Soul's Decay : Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen

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West Liverpool High had just stopped gossiping about the mysterious disappearance of Dove Macdonald, Antonio Macdonald and Beverly Salsberry when Detective Nick Church stopped Adeline outside the high school.

Adeline was exhausted; she had gotten through her fitness test in PE, Latin exam, and was dreading the idea of returning, again, to a house without Beverly or her parents. Beverly’s parents and Adeline’s foster parents had left the house only five days ago, right after Beverly had. It was only a note that was left behind;

ADeline, we’re sorry but we have to leave.

You have the house to y ourself now.

- Love, your parents

They didn’t even take their stuff. They also left their favorite couch behind. If they had moved to another house, they would have taken it.

Adeline tugged herself back into the present time. Detective Church was a handsome man of his twenties, with a professional smile on his shaved face. He had been standing right beside the school’s gates, staring at the river of students flowing noisily by, and had stepped forward abruptly when Adeline came out of the school.

“Detective Nick Church.” He had introduced himself, leading Adeline out of the crowd of students to a relatively silent corner. She blinked, startled by the flow of events. “You must be Adeline Campbell?”

“Adeline Salsberry. Um, am I in trouble?” Adeline replied, frowning; as far as she could remember, she hadn’t kicked a car, or threw trash onto the road, or kicked down trees; she was completely innocent. Detective Church smiled at her again. Creepy, she noted absently.

“I just want to question you about Beverly Salsberry and her disappearance. You knew her, correct?”

“I used to know her. Now I’m not sure anymore.”

Nick raised an eyebrow. His face was unreadable as he pulled out a notebook and jutted down a few words, Adeline watching him warily. All of a sudden, the detective pocketed the notebook and looked around sharply. “Adeline, could you come with me to the department and continue our conversation there?” He asked her, tilting his chin toward the students who were glancing at the two.

Adeline nodded. “That’d be great.” After all, she didn’t want anyone to know or find out more about Beverly. She also didn’t know why a detective was coming by and questioning her now, not before when Beverly had disappeared, but sooner or later, if it was done, everything would be good. Beverly even might come back to her, and the lonely house.

Quickly, Nick led her around the school building to a brown car, which was nearly falling apart. Seeing Adeline’s doubtful and confused look, he smiled a little. “The ride is short, don’t worry. We also don’t really get a lot of money from our job.”

The car seats stank of old beer; it was the first thing Adeline noticed when she climbed into the vehicle. She glanced at Nick, but he didn’t look like a person who always got drunk after work and staggered to his neighbor’s home, demanding for the poor person to open the door; he seems pretty decent, actually. Adeline thought to herself.

With a deafening roar, the car engine started, then died down. Grimacing, Nick tried the engine again, and this time it stayed alive, shuddering. He gave Adeline a tight smile. “I better change this thing soon, huh?”

“Um, yes.”

In an awkward silence, the car pulled out of its parking place and went onto the road, bumping a few times before it finally gained its course. Unconsciously, Adeline gripped the car seat tightly, feeling nervous. The car was swaying from side to side dangerously steeply, and Nick was cursing under his breath, his feet obviously longing to slam down on the gas pedal. Adeline wondered how in the world the detective had gotten his driver’s license, and gripped the seat tighter. Oh, God, are we driving on the wrong side of the road?

Nick looked over to her, detaching his eyes from the road, and grinned sheepishly. “Hey, sorry, Adeline. It’s been a long time since I did this, that’s all.”

“Please just look ahead! Please!” Adeline gasped, not trying to make sense of what the man had said. She didn’t intend to end her life in an old car, with a detective who seemed to have bribed his way to his driver’s license, driving on the wrong side of the road. She wanted something more normal than that.

Swiftly, Nick returned to the right side, dodging a huge food truck along the way. His face was crunched up in concentration; apparently, a concentration that was very, very useless. “Just five more minutes of driving!” The detective announced overly-cheerfully. Adeline’s stomach stopped doing jump ropes as Nick seemed to fall into a more comfortable and less dangerous driving pattern.

The road was strangely empty, although it was hard to pay attention to anything else except for the powerful, penetrating scent of beer. There were no cars in sight, or passerby, or even birds in the sky. The area around them were completely empty. Aren’t detectives supposed to pick out the smallest details? Adeline worried. Perhaps she was being paranoid, but something was just off. Detective Church started to hum a song that sounded a little like a lullaby and more like a mourning song.

A feeling of being watched, a feeling of being in danger, crept into Adeline’s mind until she couldn’t bear it anymore. She reached to the side and tapped the detective’s shoulder. The older man glanced at her with a reassuring smile. “Yeah?”

