Treasure

The wait for backup may have seemed like forever, but the first squad arrived only three minutes after the 911 call came in.

The gunshots had ended, but the screaming continued. Chief Clarke yelled for help after verifying the first man was dead. A nurse cautiously looked in, then ran over to Chief Clarke and started putting pressure on his bleeding thigh. “I NEED HELP IN HERE,” she yelled.

More nurses and a doctor showed up. When the two patrol officers arrived at the room, they were already loading their boss onto a gurney. The officers talked briefly with him before he went to the emergency room, and a shaken Dawn walked out past the dead attackers. “Treasure, we have to find Treasure, she ran out,” she told the officers.

“Anyone see where she went?” Nobody had, they were all taking cover. The officer put out on the radio that the scene was secure, but one of the victims was missing.

Dawn was put in a wheelchair and taken down the elevator to the Emergency Room for examination. “I don’t need to go there,” she said, “I need to find Treasure.”

“We have the whole hospital and the police looking for Treasure,” the nurse said. “You got hit pretty hard.”

Detective Jensen arrived, and as senior man, took charge of the scene. “Get down to the security center and check the tapes, we need to see where she went,” he said. “A teen with her left arm in a cast and a broken jaw can’t have gone too far.” The hospital room crime scene got sealed off. When Detective Jones arrived, he took the Chief’s statement before he went into surgery.

He went to Jenny’s room, knocking and identifying himself. He heard some scraping, then the door opened, and Debbie peeked out before opening the door. “Sorry, Chief told us not to open the door until you were here. What happened?”

“The men who attacked you went after Treasure, and Chief Clarke stopped them. You guys all right?” They nodded, but Jenny had to sit down. “Treasure took off. I was hoping she ran in here with you.”

“Sorry. Do you need help finding Rea?”

“Just stay here, the hospital is on lockdown procedures. We’ll find your friend.”

They started a room-by-room search. Cameras in the stairwells and elevators showed nothing. They finally found Treasure in a family bathroom at the end of the hall. The officer at the door was backing out, and he could hear her screams through her wired-shut jaws. “She’s afraid of me,” the officer said as Jensen approached. “She freaked out when I went to help her up.”

“She’s been through a lot,” he said. He stood in front of the open door. His heart broke for the poor girl. She was in the corner next to the toilet, curled up in a ball and protecting her injured side. “Treasure? It’s Detective Jensen. Come on out; it’s over. You’re safe.” he said.

She shook her head no, her body shaking. He could see blood on her hospital gown, and she was obviously in pain. Squatting down to make himself less threatening, he approached her like he would a scared animal. “It’s going to be all right. Let us help you.” He held his hand out, but she started kicking at him as she looked for a way out. Recognizing she was hurting herself more, he backed out of the room and let her calm down.

“Call down to the ER. We need her Mom up here. Maybe that will calm her down,” he told the nurse who was waiting with them.

“I’ll call the Psych Department, they’ve dealt with her before,” she said. “We may have to sedate her.”

The statement seemed to trigger something in the girl because Treasure was up and running for the door. Jensen caught her as she ran out. She flailed and scratched to try and get away, but cops know how to handle that. He pulled her to the floor and wrapped his legs around her thighs, trying to keep her still. One of the other officers grabbed her uninjured arm, but she didn’t give up. “Calm DOWN,” he said, and this just made her struggle more.

“GURNEY AND RESTRAINTS,” the nurse yelled as she tried to keep Treasure’s head from being used to hit the detective’s face. Four people held her down until the gurney arrived, then more helped to move her onto it. Leather straps bound her legs and her uninjured arm. More heavy leather straps went over her hips, chest, and thighs.

The psychiatrist showed up from the ward, and he injected her with three milligrams of Midazolam. They all breathed a sigh of relief when she finally relaxed and stopped struggling. “Everyone all right,” the Doctor said. Luckily, the young woman hadn’t been able to bite him, and other than a bruise or two, the Detective was good. “Take her down to the ER. She’ll need X-rays to make sure none of those injuries shifted.”

The fall from the bed had done some damage, they found. Dawn was all right, just bruised, and she watched as they worked on her yet again. The detectives took her statement, then left her alone.

Three hours later, her broken arm in a new cast, Treasure’s gurney wheeled into the psychological ward. Instead of the sweet young woman they had hoped for, she had fought them and was sedated again. The doctors were at a loss as to why the medication was no longer working, but they would try something different. In the meantime, she would remain at the mental health ward. It was the best place for her to heal up; the people who worked there could deal with her sudden violent outbursts.

Treasure would spend the next two months in a mental hospital.

It took that long for the voices to stop this time.

--

Craig Forrest, one of the North American members of the global Werewolf Council, sat down in his chair as his mind went back fifteen years earlier. As a former Alpha who had been retired for more than five decades, he was still the junior man on the five-person governing body of all things Werewolf.

