"What are you planning?" Veronica shouted.
"None of your business." Hope crossed her legs and folded her hands in her lap.
"You spent enough time with that man for me to think otherwise."
"You've spent too much time with Burr. You're not thinking clearly."
"Dr. Saltzman seems to think you're plotting against us even now."
"If I wanted you dead, you would be already."
That was clearly the wrong thing to say, because from nowhere, Burr pulled out a gun and put it too her head and Hope twisted his arm around. With that, the fight was on.
Hope spun out of the way and kicked a large man down, sinking her fangs into his neck as she did so. The idiot hadn't even bothered to try taking vervain and she drained every ounce of blood from him all the while using him as a shield from the other shooters.
"She's immune to Malivore bullets!" Burr screamed. "Stop wasting them!"
There. The one she needed to take out. If she was going to kill anyone, it was going to be Burr for all the pain he'd caused her before she'd become a full tribrid and for the annoyance he still was now that she no longer felt much in the way of human emotions.
With a vicious snarl and her wolf teeth bared, she jumped for him and grabbed his shoulder, forcing him to the floor and stared down at him.
"You bitch." For all his bravado, now that he was faced with her full fury, he was terrified. "You're nothing but an animal wearing a human face."
"Sticks and stones, sweetheart. I feel nothing, but the thought of terrifying you as I kill you, well, I just can't resist."
With that, she tore out Burr's throat with an extra level of savagery, draining him as quickly as she could.
Behind her, someone else fired a gun at her, but the bullet barely registered as it struck her. Had they not heard Burr telling them that she was immune to Malivore mud bullets? Why keep waste their precious ammunition on her? It wasn't as though she would tell them where to find a portal so they could make more.
Hope scoffed and leaped for the shooter, breaking his back as she landed and he died with a gurgle.
Another man started to run towards her and Hope swept his legs out from under him and snapped his neck. All too easy. After fighting monsters for so long, she forgot just how quickly humans fell beneath her blows.
A second and a third agent fell quickly, followed by a fourth.
The next one to fall didn't go down so easily. Hope's blood was up now and she wanted to cause destruction, so she tore him apart with a ferocity that would have surprised her had she been able to feel anything.
Two more came at her and they met similar fates. She truly was her father's daughter and even if he didn't remember her, it was time she embraced her heritage.
Who was left for her to take out? Most of the base seemed to have gone quiet, aside from the shrill of the alarms as the agents fled once they realized that the one person they couldn't kill had finally turned on them.
There was still a heartbeat though and Hope looked around to find Veronica attempting to hide behind an overturned table, the scent of fear hanging thick in the air around her.
"He was right about you," Veronica breathed as Hope advanced on her.
"Alaric Saltzman has been around the supernatural for decades. There's very little he doesn't know about the protected species." Hope bared her fangs. It wasn't as though she needed to feed now. Killing as many as she had would sustain her for a few days at least, but killing Veronica would be a pleasure she couldn't deny herself. Not after what was done to her at the older woman's command.
Before she could strike, Hope found her world spinning and she buckled. The last thing she saw before her world went dark was a pair of dark eyes set above a perfect nose and plump lips. And her last thought was what was the pretty boy doing here?
When she woke up, she found herself in a cage, unable to access the magic she'd known her entire life. Blinking in confusion she sat up and looked down at herself. She was still wearing her battle stained clothing, fortunately, so wherever she was, they weren't interested in anything she wasn't willing to give them.
As she moved, a flash of gold in the dim light caught her eye and she found herself battling the switch. Wrapped around her wrist was the chain her family gave her to shield her from Dahlia. The last time she'd seen it was when she'd taken it off so she could cast a spell right before Triad took her, and now, it was hers once again. As odd as it was to no longer have magic, seeing this small piece of her past come back to her, it left her feeling off balance.
"Don't bother trying to use magic and don't try to take that chain off," the older man from the other night said.
His interruption enabled her to push her feelings back down and the switch was firmly in the 'off' position once more.
"It will keep your magic contained until we feel we can trust you."
"I'm aware." Hope stared at him and leaned back against the wall, drawing one foot up onto the narrow cot.
"That chain, how do you know it?" It was the dark haired man.
Hope didn't reply, not trusting herself to keep the switch in place if she tried to talk about the bracelet. This piece of jewelry, made specifically to protect her, and now it was in the hands of strangers. Seeing the full evidence of just what it meant to be forgotten, it tested her in a way she wasn't expecting.
