Candice rubbed at her eyes as she leaned back in her uncomfortable office chair. She could not put the encounter she had a week past from her mind. It wasn't just the young man being impossibly fast and strong. It was those words: "Some people..., some things?"
The boy was running from someone, and whoever it was had traumatized him to the point of desperation to keep away from them. Not only did she have an endangered youth on her hands, but she also had dangerous fugitives after him, people who needed to be behind bars permanently. People like them were the reason she became an officer in the first place. They abused her as a child, beat her until someone intervened on her behalf, and lifted her out of her own nightmare. Candice could still remember the days after her abusers were jailed, the fear and anxiety of being tormented further. But slowly, healing happened and with healing, purpose.
After a long road in college and the police academy, she now led the charge to lift others, to save them from the hell life had cursed them with. She had been able to lift a fingerprint on a piece of her equipment that he had inadvertently touched but could not find a matching set in any database. Candice had a few of his stray red hairs from the encounter but nothing from the DNA. The kid had never existed. He had never had a passport, never had his prints taken at school, never had DNA stored for fast search as some parents do, and sometimes, especially with troubled youth, they had run-ins with the law, but he was not in those databases either.
There was something about his features too. He had sharp, tightly drawn features. His complexion was lighter, almost grey like he was locked away for most of his life, but it was his eyes that had spooked her the most. They were almost clear. When he tackled her, it had to have been the suddenness, the fear, but it was as though it was feral in nature with the way he bared his teeth. His canines looked as though they were lightly extended, but everything happened very quickly, and with what he said he had been through, if some stranger had touched her, she would have reacted in kind.
He also seemed at first to be suffering from apprehension from the encounter with her, skittish at the sight. But soon, as kids who had been through trauma, he had warmed up to her, or so it had seemed. If Candice had to make a gut guess, it would be that his abuser was a female of authority.
A knock came at her office door, and she looked worriedly at the clock. It was after nine PM. Someone at the door of her office this late at night was never a good housecall.
"Come, it is unlocked," She called to the stranger on the other side of the door.
A middle-aged woman with greying brown hair and an albino youth opened the door quietly. The woman meekly came to the desk, silently holding a picture face down while giving a small sob. Candice took the picture and saw the youth's face that had attacked her, giving an open look of surprise to the woman. Here, in her hand was the picture of the young man from this last week.
"Have you seen my bo..my boy officer?" the woman asked.
"I.." Candice started to stumble but was caught trying to decide how to proceed. According to the youth, the people who were after him were abusive, but the woman before her, in this plain, brown dress, bawling her eyes out, was no more abusive than she.
"Please, he is in some serious trouble..." the woman pulled a stack of papers out of her purse and handed them over to the dumbfounded officer, "I don't know if you have seen him, but he is troubled, and we need to get him help before he hurts someone."
Candice thumbed through the stack of police reports on the youth from theft to assault and sat heavily in her seat. Defeated, she gestured to the seat across from her and proceeded to tell what she knew of the youth.
"I had a run-in with your son. He attacked me when I approached him as he lay sleeping down near the river. That was a week ago," She reached into her desk and placed a stack of papers on the tabletop. "He said you were his abusive relative. How do I know there is not any merit to this?"
"His father is, but that was handled...and I..." the middle-aged lady handed the officer another piece of paper. This one was a signed restraining order, "love him, but he...won't stop hitting me!"
Candice's composure fell.
"Oh, honey, " She put her arm around the woman, "We will get him back. I have been attempting to track him through some scattered police reports along the way."
The albino looked at her with interest.
"Really?" His voice rolled out smoothly. His eyes, those same eyes that the boy had, locked onto hers, and Candice could not release from them. She felt her will drain away. "Now, why don't you hand those over to my dear mumsy? I could use a snack."
Candice felt her hands involuntarily gathering the papers off of the desk and handing them to the lady in the brown dress, but why? The lady grabbed them irritably without looking, glaring at the boy all the while.
"Really, you are going to do this NOW?" She asked, glaring at him, the anger flaring in her eyes. Candice now realized she had been part of an intricately planned play, and the actors had played their parts brilliantly.
The young man shrugged indifferently, "I'm hungry, and you haven't let me eat lately."
"But she is an officer."
"Fine, then I will let her live," he said, a bit pained.
"Make sure you do, and make sure you keep your venom to yourself. Master would be very displeased to hear of an impure on the loose that he is now responsible for."
The boy's eyes danced with mischief, "I wouldn't think of disappointing father, now would I?"
Candice wanted to scream as she watched his canines grow. He growled, lunging for her as the world went black.
ns 15.158.61.48da2