The authority of the Council was absolute. Their function was to mediate differences and dispense justice, ensuring above all else that their existence remained secret from humans. Covering up the extinction of the Arrowhead Pack, one of only two Packs in northern Minnesota, had been the most challenging assignment of his life. When he and his fellow Council members had arrived eight hours after the alert went out, it was already too late to hide anything from the humans.

There had been no call for help and no witnesses to what happened that night. The closest Pack, the Oxbow Pack, was the obvious suspect, but no evidence linking them to the crime existed. The Alpha couple at Oxbow were family; the Arrowhead Alpha had been the older brother of the Oxbow Luna. Their Packs were closely linked. In over a century, there had never been a conflict between the two.

No other Alphas had lodged complaints, and they still had no suspects.

It was the fire that started shortly after sunrise that resulted in the 911 call. The large Pack House was gutted, along with all the smaller houses and outbuildings. The small rural fire departments didn’t have the equipment to deal with a blaze this size, and by the time other departments arrived, it was too late to save anything.

The firefighters initially thought the place deserted because no one met them or was watching the fire burn. It wasn’t until they started overhauling the fire after it had burned out that they started finding the bones. LOTS of bones. Human and dog bones alike, scattered throughout the big house, dozens and dozens of skeletons.

The Council moved into action when they arrived. Each Pack designated a Council-approved lawyer as executor in case no leaders survived. The priority was to hide their existence from the human investigators.

He provided investigators a list of Pack members that matched the number of human remains found. The Medical Examiner took a large bribe before assigning the remains to the people on that list. The others? Werewolves were not heavily involved in human society, so creating a paper trail that led elsewhere was easy. Nobody was looking for them, and their disappearance went unnoticed by humans.

All the other Packs knew was that the entire Arrowhead Pack no longer existed. No one questioned the Council’s actions in response.

So, when he arrived at his upstate New York office in the morning and started his routine, he had no warning everything was about to change. The message had been left on his answering machine last night and got an immediate reaction. The name “Charlotte King” hadn’t been uttered in fifteen years.

He got the other four members of the Council on the video conference. “Gentlemen, we may have a problem in Minnesota,” he said without preamble as the last man joined them. “I got this message last night from a detective in Rochester, southern Minnesota.” He hit PLAY on his phone.

“Mr. Forrest, this is Detective Terry Jones of the Rochester Police Department in Minnesota. I’m looking for information on Charlotte King, born September 24, 1999, in Lake County, Minnesota. According to my records search, her parents both died in a fire. I can’t find adoption records or anything else on her in the database. Since you are the executor of her parent’s will, I’d like to follow up on her whereabouts. You can reach me at 218-555-1212. I work nights, so please leave a message or email me at [email protected]. Thank you.”

He let the words sink in. “I did a quick search on the Internet. The Rochester media is full of coverage of the attempted murder of one sixteen-year-old girl and the attempted kidnapping of another. Look at the sketches of the suspects I just emailed you.”

“I know this man,” Councilman Waterman said. “He’s a Beta in the Bitterroot Pack!”

“He was, he was killed two nights ago at the Mayo Clinic hospital in a shootout with police,” Craig said. “I accessed the Werewolf database and identified the second man; he was a warrior in the same Pack. He’s dead too. Both killed trying to kidnap a girl named Treasure Olson, the same one they had attacked the previous night.”

“Fuck me,” Chairman Gruber said. “They found a Lost Princess.”

Craig nodded, then put up the most recent photo he could find on the Internet of Treasure Olson, taken at her father’s funeral service. “She looks just like her mother, Joanna. The sole living first-born female descendent of King Lycanos didn’t die in the fire as we thought. No, she was found by the side of the road the previous night in the next county.” He let the information sink in. “She went into the human foster system, then was adopted by the State Trooper who found her and his wife. They’ve lived in Rochester for the last ten years.”

“You’re telling me she has grown up with humans and she’s now sixteen? What about her wolf?”

“That’s kind of the problem. A Google search on her shows that at age fourteen, she went nuts on the soccer field and severely injured another player. It looks like she’s been in and out of the mental health system ever since.”

There was silence on the line for about fifteen seconds. “First things first, we have to take care of Alpha Todd Blackstone. There’s only one way he would know the child survived when we all thought she was gone.”

“He was the one to wipe out the Arrowhead Pack,” Councilman Waterman said, the implication suddenly hitting him.

“Exactly. And I guarantee you the Beta didn’t try and kidnap Treasure twice unless the Alpha directed it,” Craig said. “Get to Missoula as soon as you can. We need to hold a trial.”

“What about Treasure,” another asked the Chairman.

“I will call her grandfather and let him know. She needs her family now.” He stood with his hands on the desk. “No one else knows the Princess is alive. For her safety, it has to stay that way.”