"So, what progress do you have to show me?" Lea's chief torturer asked. Betty held up the ring found on Lea's finger, and moved slowly around in a circle, demonstrating it to her 'audience'. The rest of the government officials dedicated to the study of the supernatural so far looked unimpressed. However, Betty had put careful thought into her presentation, and she was very proud of her work, if she did say so herself. She hadn't sat and studied that phone and ring for nothing. She was getting there, slowly but surely.

     The clicking of her heels on the floor seemed so much louder when the rest of them were quiet, and she silently chided herself for wearing her heels today. But, being rather short, she'd wanted to appear taller so she didn't feel so dwarfed by her superiors. However, all things came at a cost.

     "So," Betty began, hoping the hand holding the ring wasn't shaking too badly. "To the average eye, this is a normal ring. A pretty one, perhaps, one that may stand out in terms of its design. But just one ring. One simple ring, that does not seem to possess any peculiar qualities or be of any merit. However, as you all should know, the moment this ring was slipped from Lea's hand her appearance changed dramatically in a matter of seconds, a feat that no-one in this room could accomplish when they tried the ring on-"

     "Miss Bliston," a man interrupted. "You are not to refer to The Captive by their given name. Seeing as the young woman in question was dead, we can but assume that it was a fake identity, therefore their actual name is unlikely to be Lea. You should know by now the proper protocol when it comes to addressing a Captive. Have we not went through that several months beforehand with the goblin?"

     Betty grimaced, reprimanding herself for her mistake, yet at the same time wanting to scream at the man for being so ignorant. She was convinced that the fingerprints couldn't have been faked, and they'd ran them through the system dozens of times to be sure. It was obvious the woman was Lea, and that there must be something paranormal involved in the matter. Even though they had yet to discover any ghosts, that didn't mean there wasn't some out there! After all, nobody had believed Yeti's existed, blaming the eyewitness accounts on drunkenness, until her grandmother had proved them all wrong almost fifty years beforehand.

     "That's hardly the point." She chose to say, deciding not to lose her cool. She did hate the word 'captive' though, because it served as a reminder of how much she hated the inhumanness of her work and their less than kind methods. "I have been investigating the ring for a few weeks now, as it too lets out the tiniest little extraterrestrial signal. I have dug deep into the matters of the ring, and I've managed to open up the signal a little more, if you allow me to show you."

     Turning her back to the audience for a moment, Betty picked up the microphone and held it up to the ring. With the sound magnified, you could faintly hear a little wheezing noise coming from the ring, and her colleagues looked well impressed. On a high from her success, Betty projected an image from her laptop into the screen behind her.

     A world map flashed up, with dozens of tiny white pinpricks scattered across it. "There are many rings like this out there, and I've zoned in on them. I have the exact location of all the ring wearers across the globe, and there's two thousand and ninety-eight in total. I used our contacts and our satellites to get a picture of each one, and I've put various agents on some of the ones closer to home so they can gather information about the subjects. I've also managed to create multiple copies of the ring, so all the agents are wearing one so that they can morph into whatever person they like."

     "Hold on," a woman cut in. "Whenever we tried The Captive's ring on ourselves, it didn't work. How did you solve this problem?"

     Betty smiled. "Simple. I found a thin layer of Le- The Captive's DNA imbedded into the ring, so it only responds to her own thoughts. I've done the same to each of the other rings, so it will be uncontrollable by any bar them."

"Also, The Captive reverted back to her original appearance once the ring was taken off. Is there any way that we can prevent that from happening?"

     Betty's smile faded. "Unfortunately not at the moment, but it was a very rushed procedure. Those people out there may be terrorists, and what with that recent incident in Nice, we couldn't afford to waste any time. People wearing rings that change their appearance? All very suspicious. They could be using them for all the wrong reasons."

     The woman made the sign of the cross at the mention of Nice, but Betty knew that she couldn't be religious because all the ones here were dedicated to one cause only; the finding of the supernatural. She relaxed in part, hoping that she'd thrown the woman off the subject, but she was determined to pursue her line of questioning.

