Hidden Enemies | The Prime Archives #2 ✓

twenty-one

Chase hated funerals.

As a kid, he had accompanied his father to quite a few. They were always the same. Men and women dressed in starched officer uniforms standing in a row behind the casket. They would fire their rifles into the air, the sound echoing for miles.

He could still see the American flags fluttering over the black coffins.

His jaw clenched at the thought. Scowling, he wiped the raindrops off his forehead.

It always seemed to be raining during them, too. Though, that might've just been his mind fusing all the memories into one large, unpleasant souvenir. He didn't remember every single thing about them—not that he wanted to anyway.

But he did remember how lifeless the corpses looked inside of their wooden boxes. They were always dressed up in the nicest clothes. It was usually something the person would never wear if they were alive. In fact, the body inside almost never matched the picture that stood tall next to their casket. They always looked like someone—something—else.

He never truly felt the true weight of loss. Not really at least. None of the deceased were ever directly related to him, and he had never been to a funeral for a family member. Despite that, he recalled the dull, hollow feeling that always settled in his chest.

But this particular funeral was different. This time he felt the loss. It was agonizing and painful. It cut deep like a jagged knife, tearing through flesh and digging into his bones. The pain ached and stung and gnawed away at his core.

Holly had been dead for five days. Five days had passed since she died. Five days.

It still didn't feel real to him. He wasn't sure if it ever would.

A lot had happened during the past week.

After the disaster that was Alastair Crane's campaign rally, a search party went looking for the senator. Somehow, his security team found and rescued him from the Primes who had abducted him. Chase still couldn't wrap his head around how they managed it. He had been abducted by a team of six Primes; six powerful Primes. How could a group of normal humans rescue someone from their clutches?

He wasn't sure—but Emily had her theories, which she didn't hesitate to share with the rest of the team.

The media didn't seem to have the same questions they did. Instead, they heralded Crane's rescuers as heroes, and they painted the senator as a saint—despite his incitement of violence at his own rally.

To make things worse, Senator Crane used the situation to cast stones at Atlas and the Prime Task Force. He pegged them both as incompetent and inefficient. A failure.

And everyone was buying it.

Crane's stock had skyrocketed since his abduction. More United Nations officials had expressed their allegiance to the PRA. There were only a few left who opposed the act. He wanted to believe that Crane wouldn't succeed, but the odds looked to be swinging in his favor.

The fight was almost over.

But Chase didn't care about that at the moment. All he cared about was Holly Primrose Green-Taylor. Dryad. Flower Girl.

When he had received the distress signal from Lucky during the fight, he didn't know what to expect. Oscar's team had gone after the fleeting van Senator Crane had been taken in. They had chased the Primes into an electrical power plant. That's when everything hit the fan.

Holly had been killed in an explosion caused by Circuit. The same explosion also left Archie paralyzed from the waist down. And, to top it all off, they had no leads on where the rogue Primes had escaped to. They had vanished like ghosts.