Playing With The Puppet Master

21

"Whoa! That's so cool!" Angie bounced in Adrien's arms as we walked up to the stronghold. Spots of mold blocks laid around the ground in heaps. I only assumed that the dead lycan bodies turned into that when they died for some obvious reason that was unapparent to me. I opened the back door and we all trailed inside. The warmth of the blast furnaces still fired up washed over us all.

"Thank god, it's still warm in here!" Adrien sighed happily.

"Let's make sure that the lycan are actually dead in here," I said warily. The four of us divided into pairs. Angie went with Adrien along the first floor while Silent and I chose to go to the top floor. We glimpsed into the explosives room and saw that nothing really changed in there. We crept up to the next room. When I opened the door, there was a huge pile of mold that took up most of the floor of the room. A pile of gold sat near it. The door to the roof was laid open. Silent and I crept into the room and looked around.

"Hey, mind just listening to me for a moment?" I turned back to Silent. His interest was caught by the way he nodded his head. "So, I am a little stumped here." He trailed over to me as I grabbed the photo and zippo from my pockets. "Back at that place where you were staying, there was a notebook on that work bench downstairs. And it had information on past...experiments. Well, one of the names stood out. Mordecai Beneviento. I don't know who he actually was, but I think...I think I killed him." Silent's brows furrowed in confusion. "Hear me out. At first, I was here to exterminate lycan. Well, apparently there was someone controlling the lycan. Adrien and I knew him as the old gardener for Donna Beneviento. Mother Miranda implanted cadou into him and made him stay away. I don't know why, and something tells me I might want to find out. But, anyways, Mother Miranda never told me that was my real target until after the deed was done. She knew exactly who I would actually want to go after but never told me. I don't understand why. Something weird is going on here. Even the guy that I killed didn't even tell me who he really was. And the only reason I am guessing it was Mordecai and not the gardener is because, one the note of lycan control matched this guy and this." I lit the flame behind the photo and Silent read the words. He slipped the notebook out of his pocket and made a note a moment later for me to read.

'He must have been a threat to Eva.'

"But why? One, Eva is a baby. Two, if this was Donna's family, why not tell her?" Silent shrugged. He tapped the pen against his pad before an idea struck in his eyes.

'What if it was for control?'

"Control?" He held up a finger as he wrote down on his paper.

'Moreau told me about how Mother Miranda is such a great mother, but it struck me as traumatizing manipulation. What if this was her way of manipulating Donna? Take what was left of her family.'

"But she watched her family die. I...I saw her vision of her family hanging by nooses." Silent gave me a deadpanned stare. My brows furrowed as his eyes went upward and turned to the paper. He held the notebook up a moment later.

'Are you sure that was her father and not the gardener? If that man knew to call himself a gardener and he wasn't, that's the only other option.'

"But that wouldn't..." My words trailed off as my eyes fell. "Maybe that is possible for her to create nightmares like that for Donna to experience. But then why wouldn't the dad come...wait." I walked out of the room with Silent on my heels. We walked into the room full of explosives and to the map on the far wall. I pointed toward the 'safe' zone. "He was threatened then. He must have been threatened of her safety if he didn't stay away." I whipped to Silent. "Right?" Silent shrugged. His head tilted to the side and reached past me. He slowly took the map off the wall. I turned around. Underneath of it was a smaller note. My brows furrowed as I grabbed it.