7| required reading

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     THERE WAS NO THRILL IN THE INVESTIGATIONS ANYMORE, no rush of adrenaline when Juliette would figure out a vital piece of the puzzle, no blissful conclusions; or hardly any conclusions at all. They'd been stuck in the early stages of the mystery for too long, she realised. It was too early to think of ways to defeat the Dread Doctors, because they merely know what Valack had informed them of.

Sheriff Stilinski picked up his red marker and crossed an X over Tracy's picture. "Chimeras." He tested the word on his lips.

"Two dead chimeras, and eight new ones. So that makes ten overall."

      "I think it might be eleven..." He pinned a picture of Donovan on his board. Stiles stood still, gaping blankly at his father before dropping his head. "Our station tech guys confirmed something for me. They said, both the holding cell lock and cameras could've malfunctioned because of something electromagnetic. You said that, uh.." He grabbed the book on the counter, the one Valack instructed them to read. "These guys–"

      "The Dread Doctors."

      "Are we really calling them them?" He huffed lightly. "I think they broke him out, well, it is what they did in Eichen, isn't it?"

      Juliette's gaze drifted from him to the board. "It would make sense." She agreed. "The night he broke out, Theo said he saw him in the hospital. I was there too, but I only saw glimpses of someone walking around the hallways."

      "But the question is, is he a failure like Lucas and Tracy?"

       She shrugged. "If he's still alive, i'm sure he'll come after you two." She said bluntly. "But it's been a week, i'm sure he's dead."

      "I'll believe it when I see a body." The Sheriff stated, twisting in his heel to Stiles; whom stood in the other side of the room, peering around the corner with his back facing them. Juliette narrowed her eyes at him, dumbfounded. "You're uncharacteristically quiet."

      He's been like this all week, she wanted to say. "Sorry, uh.." He swallowed. "I'm just trying to think about it. These are all teenagers, right? So, now, I mean, shouldn't we be trying to figure out why these teenagers?" He asked, causing Juliette's expression to brighten. She'd been so busy wondering what their motivation and desired outcome was, that she never wondered why they chose these targets.

       "If the Dread Doctors, if they went through all that, burying them, killing them, breaking one of them out of jail..." He continued, capturing every ounce of their attention. "They couldn't have been chosen at random."

      "They had to have something in common." Sheriff Stilinski nodded along. "Something that made them right for this experiment."

       "Something that made them special..."

       Juliette's gaze dropped to the pictures of the chimeras, her mind cramped of curiosity. "What if it's the opposite? Not something that made them special, but something that made them... expendable, so if their experiment failed people wouldn't pay much attention to their deaths." She carried on. "They wouldn't investigate it. Kind of like why Brunski was so resolute on killing me."

      Tension arose in the room, and Juliette quickly figured that bringing up that event was not the best of ideas. "But they wouldn't have used Tracy if that were the case." Stiles countered, pointing at today's newspaper, with Tracy's picture on the front cover. "Maybe it has something to with their strength. Pain tolerance, and all."

      Juliette peered down at her phone, receiving a text from Lydia. Book club today, be there in 10.


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