“Umm, Detective Church, I think that we should-“

The car flew up into the air with a noisy scratching of metal against something equally as hard, and it stayed suspended for a short second before the vehicle was flipped completely onto its back. The windows were smashed in, and Adeline shrieked.

“Stay in the car!” Nick barked, then pulled off the seatbelt, kicked the car door off of its hinges and climbed out on all fours. He pulled out a gun from his belt and was out of sight.

Adeline nodded, shivering, gasping and upside down, tears of shock running down her face. Her head hurt terribly, and a certain spot was wet with blood. Shakily, she clicked the seatbelt off of her and immediately fell flat on her upper back.

Just as she started to find her balance, a pair of rough, big hands pulled her out of the car, at the same time ripping the door off. The old car didn’t protest, and it almost seemed like it was happy to break apart. Adeline kicked and started to yell, but some kind of fabric smothered any sounds from escaping. Her eyes darting from side to side frantically, Adeline scanned the area, and found Detective Church on the ground, unmoving with a large piece of glass stuck in his abdomen and a bruise forming on his forehead.

Now even more desperate and fearful, Adeline shouted again, the sound being muffled; an attempted head-butting came back to her as a sharp, exploding pain in the back of her neck. Another blow landed itself on the already injured spot, and her vision began to go black around the edges.

I can’t die here, was her only thought before she fell limp in the assailant’s hands, out cold.

Adeline came into consciousness with a nasty, aching pain all over her neck and head. She was in a dark basement of some sort, and the only light provided was a flickering lamp on the ceiling. Her heart having calmed down a little, she took her time to look around. The basement didn't have anything in it except for a set of iron stairs leading up onto ground level and a small window; also a chair with a battered-up Detective Church tied to it.

Immediately, Adeline tried to wake him. “Detective.” She hissed. “Detective! Mr. Church! Come on, wake up.”

There was no response except for a small groan.

“Wake up! Come on! Wake up!” Adeline tried again, feeling a flicker of hope at the tiny groan. For another five minutes, she hissed, yelled, and made noises with the chair she was tied securely to. Finally, after nearly tipping her chair over, she settled down, took a deep breath, and tried to focus on; how the hell had my day gotten so crappy in a minute?

She had been having just a normal day. She definitely hadn’t done anything worth being kidnapped. Thinking, I didn’t do anything wrong, she nearly sobbed.

Upstairs, the floor shook lightly. A fine layer of dust fell from the basement’s ceiling, indicating that someone was walking on that floor—someone who was heading to the basement’s door. “Nick! NICK!” Adeline half-screamed and half whispered. “WAKE UP!”

Just as the door burst open with a loud crash, the detective jerked up, blinked groggily, and immediately winced as he jostled the glass fragment stuck in his torso. Adeline kept an eye on the man who was walking down the stairs, yet sighed silently in relief.

Their kidnapper shared a good amount of resemblance to a grizzly bear. He had small, beady eyes that studied Adeline and Nick with a twinkle of amusement and cruelty, a hair that was a perfect example of ‘dyeing-your-hair-red-gone-bad’, and a huge, hulking body of at least seven feet that bulged with muscles beneath a thin, white and dirty undershirt. From a sinewy hand, dangled Detective Church’s pistol, still loaded and yet to be used.

The man stopped in front of Nick, eyed him warily, then moved onto Adeline, who gulped. “Hey, girly.” The man grinned, and Adeline gritted her teeth at the tone. She wasn’t a child; she had left that stage of her life in her old house years ago.

“What do you want from me?” She retorted, pleased at how unshaken her voice sounded. Nick nodded his agreement from her left.

“What do you want from her?” He croaked, then coughed. Arms now crossed, the kidnapper loomed above Adeline imperiously, pale, green eyes glinting like a wild animal’s.

“Information, girl.”

Adeline snarled angrily, her temper snapping. It sounded so animalistic that it shocked herself. Despite that, she screamed, “I don’t know anything! I don’t even know you! Get the fuck out of my life!” Angry tears tinged the corner of her eyes.

The kidnapper didn’t look even remotely impressed. “Huh.” He said, before taking a step forward, making Adeline instinctively shrink back. “I’m looking for an animal.” He continued. “A black animal. A fox. A mutation.”

Adeline blinked at him uncomprehendingly, although a rock seemed to settle in her stomach. “A black fox? I don’t know any mutated black foxes.”

