Who is Magpie?

Fiona begrudgingly went to find Ezekiel wondering first through the kitchen for a snack, and then to the bathroom. If she looked too eager to report to him she was sure the word would carry around and twist into something ridiculous. She for one didn’t see the big deal, the girl seemed nice enough. Other prisoners had tried to bite her, and Magpie hadn’t even thrown her towel or smelly laundry in her face.

She ran into Bronx first, and the pair walked together to Ezekiel’s office at the top of the stairs on the same floor as his bedroom.

He sat at his desk, clock ticking away in front of him, counting down to the another day of deliberations with the counsel. Bronx knocked loudly and they both entered, closing the door behind him. He closed his laptop slowly looking up at the pair wondering who to address first.

Fiona wasn’t so patient. “She’s well.” She gleamed with her best ‘people person’ smile, before sighing with her signature smirk, one tooth always getting stuck on her crooked canine. “Pretty sure she thinks you’re going to reject her, believing she’ll be found guilty, like a coward.” Fiona resisted the urge to chuckle when she continued. “Spit fire that one, not surprised you matched, I think she could take me easily. She has Luna energy.”

Bronx begrudgingly agreed. “Yeah, that’s why I’m here, it had me thinking a great deal. She needed a lot of those plants to control her… and do you know how many neighbouring Alpha families fell in and around 7 years ago? Four.”

Ezekiel leaned forward, intrigue practically dripping from him. “I thought everyone in those families were killed.”

“So does everyone else.” Bronx continued. “But what most don’t know is that two of those territories also had more than one alpha family. Their alphas died while fending off rogue attacks and, with no heir near the age of the trials, the families had to step down.”

“You’re joking.” Ezekiel’s mouth fell open, thinking first of the odds, and then Magpie’s energy.

“The Teermen’s had all been killed in their home, not suspecting to be targeted and only had a son. However, the Hemlock’s were from the first territory hit, wife and daughter, age 4, left behind. They moved far away from the pack house, wife eventually remarried a human male, then nothing about them until 12 years later when they’re attacked in their car. That was when the rogues that took over started trying to expand. Jessamine was reported alive after the accident but two months later she fell off the map. Stopped showing up at school, never got her apartment keys from management or returned for her deposit,” Bronx concluded. “I’ve been trying to call around over there for any records, or even a photo of her, but getting through to anyone is impossible.“

“I’ll go.” Fiona volunteered immediately. “The Hemlock pack was good to my family, if that’s their daughter down there, I owe it to them.” Ezekiel nodded and she turned to go. “Oh and she said if you don’t like what she’s wearing you can go ask her to change your self.”

Fiona ducked out right after that, Bronx chuckling behind her. “What’s it going to be you think? The prison scrubs or the towel?”

Ezekiel rubbed his face with both hands. “I don’t know. I’ve been feeling this lump in my chest, but she’s just been pissed off most of the time, up until her shower. I could probably actually get some sleep with how happy she’s projecting now.”

Re-opening his computer he started to log back in. Bronx walked over to him and looked over his shoulder as he opened the security system and clicked to view the different cells. Magpie was in cell two, seen in the monitor doing strength and flexibility training.

Ezekiel’s wolf growled within him ‘mine’, desperately.

The strange, narrow steal pin he snuck to Magpie was one of two he had found his first night back in his room. He had turned his room upside down looking for anything missed and the cleaning staff had thought they had been his. He had found them in his jewelry box and opening it gave him that strange smell of lemon. It still wasn’t her, but it was something.

Leaving one in the box, he wore the other to pull back a section of his near shoulder length, thick, wavy brown hair. The soft thump against his head as he walked was a constant reminder that she was safe, just unhappy. Now that she had that one, he hoped she would understand how he still felt and wait for him to be able to explain.

He retrieved the second one from his desk drawer as he looked over at Bronx, who was still watching Magpie. She had slotted her feet above a horizontal bar and was hanging upside down, doing full sit ups to grab her ankles. “Screw Fiona, I think she could actually take me,” Bronx scoffed. “You ever feel like she’s telling you she’s in that cell because she allows it?”

“Every time I look at her,” Ezekiel returned. “I’m not surprised that Wallace is among those who want more evidence, and he doesn’t even know about his boat,” Ezekiel muttered, smiling to himself that she had been the one to sink the ridiculous thing.

“The Hemlock’s, do you remember them? They would have been at a Fall Ball right before Mr. Hemlock died. Jessamine would have been four, and we would have been seven.”

He hated that he didn’t remember, but at seven with boundless energy and a penchant for getting into trouble he was not likely to have been playing with a four year old girl. “I do,” Bronx said suddenly. “Not Magpie, not her.” He pointed a finger at the woman who was doing hand stands and letting herself fall back to tap the wall with her feet, lowering down, and repeating the hand stand and controlled fall. “But Jessamine. Her mom had put her down to play in the garden with the other kids and a spider crawled on her. It could have been a wasp sting for the scream she let out.”

“I’d find it difficult to believe that someone who rode in, up our driveway, under a truck, would scream at a spider,” Ezekiel reflected.

Fiona hadn’t believed it was possible. The back driveway the boys used for their cars wasn’t the nice smoothly paved road for guests. After the security team had found that out, more than one person had objected that someone could hold themselves up over the rough terrain with the speed they had rolled up at.

Fiona had tried. A few of the other guys had tried as well with higher trucks or jeeps. Each one got road rash up their ass when they fell off. The only good that came from it was the entertainment Ezekiel and Bronx got in watching them try, and the small about of respect that they had gathered for the girl who had done it.

Ezekiel had taken over what was the old Hemlock territory two years ago, pushing the rogues further out and growing his numbers by more than a hundred; most of the humans who had lived there had already moved away with how bad it had gotten. Bronx further explain that they had stopped attending parties after Mr. Hemlock died, basically falling off the radar.

The rogues had gone after anyone who could challenge them and Jessamine would have been maybe a year or two into the range when people started shifting when her family was attacked. If she had shifted and fought he would presume she would have been killed, but if she hadn’t and was now in his prison he had a lot more questions to wonder