     "Lastly, how exactly did the agents fit in? Surely people would have noticed if they randomly appeared."

     "That's the beauty of the rings. You can take the appearance of another person and pretend to be them. Also, the ring helps you to blend in. If you act a little differently nobody tends to notice. Unfortunately, I cannot claim credit for that, I merely copied the original design. Plus, I've had all of them stationed since Saturday, and none of them have had any bother yet so it must be working."

     The woman finally say back, satisfied. After opening the floor for any more questions, Betty launched into her final words.

     "I do realise that the main reason we launched this investigation was because of the phone calls The Captive was making, but under closer inspection the ring has turned out to be just as important, and it's now fully under control. As for the phone, I'm working on it. When monitored, the ring wearers are also letting off energy due to phone calls that would have otherwise gone undetected. I reckon with a few more day's perseverance I'll be able to make a call on that phone to one of the contacts. I hope this short presentation has brought you up to speed on the current events and that you are now more aware of the dangerousness of this situation." Betty closed her presentation effectively, and all her peers and superiors had no choice but to clap her as she nervously walked out.

     Betty headed back to her office, mentally congratulating herself. She thought she'd faint halfway through, but actually it hadn't went too badly. It was a major breakthrough, but things like this happened in cases all the time. But it sent a tingly feeling up her spine to think that today, the praise would all be directed towards her.

     If she could make that phone call, she'd definitely be heading towards a promotion. She'd be one of the ones who talked about their fleeting success as she started out, and how she'd discovered the relatively unknown species of the Cuties.

     The Cuties was what Betty was currently calling them, because every single one of the ring bearers looked indescribably perfect, as if they were fresh off the cover of Vogue. Besides, those who discovered new species got to name them, so nobody could really object to the name. Although, knowing her superiors, they might do so anyway.

***

My feet pounded across the gravel, running to anywhere, as long as it wasn't the milkshake place. The word repeated incessantly in my head, as if it was trying to taunt me. Cousins. Cousins. Cousins!

I was fast approaching a library, which had several benches outside. It was a mistake to make them wooden, because several people had carved their initials into it and wrote really dumb things like, 'Ashley and Sophia BFFs 4eva' 'I wuz here' and 'Lawrie lurves Beth'. That was something I never understood; what sort of people brought knives to write these things?!

I took the chance to sit and think about it. If Fiona was my cousin, that meant she would've had to come from my aunt or uncle.

Mom had a twin sister called Kate Alex-Tinney. It was a pretty weird maiden name for my Mom to have, but my grandparents were unmarried when they had them so they combined their surnames into Alex-Tinney. I was just glad Mom and Dad were married when they had us. I couldn't imagine being called Rosie Alex-Tinney-Parker.

Aunt Kate was Mom's best friend, and they were practically inseparable. However, Aunt Kate died in a car crash whenever I was ten, and I took it very hard. I actually developed a habit of writing her letters and leaving them at her gravestone. I'd trudge down every Saturday morning in my Leli-Kelly's and leave a bundle of letters about my week. At the time, when I came back the next Saturday to find the letters gone, I was convinced she'd taken them and was reading them in heaven. Obviously, as I grew older I knew that the wind must have blown it away, but I didn't stop leaving letters until the week after I turned sixteen. The last letter I ever left her was a blow by blow account of my sixteenth birthday party.

I really didn't think Aunt Kate had ever had a child, because I had multiple photo albums of her and in not one was belly inflated. Mom's way of handling her grief was to throw herself into making an enormous scrapbook containing pictures from every month of every year of her life. If she'd had even the slightest bump, me and Mom would've noticed as we sifted through dozens of pictures to find the best ones to put into the scrapbook.