“You don’t know one.” The muscular man hissed threateningly. “You saw one.” Defiantly, Adeline gave him a shake of her head.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

With an exhausted sigh, the man ran his hand through his hair and paced, glaring at Adeline now and then. Detective Church was pale, Adeline noticed; he was losing blood, fast. She didn’t know how much a glass shard in the stomach would hurt, but she definitely didn’t want to experience it either.

The man walked over to Adeline again, strides long and quick, and before Adeline could make a snide insult about anything, slapped her. At the unexpected blow, she gasped, her head snapped to the side, and was painfully reminded of that last time her father had slapped her.

“Don’t touch her!” Nick raged, but Adeline couldn’t hear him clearly. Her ears were ringing from the force of the slap. The kidnapper ignored him, and slapped Adeline again, this time on the other side. A tear trickled down her cheek, and she whimpered lightly in pain.

“Tell me about the mutation. Tell me about what you saw at the funeral. I know that you killed my fox.” The man growled in a barbaric, unsettling way. Adeline’s eyes teared up again, and she cursed herself for showing a weak side.

“I… didn’t kill anything at that funeral.” She nearly sobbed. “I didn’t.”

To her great relief, the kidnapper backed away, yet still looking angry. The light that hung above flickered and dimmed. Detective Church let out another groan of agony, and it seemed to snap the kidnapper’s unfortunate attention to him.

He wouldn’t. He can’t shoot a detective. He can’t. The brief moment of hesitation was all the kidnapper needed to raise the loaded pistol, level it with Nick’s torso, grin sadistically, and…

…pull the trigger. BAM, the gun went off. Adeline screamed her throat raw, thrashing in her chair, nearly knocking it over. The light flickered. A large, red stain started to form on Nick’s already wounded abdomen. The detective let out a strangled sound and collapsed forward, head down, legs and arms limp.

No, Adeline thought, ceasing the scream for a moment, feeling warm, sticky blood in her throat; It’s only one shot. It wasn’t to the head or the heart. He might still be alive.

As if he knew exactly what she was thinking, the kidnapper mockingly blew an invisible plume of smoke away from the gun’s opening and smiled. “Hold that thought, girly.” He aimed the pistol again.

The index finger pulled the trigger. BAM.

Again. BAM.

Adeline wailed horribly, her wrists scraping against the ropes holding them. BAM.

“STOP IT!” She howled, straining against her bonds. A split second later, she was laying face-down on the ground, having fallen with the chair, still tied to it. BAM. A sharp taste of blood filled her mouth from the impact, and she began to cry in earnest.

BAM.

Adeline could feel the cold floor squashing her profile, the heavy chair pressing down on her in the position she was trapped in —not even remotely comfortable—; perhaps it was why she kept on yelling. “You fucking jerk! Motherfucker! SON OF A BITCH! STOP IT!” She wailed, weeping in both terror and sadness. BAM. Perhaps, the last shot was just to punish her for yelling out. She quieted down at that thought.

The kidnapper finally brought the gun back to his side, looking sated. The detective’s entire torso was dark red. Blood was dripping and pooling on the floor of the basement. He was undoubtedly dead.

“Look here, girl,” the kidnapper snapped, and turned the gunpoint to Adeline instead; on the floor and sobbing pitifully. “I don’t have time for this. Tell me or join that detective.” He jerked his chin toward the dead, bad-driving detective who Adeline had never, never wanted dead.

“I…” She gasped through the tears. “It was just a fox… And it had…a lot of tails…” She sobbed. “I don’t know! A man killed it! He just stabbed it in the neck with this… this…” A wet hiccup escaped her throat. “This dagger, and then just took the body, I don’t know anything else… Please don’t kill me.” She had to call the police if she escaped, but she wasn’t sure if she could manage to do it.

The kidnapper’s feet approached, and with a limited vision, Adeline squeezed her eyes shut and began to tremble.

There was a numb, faraway tugging sensation on her wrists, then the ropes that had bound her slid onto the ground. Not wasting a precious second, Adeline threw away all her dignity and scrambled away on her hands and knees. She had to get away from the murderer.

“Go up the stairs.” The man told her. “And not a word, you understand?”

Adeline nodded frantically, not knowing what she was doing, and stumbled to her feet. Her feet tangling with each other, she managed halfway up the iron, rusting stairs, then looked back. Majorly, she looked back at the dead detective.

Nick Church was red, red, red, and black.

Releasing a scream of rising hysteria, Adeline miraculously managed not to fall back down the stairs, wrenched through the door, and then ran out of a house that she was suddenly in the middle of without looking back even once.

Dominic nudged the ‘dead’ ‘detective’ with a finger.