It would seem that she still had one weakness. The family she'd been ripped away from, the family who'd sacrificed so much so that she could live and now they no longer had any memory of her. They wouldn't even look for her, because they had almost no pictures of her for them to try to figure out who she was since it had been too dangerous to leave evidence she was alive or who she was prior to them waking up the wounded family members after they'd been healed.
Hope blinked a few times, forcing those memories back safely beneath the switch. That girl was dead and gone. Hell, maybe it was time to stop thinking of herself as Hope and just become Mikayla even in her thoughts. It would certainly make things easier to pretend that being a part of a family that had loved her once upon a time was nothing more than the dreams of a girl who had nothing. She was nothing, no one, with no reason for anyone to come after her or try to use her against anyone.
"Dad? If you don't need me anymore, would it be okay if I went upstairs?" the blonde girl asked. "Josie got pretty messed up seeing what we did and she needs me right now."
"Go on upstairs, Lizzie. And tell Josie I'm sorry you girls had to witness what you did."
"This is what happens when you bring children in to battle," Hope commented. "You knew what a humanity free vampire could be like, that the smallest provocation could send me into a murder frenzy, and yet you still brought your children around me."
"We needed witches who could siphon off any spells you decided to cast."
"Still, a smarter man would have found a better way of handling someone like me. Or dealing with a dragon for that matter." Hope smirked as his mouth tightened. Good. If he was going to trap her in a cage, the least he could do was be annoyed too.
"So why did you do it? Why turn on them?" The dark haired man asked.
Hope raised an eyebrow, but remained silent.
"In case you're wondering where you are, you're at the Salvatore School for the Gifted. I'm Dr. Alaric Saltzman, headmaster here and this is Ryan Clarke, our Monster Lore instructor."
"Actually, I wasn't wondering, but thanks for providing that information. Who knows what I might do with it later?" Let them make of that what they would. The less sure footed they were about her, the more she could find out about them to use later.
Alaric stepped closer to the bars. "How is it that a heretic ended up working for Triad? Last I checked they weren't interested in taking on supernatural agents."
"You have a prison in the basement of your school?" Hope retorted.
"This is a werewolf changing cell, not a prison. It's to protect our students from when the werewolf students need to transition, particularly our vampire students." Alaric sounded indigent at the accusation.
"Bars, check, narrow cot check, lock on the door, check, annoying guards, double check. It's a prison." Hope lay down on the bed and closed her eyes.
"We're offering you a chance to become better than you are. That's why you're here" Alaric said.
"You say that like I should care about my current state of being. Everything was fine until you planted that bug in Veronica Greasley's ear about me turning on her. Burr, I could handle. All I had to do was make fun of him and my track record spoke for the rest. But you had to go and confirm what he said."
"You were in the middle of wiping out the entire Triad force when we found you."
"They tried to kill me, so I did what I had to to stay alive."
"If you want to continue staying alive, you'll do as we say," Alaric snapped. "Including checking the behavior that landed you in this cell."
"They had it coming. I'd think even you would say they deserved it if you knew exactly what they did to me. And no, I'm not referring to them trying to kill me whenever it was you found me." She rested her hand under her head and made herself more comfortable.
"What did they do to you?" Ryan asked, his brows furrowing.
"As if you'd care what they did to a freak who fits in nowhere." Hope smiled.
"Alaric, I was wondering if I might speak to her alone."
"Not so sure that leaving the one who started Triad alone with her is such a good idea, all things considered."
"I haven't been in control of Triad since the fifties and even then they were becoming something I never intended for them to be." Ryan sighed as if this was a conversation was one they'd had many times before.
"You started Triad?" Hope stood up. So he was who she had to thank for what happened to her?
"Yes." Ryan hung his head, his mouth tightening. He raised an eyebrow at Alaric.
"I'll leave you to it then. But don't blame me if you get put down for a while." Alaric left them then.
"You started Triad and now you're ashamed of it. But you started it in the fifties, which means that you're not human to have lived that long without looking it. So why do it?"
"It's a long story."
Hope sat down and crossed her legs. "Since it seems I'm going to be stuck here for a while, or at least until Mr. Craw up his ass decides I can be a good girl, so I've got time."
"I would much rather not tell my story to someone with no humanity, but since you've obviously suffered because of them, I suppose I owe you an explanation of how your torment came to be." He set a wooden chair across from her and sat down.
"So, how long of a story are we talking about?"
"One that spans centuries."