However, my Dad also had a sibling, a younger brother, Uncle Larry. It was completely possible he could have gotten someone pregnant in his youth and then refused to have anything to do with the child, putting his business first as per usual. Heck, it certainly sounded like Uncle Larry. And I remember him having a very serious talk with me when I turned eleven about the importance of safety, and he showed me on a diagram how to use means of protection. My Mom was furious with him because first off, I was eleven, I hadn't even learnt about periods yet! Secondly, my Mom was dying to do the Talk with me herself because she successfully scared Owen into not even having a girlfriend for all his years of existence (although that also started the Are You Gay? Talk). Although, the Talk didn't do that at all actually, it just made him have a girlfriend in secret.

That must mean that Fiona was Uncle Larry's daughter. Now, I just had to go confront her.

***

"Hi, Rosie," Fiona said, looking up from her textbook a minute to look at me. "Hey, what's wrong?"

"Kat just told me that you're Owen's cousin. Is that true?" I asked, half hoping she'd laugh and say that Kat has gotten things totally wrong.

Instead she looked at me seriously. "Yes. That was why I laughed earlier on when you said that Owen fancied me. We're related."

I sat down on my bed opposite to her and sighed. "Well then. Care to explain a little more? I've already figured out that you must be the daughter of his Uncle Larry."

"Yes, how did you know?" Fiona said, surprised. "He and my Mom went out for a week or two when they were eighteen, and she got pregnant. He ran off scared when he heard I was in the way, but I don't really care. My Mom did a good job in raising me, and I'm very close to her. Sometimes it feels like us two against the world."

I was surprised at how direct Fiona was being, a she'd never told me anything about her family before. And she didn't seem to regret not having her father in her life, which I found weird. I didn't think I could have lived without my Dad.

"All I really knew about him was his name growing up because Mom didn't talk about him much." Fiona continued. "He was just Larry Parker, a not very serious boyfriend. So when Owen Parker showed up here, talking about his uncle Larry, I did a little digging in those stupid family tree websites and found out we were related. I told him everything, but made him promise not to tell his relatives. I didn't want to know if Larry had told anyone about me, and he probably doesn't even know my name."

Suddenly, I realised why Owen had repeatedly talked about Fiona throughout the summer. He had mentioned her name in conversations again and again until we were all sick of her, but it just have been some kind of test to se if my parents would recognise her. He had promised not to tell, but he must have been curious, so he pretended he liked her as a way of being able to talk about her to provoke a reaction. It all made perfect sense now.

"So that's why I didn't go back for Rosie's funeral. I didn't really know her, and I probably wasn't welcome there-"

"This hit, that ice cold, Michelle Pffieir that white gold." Fiona's face turned bright red as she picked up her phone. For the record, I thought it was a very cool ringtone.

I could faintly hear Harriet saying, "Fiona, aren't you with Rosie? Put me on loudspeaker." Fiona obliged.

"Guys," Harriet said dramatically. "I need you help coming out of the closet."

Fiona rolled her eyes, already getting to her feet. "I'll go swipe the janitor's keys. Let me guess, are you playing hide and seek with Julia again? I thought I told you last time don't close the closet door fully because it locks automatically behind you- "

"No," Harriet interrupts. "I mean, coming out of the closet coming out of the closet. I guess what I'm trying to tell you is... I'm gay."

Hi guys! My friend and I are going up to a funfair kind of place tomorrow - hello dodgems, loop de loops, candy floss, ghost rides, 2p machines and those rides that turn you upside down, that last time I turned white as sheet on! So, basically I probably won't have the next chapter ready for a few days, because I don't want to sit and type on Wattpad while my friend's here. I'm aiming to have the next one ready by Wednesday or Thursday. Plus, I just want to say my heart goes out to those poor people in Nice. In case you haven't heard about it, I've put a screenshot down below. Here's a few questions: How do you feel about Harriet being gay? Do you think Betty is justified in what she's doing if she suspects the Cupids are actually terrorists? Is Rosie in danger? Please answer, I'd love hear your thoughts and it would really make my day if I got a vote or comment from my readers!

Zoe xxx