The Code

Chapter 5

Lebanon, Kansas, Present Day

Mary felt as if she needed a shower after watching that last interrogation. She understood the danger the shifters presented, but in her experience not all shifters had evil intentions, so it just seemed cruel to kill them all because some of them used their abilities for nefarious reasons. Besides, Ketch's version of questioning was just plain inhumane.

And the fact that it seemed to turn him on? Even more gross.

Her self-flagellation for the mistake she'd made with Ketch made it even worse. She was a grown woman - a widow, of sorts - and she had every right to sleep with whomever she chose, but she could have at least chosen better. She had a distinct feeling that decision was going to come back to haunt her.

Sitting down on the bed in her tiny dorm room, she pulled off her boots and placed them neatly under the bed. She wasn't a neat and tidy person by nature, but everything here was so sterile that she felt it was dangerous to have anything out of place.

She lay back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. Am I doing the right thing? Something just seemed wrong about this whole thing, and the uncomfortable feeling was growing day by day. She wanted to listen to her instincts, and just leave, go back to Sam and Dean and hunt the way she'd always done. Even if that meant never having the life Mick had promised her.

But will they let me?

Why was she thinking that? It was just paranoid. But the thought wouldn't leave her alone. She needed to do some investigating, figure out what it was that was setting off so many red flags.

She sat up. For once the part of her that wanted to find out what was going on was screaming just as loudly as the part of her that said it was a bad idea, and she didn't know which voice she should listen to. For her entire life though, when the chips were down she usually went the direction that any sane person would run from, so why start doing things differently now?

Using her foot to nudge her boots back out from under the bed, she leaned down and put them back on.

It was time to see what the Bletters were really up to.

* * *

Kendricks Academy, 1990

Over the next weeks they made their plans. Tori quietly took money from her savings account, and would sneak money from her mother's stash each weekend when she visited at home, and then hid it in a lockbox in the storage room at Kendricks. Mick was amazed when he saw how much she'd managed to sneak out. "It's barely a drop in the bucket," she'd told him with a shrug. "Mother will never notice."

Mick had quietly been working on their new identities, and almost had everything they needed. They planned to leave on a Friday night, just after Tori would be sixteen weeks into her pregnancy. Any longer than that was too much of a risk, but they wanted as much time as possible to build up their stash of funds. They would leave at 1:40 am; everyone would be asleep, and no one would be up for several hours. Tori would head for the airport to catch a flight to Rome. Mick was going to take the train to Edinburgh and catch a flight to Athens, and then take the train to Rome. From there, they'd both take a flight to New York, and then drive across the border into Canada. With the Men of Letters extinct in North America it seemed the safest place to be.

Mick had wanted to separate until New York, but Tori insisted they'd be fine. While she waited for him, she was going to do as much as she reasonably could to alter her appearance. Cut, straighten and dye her hair, change her style of clothes. Whatever she could think of.

Time seemed to crawl by, and it was wearing on Mick, trying to seem as if everything was perfectly normal when in fact his mind was a constant whirl of activity. It was just lucky that he had a natural ability for hiding what he was really feeling. He watched Tori closely for any outward sign of the pregnancy, but she only looked like she'd gained a tiny bit of weight, and their school robes hid that well enough.