Young Writers Society

Lunis walked over to Ryder, looking over Ryder's shoulder. The panther must've been pretty happy with what he saw, because he stepped back, cracked his knuckles, rotated his shoulders, and let out a long breath. "Nah," he said, staring onto the slowly-emptying street. "It's about time for me to do my job."

Looking over at Queenie, Taber gave her something of an awkward smile. It flickered into a frown as he spoke, but Kendrik was reasonably sure he was the only person to catch that in the darkness of the alley. "Yeah, I think I'd like to stay and help."

And that was the last thing the hound needed to hear. Sure, he loved the sound of a hotel, and he didn't think he'd be any good at either hiding or finding whatever it was Ryder believed was out there. But he had a bad feeling about Queenie. Mostly because Taber did. Now, Taber wasn't exactly the best judge of character, but he rarely ever was afraid around other people. Much less disagree with someone's idea like that.

"We can wait," Kendrik said to Queenie. "What's the deal with stayin' here for a little longer?"

He tuned the others out.

It wasn't intentional. He just couldn't tear his focus away from the street and the people on it. He was trying to gauge the right moment to leave the alleyway, and trying to figure out what direction to head in so they didn't look like lost tourists. But as his gaze swept across the street yet again, he found that someone had noticed their group.

On other side of the road, a man was staring at them.

He didn't catch that long of a look - just a handful of seconds. But then the man was gone with a turn of his long, black coat, and Ryder knew that he had just found the thing he was looking for.

"I just saw someone," he said, pointing in the direction that the man had run off to. "He was staring right at us, and then he ran away - we should get some answers if we talk to him."

But there wasn't really time to argue something like that, so he popped out into the street and hurried on after him - nearly avoiding the strange vehicles on the road as they angrily honked at him.

"Sorry!" he shouted, but that just got him more honks as he jumped onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street. A quick glance down the road the man had gone running down, and he could just barely make out the unforgettable black coat and white hair.

He darted after him.

Meryl raced after him onto the sidewalk, inviting more annoyed honks, and felt the glares of many drivers eager to go home. She hadn't seen the person, but she thought that it'd be better if Ryder didn't go alone. One of the most important lessons she had learned while training her supernatural abilities was never, ever to wander away on your own.

It was a struggle to keep up with Ryder, who was fast, especially since she wore navy blue flats. If only she'd worn sneakers.

Far ahead of Ryder, she glimpsed a figure dashing ahead. The shadows made it hard for her to see him, and for a moment, she fancied he was a ghost.

The moment Ryder took off, Queenie followed, darting to her feet with a barely perceptible hiss of pain and dodging angered pedestrians in his wake. All the while she cursed internally, wondering why she didn't just set out on her own, wondering why she cared enough for...this.

She slid over the hood of a halted taxi and stumbled, momentarily losing Ryder in the crowd. She took that moment to mutter some choice words about the boy's reckless choices, fully aware of the hypocrisy of such a condemnation.

She found him again, spotting the man he was following as well. With a whole lot more internal cursing, she found the best path through the crowd (which happened to include going through the middle of the road) and took it, arriving, out of breath but hiding it well, on the other side of the white-haired man.

The figure skid to a stop right as Ryder reached him. He had seen Queenie dart a few feet in front of the figure, but now it was impossible to see him - the moment the man stopped, Ryder went barreling into him. Ryder hurried to regain his balance and get a reasonable distance away from the man; the man, meanwhile, jumped in surprise and stumbled back towards Queenie as he turned to look at who had run into him.

Now that he was closer to the man, he began to notice little details he hadn’t noticed before. His messy white hair was thrown up in a ponytail, but his hair color wasn’t the strangest part of his appearance. A black cloth covered the lower half of his face, and his eyes were two different colors. Ryder knew he was being a bit of a hypocrite, but it really was a strange combination: greenish-blue for one eye, and gold for another.

And the man wasn’t really a man. He looked like a really tall and fit teenager upon closer inspection - maybe seventeen or eighteen years old.

The teen, realizing he had been caught, stumbled back away from both Queenie and Ryder into the closed storefront on the side of the street.

(He’d have to thank her later for helping catch him.)

“Hi,” Ryder said, taking a step towards him. The boy’s eyes widened, and he scooted closer to the storefront. “I saw you watching us earlier - you know why we’re here, don’t you?”

The boy frantically shook his head.

Ryder crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow. “Then why were you looking at me?”

The boy, despite somehow being taller than him, suddenly made himself look very, very small. A shaking hand reached up to pull down his mask. He mouthed something, but Ryder couldn’t even begin to read his lips - they were shaking too much.

And when he looked up, the boy was crying.

