Chapter 39: THE CHIEF'S CHOICE
The Hawkins Police Station smelled like burnt coffee and decades of futility.
I walked through the front door at five-thirty on a Tuesday evening, when the day shift was wrapping up and the night shift hadn't fully settled in. The desk sergeant—a tired-looking woman in her forties—looked up from her paperwork with the automatic suspicion all cops develop for teenagers.
"Help you?"
"I need to see Chief Hopper."
Her eyebrows rose. "The Chief's busy. You can file a report with—"
"Tell him Billy Hargrove wants to talk about the pumpkins. And the tunnels. And Will Byers."
The names landed like stones dropped in still water. The sergeant's expression shifted—recognition, concern, something that looked almost like fear.
"Wait here."
She disappeared into the back. I stood in the lobby, aware of the eyes on me from other officers, aware of how this looked. Teenager in a leather jacket, asking for the Chief by name, dropping references to things that weren't supposed to be public knowledge.
If I'd misjudged this, if Hopper decided I was a threat to be neutralized rather than an asset to be cultivated...
The door to the back opened. Hopper emerged, hat in hand, expression unreadable.
"Hargrove." He studied me the same way he had at Merrill's farm—cop eyes, searching for tells, trying to figure out what game I was playing. "Thought I told you to stay away."
"You told me to stay away from places I don't belong. This is a police station. Pretty public."
"That's not what I meant."
"I know." I straightened, meeting his gaze directly. "I have information you need. Real information, not rumors or speculation. And I'm offering to share it because we're going to need to work together when this thing breaks open."
Hopper's jaw tightened. For a long moment, I thought he was going to have me escorted out—or worse, detained for questioning, thrown into a cell while he figured out how much I actually knew and who I might have told.
Then he jerked his head toward the back. "My office. Now."
The office was small, cluttered, exactly what I expected from a small-town police chief who spent more time dealing with supernatural crises than filing paperwork. Hopper closed the door behind us and lowered the blinds, cutting us off from the rest of the station.
"Talk," he said, settling into his chair with the weight of a man who'd heard too many impossible things already. "And it better be good."
"The pumpkin rot is spreading faster than the county extension office reported." I stayed standing, keeping the desk between us. "It's not agricultural disease. It's contamination from below—tunnels, spreading under the whole town, connected to something you already know about."
Hopper's expression didn't change, but his hand moved slightly toward the desk drawer. Gun, probably. "Go on."
"Will Byers was never really saved. Whatever connection he formed when he was in the Upside Down—it's still active. The thing on the other side is using him, seeing through him, maybe controlling him. His episodes, his drawings—they're not psychological trauma. They're communication."
Now Hopper's expression did change. Shock, quickly suppressed. "How do you know about Will's episodes?"
"I pay attention." It was the same answer I'd given before, and just as incomplete. "And I have abilities."
The moment of truth. I'd demonstrated to the kids, to Steve. Now it was time to show the one person in Hawkins with actual authority over the supernatural situation.
I raised my palm and let the fire bloom.
Hopper's hand went to his gun instantly, drawing and aiming in a motion so fast it would have been impressive if it weren't pointed at my chest.
"Jesus Christ—"
"It's controlled," I said, keeping my voice calm despite the weapon trained on me. "I'm not threatening you. This is what I am. What I can do."
The fire danced in my palm, casting orange light across the cluttered office, illuminating Hopper's face as he processed what he was seeing. The gun didn't waver, but neither did my flame.
"Fire," he said finally, voice rough. "You can make fire."
"And I used it to kill one of those dog things." I extinguished the flame slowly, showing control, showing that I could stop as easily as I'd started. "Three days ago, at the quarry. Demo-dog ambushed me during training. I put it down with a Phase 3 burst—temperatures around twelve hundred degrees."
Hopper's gun lowered slowly. He didn't holster it, but he wasn't aiming at me anymore.
"Demo-dog," he repeated.
"That's what we're calling them. Smaller than the Demogorgon, maybe offshoots or offspring. Pack hunters, from what I could tell. Fast, tough, but they burn." I pulled out the Polaroid photos—the same ones I'd shown the kids—and set them on his desk. "Evidence. That's what's left after I was done with it."
Hopper picked up the photos with his free hand, examining them with the intensity of a cop evaluating crime scene evidence. His face was unreadable, but I could see the tension in his shoulders, the weight of everything he'd been carrying alone finally finding company.
"The Lab knows about this?" he asked.
"I don't know what the Lab knows. But they're connected—the tunnels, the Gate, everything that's happening. And when it breaks open, when the Demo-dogs come in numbers too large to ignore, the Lab is going to try to contain it the same way they tried last year."
"Cover it up."
"Bury it. Silence anyone who talks." I met his eyes. "You've been protecting people on your own, Chief. The Byers family. Will. Maybe others I don't know about. But you can't protect everyone alone. Not against what's coming."
Hopper was quiet for a long moment. The gun finally went back into the drawer, and he pulled out something else—a bottle of bourbon, half-empty, the kind that saw regular use. He poured a single glass and drank it in one motion, not offering me any.
"Who else knows?" he asked, setting the glass down. "About you. About the powers."
"My stepsister. The kids—Wheeler's group. Steve Harrington." I paused. "Now you."
"That's it?"
"That's the team. For now."
"Team." He laughed, but there was no humor in it. "A bunch of middle schoolers, a high school senior with a nail bat, and a kid who shoots fire. That's who's supposed to save this town?"
"Plus a police chief who's already seen the impossible and didn't break." I stepped closer to the desk. "You know what's coming. You've been preparing for it, even if you haven't admitted it to yourself. All I'm asking is that when the time comes, we coordinate instead of getting in each other's way."
Hopper stared at me. The bourbon sat on the desk between us, amber liquid catching light from the buzzing fluorescent.
"You're seventeen," he said.
"Old enough to fight."
"Old enough to die."
"That's why I'm building a team." I held his gaze. "So nobody has to die alone."
The silence stretched. I could hear the station outside—phones ringing, conversations murmuring, the ordinary sounds of a small-town police department that had no idea what lurked beneath their streets.
"I'm not promising anything," Hopper said finally. "I don't trust you. Don't know where you came from, don't know how you know what you know, don't know if you're playing some angle I can't see."
"Fair."
"But." He stood, moving around the desk until he was close enough for me to feel the weight of his presence. "If you're right—if something's coming—then I need to know about it. Keep me informed. Don't do anything stupid. And don't burn down my town."
I moved toward the door, then paused with my hand on the handle.
"Only the things that deserve it," I said.
Hopper's expression didn't change, but something in his posture relaxed slightly. Recognition, maybe. The acknowledgment that whatever I was, I wasn't an enemy.
Not yet, anyway.
The drive home was quiet. I kept replaying the conversation in my head, analyzing every moment, every word, every shift in Hopper's expression. He wasn't fully on board—that much was clear. But the door was open. When the crisis peaked, when the Demo-dogs emerged in force and the tunnels broke through the surface, he'd remember this conversation.
He'd remember that someone had warned him. Someone had offered to help.
The wrongness pulsed beneath Hawkins as I drove through familiar streets, past ordinary houses and sleeping families and all the comfortable illusions of small-town life. They didn't know what was coming. Most of them would never know, even after it was over—the Lab would make sure of that, burying the truth under layers of cover stories and government secrecy.
But I knew. And I wasn't alone anymore.
The kids. Steve. Hopper. Max. A team, fragile and incomplete, but real.
The time for preparation was ending. The time for war was almost here.
I gripped the steering wheel tighter and drove on into the October night, fire burning steady in my chest, ready for whatever came next.
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