“Hey.” He mumbled. “You aren’t really dead, are you?” A second later, ‘Nick Church’s eyes fluttered open.

“How come you’re not the one being fashioned into a beehive?” Was the first thing that Mason, formerly Nick, asked, wincing against the pain. “Higher pain tolerance, lower chance of actually dying…” He rattled the chair by his hands. “Anyway. Free me first; process the informations later.”

“Or vice versa.” Dominic muttered. He glanced down at his burly self, smirking. “Hey, I actually like this form…”

Mason growled. “You look like a hybrid of a pig and a bear. The ropes.” Rolling his eyes, Dominic shrunk back into a much smaller, his favorite form, the red hair now the same color as his fur, and his eyes lightened until they were white. He lengthened his fingernails into sharp claws and sliced through the ropes as easily as butter.

“You know,” he told the younger fox absent-mindedly, “That plan wasn’t half bad.” Mason shook his head angrily, but he was too tired to do anything except for speak, walk and think.

“I thought that you were going to shoot me only once.” The eight-tailed fox muttered. “That was the plan. But you shot me six times more. I counted.” Weakly, he raised his hands to form two quotation marks. “ “You fucking jerk”.”

Mason was awarded with a nasty glare.

For a while Mason lay on the cold, stolen basement floor, digging his own, razor-like claws into his chest to pull out the bullets. He had to get them all out before his skin mended over the little, annoying iron pieces. Dominic didn’t offer any help; he just stared into nothingness, watching the light flicker, and tapping his foot against the floor.

Finally, Mason threw the last bullet onto the ground, which went against the brief hesitation of throwing it at Dominic instead. “Done.” He announced. “Let’s go before the police comes.”

As if he had been waiting for it for his whole life, Dominic beamed before practically flying up the stairs.

“Oh, also, by the way,” Mason added in a normal tone of voice, knowing very well that the older fox could hear him. “I get to shoot you next time.”

The houses that sandwiched an old, red-walled house were silent. The doors were shut securely, yet no soul stirred in the buildings, not even after seven gunshots went off. If corpses; in this particular case, nine corpses in two different houses; could hear sounds and make calls, they would have.

But corpses with throats slashed open couldn’t do that.

☪

Abel couldn’t remember how long he had been lying on the particular area of the ground, looking up into the sky or into his closed eyelids, feeling like he was dead.

He was close to it, though.

While he had been lying there, beneath a tree, squinting against the sun, his father had went off and came back, then repeated the process, then at some point, had run off and didn’t come back that time. Now Abel was truly alone. It had been a long time since he had been alone and he actually liked it.

There was a bird perched above him, a little harmless bird with a red chest and a proud yellow plume atop its head. It had been staring at him for a long while with a cocked head and two wide black eyes. Abel couldn’t find it in him to shoo the bird away.

The bird sang a chirpy little note and then fluttered away. Abel’s eyes chased it then returned to a fixated point in the sky.

He couldn’t tell if he was asleep or not. Probably not, but it felt like floating, dying, leaving. To his surprise, it wasn’t a painful sensation at all; it was accepting, it was calm, it was nothing.

Abel blinked.

It was his body which caused him pain; his blood felt like it was slowly eating away at his insides, which was probably —most certainly— true, and his head hurt. The shadows didn’t come to him anymore. They just watched silently and didn’t show their true shapes for him.

A thin strip of wind whistled into his eyes. Abel blinked.

What was to stop him from dying at the moment? Nothing, a voice whispered. Nothing. He agreed. He was going to die if he was going to die; he wasn’t going to die if he wasn’t going to die. It would be so easy to just accept it. But he wanted to see Dominic for the last time, queerly. He also wanted to face Mason and tell him everything. He wanted to visit where he and his once-happy family had lived. He wanted to hear the song again.

He wanted to do so, so many things.

In Montana, it was cold and the winter was settling over the land. Biting winds assaulted everything living and dead, blew dry leaves off of trees and sucked all moisture out of the air. Even though Abel wasn’t moving at all, his throat quickly became dry and every breath hitched into a struggle.

There wasn’t anything to say, to think, to do; he didn’t feel like he could say a word, nor think up of anything that weren’t laced with pain, nor do anything and not fall upon his knees. The days of his gold furred and godlike glory were gone; he now just was an old fox, dying like many other foxes by the poisoning of cow blood. Ancient history told of foxes dying because of the same cause, and after a thousand years Abel too would be remembered as the crazy fox who finally was killed by the Hunters.

Some foxes might even laugh, as they laugh at the death of a Hunter.

How had it come to this? He asked and came up with no answer.

