noticed something was amiss long before, but he couldn’t be vigilant at all times.

As it was, Kyren didn’t notice the smoke until it came through the floorboards. As soon as he got a whiff of it though, he rolled out of his bed, grabbing the pistol under his bed—incidents of home invasions were common enough for the Guild to make it protocol to have easily reachable weapons at different points in the house. Kyren activated all of his senses in time to catch a human scent he didn’t recognize running from the house, right past the advanced security that was installed around the house.

It took no time to realize the fire wasn’t natural. It spread far too quickly for that. Kyren could smell the gasoline that had been poured around the house. The same scent came from the person who was running away.

Kyren had been drilled for werewolves breaking into the house. They had plans for that. They had never planned for an arsonist. Werewolves didn’t hatch clever plans, their aggression meant that they were far more likely to attack directly than to try to burn down someone’s home with them inside.

Kyren could already hear Hawkthorne calling his name from the next room over. Kyren responded by shouting he was okay. He tried to leave his room but was greeted by a wall of flames.

Kyren looked around, knowing that he didn’t have a window in his room. It was yet another precaution taken against attacks. The walls were too thick for him to break, even with adrenaline coursing through him, seeing as they were designed to prevent a werewolf from smashing through. There was only one entrance to his room as well.

It didn’t take long for Kyren to realize he was in a perfect trap. In trying to protect themselves from a werewolf attack, they had inadvertently left themselves open to a more mundane risk.

Kyren looked back as he heard his door open behind him. Hawkthorne came half running, half falling into the room, a towel covering him to avoid the fire and smoke.

As he started coughing, Hawkthorne cursed and slammed the now burning door shut, scrambling away across the floor. “We can’t get out that way. I could barely make it the few steps here.”

Kyren looked at the burning door in dismay. It was burning quickly, and the fire had started spreading across the room. Trapped and about to burn alive, Kyren felt a tingle climbing throughout his body, and quickly suppressed it. The last thing he needed now was to change right in front of Hawkthorne.

Hawkthorne pushed himself up, grabbing something from his pocket. Kyren stepped back when he saw what it was. A small explosive charge, designed for use in traps for werewolves. The device’s size and makeup were specifically chosen to prevent werewolves from noticing it with their enhanced sense. Even Kyren who already had better senses than any delta wolf hadn’t noticed it until now.

The tradeoff for all of that was that the device had limited power. Traps using them had to be created with great skill to be of any use. It would do more than their fists, but Kyren wasn’t confident that it would be able to blow through the whole wall.

With the fire already spread across half of the room, and the heat unbearable, Hawkthorne went to work. While he gave Kyren the fuse to light, he planted the charge on the wall. Kyren didn’t have any matches, but there was fire all around him now, so, he had no trouble lighting the fuse.

The explosion wasn’t very impressive. It blew a chunk out of the wall, but not enough to go all the way through. Still, Kyren ran at the spot, filling himself with adrenaline and hitting the wall with as much force as he could without hobbling himself. He still needed to be able to run away from the destruction outside. His inability to move after his fight with Shion was still fresh on his mind.

The wall held solid even after Hawkthorne had added his own strength into things. Given time, their assault may have broken through, but they were all out of time. Kyren could feel flames licking at his ankles. Out of options, Kyren desperately pulled more adrenaline in. As he did so, another sensation came with it. Kyren could feel strength coming from a familiar source. Not wanting to think about that, Kyren threw himself at the wall at the same time as Hawkthorne.

This time, the wall shattered, and they fell out onto the grass below. Despite years of training and superhuman senses, Kyren still fell heavily onto his back. Hawkthorne somehow managed to land on his feet though and lent Kyren his shoulder as they limped away from the burning wreckage.

Once they got far enough from the fire, they looked back together. The entire house and its surroundings were going up in flame. In the distance, Kyren heard sirens, but it would take a while for the firetrucks to get there. They lived in a remote area. The only people who lived nearby were them, the Drakesmiths, and Kyren’s parents before they had died. Nobody ever came this far out of the way unless they specifically wanted to get to the Guild hunters.

Kyren looked back at his house. It was the second house he had lived in that had gone up in flames. Ironically, they had met the same fate. His parent’s old house had stood empty until the start of that summer when someone had discovered that werewolves had lived in it at one point and decided to burn it to the ground. That hadn’t been the same person though. Kyren knew who had burned down his parent’s old place, and the scent he got tonight wasn’t the same.

As it turned out, the Drakesmiths arrived before the authorities. Rafe and Alex ran over to him and hugged him, expressing how worried they had been when they had seen the smoke rising from his house.

By the time the police and firemen arrived, the group was already working to contain the flames as much as they could, ensuring the fire didn’t spread to the rest of the forest.

The Redhill police chief was a man who went by Chief Sanson. He had been the chief of police for as long as anyone could remember. At one point, he had been a good friend of Hawkthorne and Drakesmith, but ever since the Columbus tragedy, he had distanced himself from them. When they had asked him to help calm the town’s populace after riots had formed in the streets, threatening them, he had done nothing. Kyren had little faith that he would do much to help them this time either.

Chief Sanson still showed up though. He briefly pulled Hawkthorne to the side and talked with him before turning to Kyren to get his story. Kyren told him the whole truth with the exception of how he had smelled someone running from them. That would be difficult to explain.

Kyren was certain that Hawkthorne had told him that this was not done by a werewolf. Even without smelling the perpetrator, any hunter would know immediately that this was not an act perpetrated by a werewolf. It was too well thought out for a newly turned werewolf to think up through the cloud of their aggression, and too sloppy for a more dangerous werewolf like a beta or even an alpha. Nonetheless, Chief Sanson was happy to conclude that while it was clearly a case of arson, it was done by werewolves and therefore a matter to be handled by the Guild.

Kyren held back his anger, remaining calm to avoid changing in front of everyone. He wasn’t surprised by the police’s attitude towards them. It was in line with what he had come to expect from the police recently, and even if it hadn’t been, Kyren was well-aware that the Guild wasn’t very popular in Ohio anymore.

Twenty minutes after they had arrived and an hour after the fire had been started, the police and firemen left the scene of the crime with no plans of returning.

Throughout that entire time, Kyren had been following the scent of the person who had set fire to the house. They had fled beyond the reach of Kyren’s senses by this point, but before they had, they had made two interesting stops. The first was at Kyren’s old house. They had only stayed there for long enough to get into a car and drive to their second destination, the Guild branch. Kyren wasn’t sure what they had done there, but they had stayed for twenty minutes before leaving.

Kyren didn’t share any of this information with the others. He simply had no reasonable way of explaining how he could know these details. Besides, if they spent that long at the branch, the hunters would notice. Even assuming the person, whoever they were, had avoided all the cameras and security systems, they would have left some trail. Footprints in the dirt, fingerprints on a dusty doorhandle, or even a misplaced object would all clue a Guild hunter into noticing something was amiss.

When that happened, Kyren would use that as an excuse to connect the two events together. Whoever had done this, whatever their goal was, they were going to be found, and Kyren would make sure they were properly punished.