Tares City

10. Investigations and New Relations

NAOMI REID

Tossing and turning throughout the entire night, Naomi got little to no sleep. On her second cup of coffee for the morning, she slowly walks to her car. Entering her vehicle, she sits in the driver's seat, staring out the window instead of starting the car.

She sighs, putting both hands on the steering wheel, gripping it with unnecessary force. "Pull it together Naomi!" She whispers harshly to herself. Pulling down the overhead visor, she scrutinizes herself in the tiny mirror. "Goodness! I look like a zombie," She mumbles aloud.

Slamming the visor up, she leans back in her seat. Glancing at her watch, she saw that she had to get a move on, otherwise, she'd be late for work. Downing the last quarter of her now room-temperature coffee, she slaps her cheeks, waking herself up. "Okay, okay! I'm fine, it's fine. Everything is fine," She says softly.

Starting the car, she pulls off from her parking spot, the sound of a loud car horn making her step on the breaks harshly. The driver of another car screeching past angrily. "Shit!" She exclaims breathing heavily. This time she checks the road and her mirrors before pulling off. She drives to work without any more incidents, sitting in her car for a few minutes before heading into the firehouse.

She puts on a fake smile, greeting everyone as she normally would. Underneath her façade, she was an anxious wreck. Her mind was constantly telling her that any minute now her coworkers could turn into a large mythical beast and devour her.

Yesterday, she'd followed the instruction of a mysterious note, finding herself in the library with a detective – Uncovering the apparent truth. She received a folder with disturbing, nauseating images that shook her to her core. They depicted images of men and women turning into large wolf-like creatures, Lycans it was apparently called. Some of the images show a man with contorted bones, others show the not-so-pleasant details of the skin stretching.

There were also more notes in the file – Letters to her. One letter explained that the attack on the night of the eclipse was real. A man who had not yet been able to control his changes was at the mercy of the moon and on the run from hunters. It went on to tell her that the doctors at the hospital lied to her and her friend. Making them both believe she had hallucinated everything.

Through this letter, she finds out she was drugged by a hunter and not accidentally stabbed by a junkie's needle. Through the other letters, she learned there were secret groups of people who knew about 'Lycans' and spent their lives hunting and killing them. Naomi didn't know what part of the entire ordeal bugged her the most. Between someone knowing who she is and what happened to her on shift – the fact that people can turn into overly large murderous wolves and not always have control over themselves or that there were people who knew about these things and revolved their whole lives around killing them.

The paramedic in her screamed that these were people being killed but she didn't focus on that detail much. Her mind still struggling to grasp their existence kept her from truly exploring the morality and ethical sides of the situation.

The detective she'd met there, Calvin, also had a file of eye-opening revelations. Similar to hers, he'd received pictures and letters addressed to him. His letters explained that members of his precinct were hunters who regularly altered reports to keep the supernatural hidden. It listed three of the cases he'd worked on, exposing either Lycans were the killers, or the victim was a Lycan that was killed by a hunter. On the list of cases was the most recent one he'd worked with his partner – A case they had to close because it was going cold.

At first, Calvin and Naomi both thought the packages to be fake, but then a flash drive falls out of Calvin's file. On it were a series of videos. One video showed a man transforming, the other showed a wolf attacking and killing a man. Another showed a group of people dressed in tactical gear killing multiple wolves. All the videos were taken from an angle that suggested no one know the events were being filmed. The videos seemed to be taken from body cam footage.