BLOOD DREAM (Ongoing)

9.1: Hunt Scavengers

Theron didn't know what he was hoping for by promising the truth and immediately withholding it, other than forgiveness later on. If the circumstances weren't so embarrassing, he would have told her. If it was anybody but Liam, he would have been honest, right? But no amount of hypothesizing would change that he was still lying, and as Kitra stagnated with the shock of their mother's accessibility, Theron was still eating himself alive for not confessing to his sexual contests with his best friend.

"...What did she say?" Kitra asked finally.

He stared at a spot on the wall, feeling disoriented and acutely aware of everything. "She couldn't say much. Mostly she wanted to know why the hunters had me. She told me to cooperate, but I just... I could barely handle it." Everything embarrassed him to admit. He was mortified to unveil these parts of himself. They were fodder to be exploited as revenge for his abuse. But Kitra wouldn't do that, right? "I think she figured something was wrong," Theron continued. "She said sorry..."

Kitra, on the other hand, would have shot steam out her nose if she could. "Sorry doesn't excuse abandoning us for twelve years! You can't let her pull that card," said Kitra.

"What card?"

"How she used to spoil you and talk all motherly and understanding. Telling you what to do, like she knows what's best? She did it all the time to you."

Convincing him that he had to be the best for Sadie. Telling him that he was a champion, inflating his ego because she knew vanity would motivate him to excel. Turning him into a monster that lashed out when he didn't get his way because he was told the world was his. "I remember," he mumbled. The problem was that he preferred the reality his mother gave him, where he was great and strong instead of an insufferable asshole in the eyes of everybody else.

Kitra shook her head. "I want to talk to her. I want answers. Maybe she can get the hunters to focus on Sadie instead of you," she suggested.

"I saw a phone number," said Theron. "I tried to remember it, but I can't... remember it all..."

Lurking in his subconscious, he already knew the answer. He had hidden it from Kitra in his closet after their last angry conversation. She remembered it too. "Where did you put that pen?"

Theron rose from the floor. Somehow, even this act made him feel guilty as he opened his closet and stood on his toes, sifting through a shoebox on the top shelf above his hangers full of clothes. He found the pen and read the phone number under the name NIKOLAS CASTOR. The combinations he remembered matched. "I think this is the number," he said. "She's on a limited communications channel. Her line probably redirects from this one."

Immediately on her feet, Kitra took the pen and examined it herself. She stood too close to him wearing only his undershirt and underwear. He meant to get dressed, but inexplicably, finding the pieces of his security guard uniform had taken precedence.

"We need to call this number," she said, looking up.

Then what would happen? Would their mother scold him for fleeing the hunters and tell him to go back? Would she tell him what to do next to escape them? Would she even answer their questions, or would it be an exercise in futility, coming out of it with nothing but disappointment? He stared at the pen, and he agreed with Kitra, but he hesitated to say it for fear of actually doing it.

She didn't need his agreement in the end. Kitra picked up her phone and sat on the edge of Theron's bed, her thumb poised over digits on the dial screen. "I'm doing it," she said.

So he waited for her to.

Kitra dialed and put it on speaker. It rang once, then a perky male voice answered, "Good evening, this is the office of Nikolas Castor."