Hellhound (Supernatural #1)

22: Special Ops

Professional, noun.

1. a person who belongs to one of the professions, especially one of the learned professions.
2. a person who is an expert at his or her work.

***

It was hard to sit in Dad's office, with his board behind him. My head was elsewhere; I couldn't focus on occupying Dad with mindless chitchat. Since the whole supernatural world had been revealed to me, I had been too busy with that to focus on the school's gossip. I had nothing to tell him without making something up, and that would just be more lies.

Something I wanted to avoid.

What made it hard to focus was the knowledge that, after dinner, I would go back to Tate's and we would plan. Now that Brian had confirmed that he had indeed been kept underneath Pulse, Tate and Dean wanted to move forward right away. I had barely managed to convince them that heading there right away would be a terrible mistake; they needed a plan. The werewolves would be back too because they were going to be the muscle of the attack. The cavalry if you wish. I wasn't sure whether anyone else would be involved or not. Hellhounds and werewolves both seemed the kind of people who would throw themselves head first into a fight. And that's fine, but at the end of this specific fight, there would be a number of weakened and scared supernaturals that would need to be tended to.

Muscles wouldn't help with that. Though, I didn't see that stopping them from trying.

"You've been awfully quiet tonight," Dad said, breaking my train of thought. "Is everything alright? No trouble at school I hope. Or is it Tate?" Of course, Dad would accuse Tate; he hadn't been entirely convinced we had binge-watched Netflix the entire weekend. Sometimes it was annoying to have a cop for a father.

"I have this chemistry test tomorrow and I can't keep the formulas straight," I shrugged. It wasn't exactly a lie; only the test was next week and not tomorrow. "Tate's annoying because he has no problem with it. He knows all these useless little facts that he can randomly throw at you, so you'd expect him to be bad at memorizing the important things. But noooo, he is great at remembering everything!"

I quickly shut my mouth and focus on my fried rice. For some reason, whenever I spoke to Dad I seemed to lie. Sure, Tate could throw random pieces of supernatural information at me, but who knows whether he was good at remembering formulas or not. I should have told him I had a headache or something; I could feel one coming up.

Dad chuckled, completely unaware. That was good; at this point, I had told so many lies that I didn't see a way of coming clean without being grounded until I was forty. We were silent again for a little while. I was hoping to leave soon, but Dad spoke up right when I was about to get up.

"Sawyer, have you heard anything at school about a nightclub called Pulse?"

I froze; I literally couldn't move, couldn't breathe. It took me a second to reboot. Then I still needed to calm my pounding heart. He was asking if I had heard anything at school, not whether I had been or not. He didn't know I had been. If he did, he would get straight to the point rather than taking the long way around.

"Yeah, a little. People seem to really like it; especially because minors can get in. They don't serve any alcohol, I think." Instead, they were using modified supernatural blood to get people addicted to the club. I kept that piece of information to myself. I also didn't mention that the club might not open again once Tate and Dean had killed its management.

"Yeah, that's what I've heard too. It seems really popular, which is surprising for a club without a liquor license."

"Well, shouldn't you be happy about that? Fewer drunks getting behind the wheel and causing accidents."