The Raven's Nightingale

#3 Part 3: Stay Above Water

I felt a bit bad about leaving Mac by himself when he was hurting like this, but if that thing was really that important to him that I guess it would be okay if I were to leave for a few minutes. The arena's parking lot was full when I pulled up, making it a bit difficult for me to find a parking spot. When I did manage to finally get into the arena, I noticed that there were a lot of younger kids hanging around, carrying huge hockey bags as they walked towards the ice rink. I headed in the opposite direction towards the swimmers changeroom with the locker key in hand. I was surprised that there wasn't anyone in the changeroom as I walked in, so I just walked straight up to the locker.

I opened the locker and saw Mac's wallet front and centre, along with a bag that, when I looked inside, saw that it contained a change of swimming clothes, goggles, and a few other bits and pieces. I grabbed the wallet and locked the door back up before something on the wallet caught my attention. A chain was dangling out of the top of the wallet. Curiously, I pulled on the chain and was stunned by what was attached to the other end. It was a thin chain necklace that had two male gender symbols that were intertwined dangling from the chain. That wasn't the part that stunned me, it was more of the fact that I had given this to him back in high school. I didn't think that he would've kept it after all of these years especially with how we had left things back then. I stuffed the necklace back into the wallet when I heard voices coming into the changeroom, and shoved the wallet into my back pocket.

Only one person walked into the changeroom, with the other voice staying on the other side of the door. It was one of the bigger guys that I had seen earlier that morning that had gone to the swim practise.

"Hey," the guy said pausing when he saw me standing in front of Mac's locker. "Did you forget something?"

"Yeah, Mac said that he had left something that was pretty important to him here last night and asked if I could get it for him," I told him as I slowly walked towards the only open exit in the changeroom, the only problem was was that it led out to the pool area. Even though there was a door that led out to the main lobby from the pool it just wasn't the easiest to get to. But there was just something about this guy that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck now that we were alone like this. Maybe Mac was right about one of the other swimmers being responsible, and there were a couple scrapes on his knuckles that I could see from where I was standing. "Anyway, good luck with your practise."

I turned around and began to head out the door of the changeroom and into the pool area. One of the other swimmers came back in from the pool area into the changeroom, blocking my only other form of escape. Yep, I definitely just walked right into a trap, just great. But there was no way that these two muscles heads could've figured out where Mac lived and devised a plan of attack. There had to be an outside puppeteer that was pulling all the strings from behind the scenes, that planned everything out, including this. But I don't think that they were expecting it to be me that had come back to the locker room. I sighed and rubbed the back of my head as I turned around to face the first guy.

"So, who were you guys expecting, cause I'm pretty sure that it wasn't supposed to be me," I asked as I crossed my arms over my chest. Both of the guys were bigger than me, I did have a bit of self-defence training but I don't know if it was enough for me to be able to subdue one so that I could make my escape.

"Doesn't matter," replied the guy from behind me as he took another step into the changeroom, closer to me. Just then I heard the shower click off in the far part of the changeroom. I watched as the guy's head snapped towards the showers. Oh, they were after the guy in the shower. What the heck were they going to do, make it look like it was a slip and fall accident?

"Does his mother know what your planning?" I asked when I noticed the clothes that were strewn on the bench near the showers, they looked like the ones that the guy, whose mother I suspected of being the mastermind behind the attacks, was wearing earlier.