Moving Forward

Home Again

Luke's POV

It was great to be home and it was my home now, the place I felt most comfortable. It did not mean uncle was not important to me, because he always would be. Biology may say otherwise, but to me he was my dad and I refused to believe any differently. He raised me from birth when my own parents did not want me, he did not have to. He did not try to claim he was perfect, nor did he expect me to be either. As long as I did my best, he was proud of me. Right now, North needed him more than I did. That was okay; uncle had a big enough heart to love both of us and still had room to include our friends. Sven was not going to let me get into any trouble, but he was not going to keep me from living either. His attitude was a lot like uncle's; he believed that we had to experience life to understand it. He was a bit more untrusting when it came to Cupcake and it was understandable, she needed him.

I thought about the talk he had with Victor and I. Actually, his request was a relief to us. Once our classes started, we would not have time to run all over on missions. We also wanted down time to spend with Cupcake and to ride our horses, do normal teenage stuff. We would have never been able to do that if we had remained on our original team. She and Victor have already been teaching me how to research people on the computer and she has been letting us play in her lab, making gizmos. I thought it was fun and a heck of a lot easier then breaking into houses, something uncle does not fully approve of. I did enjoy being sneaky enough to get in, but then I started wondering what would happen to me if I was ever caught. I did not have a police record and I did not want one. I did not want to grow up to be a crook, stuck stealing because of crimes I stupidly committed when I was young and could not get an honest job. Sven has made it clear that his family will close the Academy down before they will let it harbor criminals and that they would turn any they found over to the police. The Academy was supposed to be a gateway to help give kids an option besides committing criminal offences to survive. Not turn them into criminals.

Someone forgot to tell that to a few of the elders in Charleston, which was the only kind of missions they gave out. I had a feeling that Sven told Colt to clean house. The dust had already started to fly and that was with only a few of the teams that are now under tighter supervision, the Blackbourne team included. I knew Owen was pissed about it, but that was too bad, not even a nine-man team would have been safe doing the Ashley Waters job. The things we found in that school while we were wiring it, yeah, not anything a parent would want to find in their kid's school. The boiler room, it was now a meth lab, the Vice Principal; he had cameras in all the girls bathrooms and the girls locker room. There was a small room in the basement; it looked like his playroom, the kind you use to secretly sexually abuse and torture your victim. Sven brought in an FBI friend, several dead students over the years were found in some alley, always raped and tortured, the victims an even mixture of both sexes. The next one was not going to be one of my brothers; I would kill the bastard first.

Victor's POV

I could not stop thinking about Owen and how he broke the tradition of sparring, did he hate me that much for wanting to go to college. In spite of what he may think, I was not the reason the main team took over the Ashley Waters mission. The more Intel they received, the more they were convinced that they needed more than one team to gather the evidence to bring the leaders of the school down. Sven told us that sending one team in would be like sending them to their execution. We already found evidence that a serial killer may be using the basement as his playground. There were too many secrets in that place; we needed to destroy the building and the rats that hunted prey there. Erase both from existence before more people were hurt. God help them if any of my brothers were hurt, I would personally send them to hell if they touched a hair on their head.

Raschel's POV

I went through the data that Web, Charlotte and Wilbur had collected so far. It was strange, three different elders signed for the changes on the Blackbourne team. What made it peculiar was that all three were dead; I had attended each of their funerals with my father and grandfathers. They had been in their sixties; one had a massive heart attack, one died in a car accident and the last died in a fire. The order for changes came after they had died, within a few days of each death. All three were well to do, single and gay. I checked the data on the other three teams and found the same elders made changes to their teams after their deaths. I sent a quick text to my dad, asking him to join me in my dungeon lab.

"What's up baby girl," he was entering the lab within a few minutes.

I motioned for him to take the seat in front of Templeton and started sending the information over to the new computer. I continued to send data as I found it, leaving him to discuss it with Colt as he read it, who was also receiving copies of the files on his laptop.

ΤSu&0QYY