Queenie raised an eyebrow at the boy's tears, but adopted a gentle tone, "What's your name?" she asked, slipping easily into character. She vaguely acknowledged the arrival of Meryl, but focused on her character through the whiteness that now crept along the edges of her vision. She fought it off. Her kindly smile looked nothing less than real.

Meryl fished in her pocket for a handkerchief and found an polka dot one which had probably come in the Christmas package from one of her aunts. The dots were pink like the hard rubber erasers in elementary school.

"Here," she said, handing the kerchief over to the boy.

These wagons (or whatever they were) had moved a lot faster than Lunis had thought. In light of that, it was amazing that Lunis hadn't gotten run over when he'd sprinted between these metal and glass contraptions, especially when they'd flashed their lights and blared their trumpets at him. Now that he'd caught up to the others, however, he wondered if he'd been better off getting run over.

"This is what we were supposed to look for?" the panther said, tugging at the teenager's black coat. Fur sticking up a lot more than usual, he tried to make his voice sound a little deeper as he growled. "He just looks like a scared kid to me."

The panther could see Taber and Kendrik running up from behind Ryder. Kendrik stopped beside Ryder, while Taber approached the teenager.

"Oh!" Taber said, after a couple seconds staring at the teen's face. Before Lunis could wonder why Taber looked so surprise, the wolf started making hand gestures. One of the basic sign language sentences that Lunis had picked up from Zech - "Are you okay?" or something like that.

Meryl's handkerchief and Queenie's question were completely forgotten. Even the person holding onto the boy's jacket was ignored in lieu of Taber's sudden appearance. The boy - now fully sobbing, though the sobs were silent - darted over to Taber and threw his hands around his neck, burying his face into his chest.

Ryder hadn't understood the words signed. He had stupidly never picked up the language, even though it would have certainly been useful. But he understood the general meaning behind it, and the implications of it being used.

The boy was deaf or mute, and Taber knew who he was.

He knew his instinct wasn't wrong. This boy was important - he was sure of it. But he definitely wasn't the enemy he had initially guessed him to be.

"I'm sorry for scaring you," Ryder apologized. The boy, his face still buried in Taber's chest, gave a small nod when he heard the apology - he was mute, then. He looked up at Taber. "Do you know what his name is?"

He was a little surprised at how quickly Kirux moved (enough to get Lunis to yank his paw back in surprise and glare at Kirux), but that faded away to relief once he realized that Kirux also remembered him. Setting a paw in Kirux's hair, Taber started to stroke it gently. It was something his girlfriend liked, and he'd gotten quite good at it.

"Yeah!" Taber said, looking over at Ryder. "His name is Kirux, and he's a pretty nice person."

Queenie supported herself on the wall of the shop they had stopped next to, trying to make it look natural, like she wouldn't fall over without it, and said, signing as she did for Kirux with a prayer that they knew the same dialect, "So he's one of us?"

"I think so," Ryder assumed. Something about Queenie seemed even more off than before, but he still couldn't put his finger on what it was. He turned back to Kirux and; the former was still holding onto the latter, but now he was looking back at the group assembled.

Ryder took it as an opportunity to figure out what he knew.

He carefully approached the boy, not wanting to startle him further. "Why were you staring at me earlier?" he softly asked. He looked like he could have been younger than Kirux, but his tone and expression betrayed that he was older than he appeared to be.

Kirux hesitated for a moment, then drew a hand away from Taber.

He pointed at Ryder's eyes, then pointed at his own.

His gaze softened even more. "You saw how we both have different color eyes?"

Kirux gave a shy smile and an eager nod.

Queenie blinked, "Yeah, yeah, you both have heterochromia, can we go somewhere that's not in the open now?" Her tone was sarcastic, but there was something akin to desperation beneath it.

The air was getting chillier, seeping through her summer dress. If only she had worn a cardigan that time. She shivered a little and pulled her ribbon off her curls, rubbing the satin between her fingers, thinking about both everything and nothing at once.

Then Meryl turned to Kirux, and asked, "Just wondering...did you randomly end up here like we did?"

Kirux looked at Taber for a minute before finally fully letting go of the wolf. He took a hesitant step in Meryl's direction. Nodding, he pulled his mask back up to cover the lower half of his face - though the action was just as shy as everything else he did.

Ryder watched the exchange with interest, tuning out what Queenie had said so he could focus on Kirux instead. The boy was terrified of them, and he needed to show that he wasn't scary. Though the timing was bad, casual conversation was a good way to achieve that.

Kirux's gaze traveled across the group before landing on Ryder again.

He held up a single finger.

"One?" Ryder guessed.

Kirux nodded. His face almost comically scrunched up in thought for a moment, and then he gestured at entire group.

He wasn't able to figure out that one as fast, but he got the combined meaning of the two actions.

"There's another person like us?" Ryder asked.

Kirux nodded.