Regrets are too late on the deathbed, his mother had told him once, so if you are fallen and dying, do not regret and waste your time: close your eyes and feel what you are going to be missing from, one last time, so that if you are doomed to burn in hell after death, you would at least remember what you used to have.

Abel was bitterly certain that his mother hadn’t had any time to close her eyes and feel what she was going to be missing from, one least time. Being chopped in half could do really funny things.

Or maybe she had been doing that for her whole life. It sounded pleasant, something that Abel wanted to do; so he closed his eyes, ignored the bright flare of agony, tried his best to clear all regrets from his mind and attempted to feel what he was going to be missing from, one last time.

Still, there were regrets.

It was sad, the fact that only regrets, not love or caring or sadness or anger, would be left behind; would be the last thing that he felt.

Abel wished direly that he could get another life: once he did, he would be able to start all over…

He fell into a deep, endless well of thoughts.

Once he started all over, he wouldn’t remember about the foxes at all. He would be born a human child, a mortal with blond hair and gray eyes, or a color variation of something else. He would have a mother and a father, and they wouldn’t hit him or try to kill him, not the mortal ones. He would grow up from his childhood looking at alphabets and pictures of cartoon animals, like elephants, rabbits, and foxes. Perhaps, he might even come over the legend of the many-tailed foxes and be fascinated about it; he would read and create fake facts and pretend that he had five or nine fox tails also. Everything from the world he now lived in would be gone, and moved into another world in a different form - no, he reminded himself. The same world, different life.

Maybe he would even meet a many-tailed fox, or maybe they’d all be extinct by the time he was reborn and old enough to meet a stranger without his parents by his side. Perhaps there would be a whole new generation of foxes, new nine-tailed foxes and eight-tailed foxes, and who knew, even a halfbreed -Abel gritted his teeth at the thought of Lewis, but stopped because it pained him too much-.

But, the point was that he might get to start all over, forget everything he did, and everyone he met and killed, and get a new chance.

Was he himself a ‘new chance’ of his past, long-dead self?

Why did the imaginary mortal life sound so good, when his mother’s last wish had been for him to be a god — if it’s even possible, Abel now suspected.

Dying did strange things to minds, making them come up of new, strange things and decide new flow of events for themselves… It was just too bad that it would be all gone like bubbles, just like in that mortal story with a mermaid, once his vision went black and his soul left the shell it was trapped in.

Perhaps cow blood killed souls also.

Everything was complicated, twisted and confusing. He sometimes wished to scream to the heavens that he wasn’t the criminal of the universe, that he wasn’t the suspect of everything that went wrong.

Mason’s mother had sired a halfbreed, he hardened himself, and his father had taken the halfbreed in. They both deserved to die; blood traitors. Or maybe he was just all wrong.

He abruptly had something to tell Dominic; he had to tell him before he died. Selfishly, he wanted Dominic to remember him, whether in a good way or bad, but he wanted someone to remember him. Abel had to tell him. Not his father. Just his former best friend.

His former best friend that only he himself had thought of as a best friend.

“…you would at least remember what you used to have.” Abel imprinted onto his memory what he had now, what he ‘used to have’. The icy winds, the sun that hung directly above the horizon, providing little warmth, and the rippling grass, and the bird with the yellow plume that had flown away.

He also had mistakes to apologize and pay for, relationships to end, and both foxes and Hunters to take care of. Insane or not, broken or not, the foxes unwillingly needed him. He was a nine-tailed fox; he could still fight and take out a few Hunters…

… Now, only if he could move without screaming.

Abel opened his eyes and blinked. The simplest motion stung.

The sky was pale and gray, what was left of the clouds were only bits of them, and the trees shook from the winds; left, right, left, right.

The bird had returned, the one with the yellow plume and red chest. Strangely enough, its eyes were now silver, a bright color just like Abel’s, although they were half silver and half obsidian black, each of the two orbs split into the two colors. Suddenly, the bird’s yellow plume seemed to glow gold.

Something cold landed on Abel’s forehead, which, he had discovered before, was shockingly chilling, despite the flame inside.

It was a snowflake.

As if on cue, more floated gently down from the sky, landing on Abel like feathers. He had always liked snow, right next to the shadows. They weren’t like rain or ice at all; a soothing kind of cold. He had even made his favorite name after snow; Abel ‘Snow’.

He liked snow. Somewhat like the shadows, they also seemed to be fond of him.

It was winter, the season he was born in—and the one he was going to die in. What was started returns to where it began. Today, the snow would be doing him a favor. They would fall down endlessly from the sky, cover the land in white, and bury his own dead body under the pure whiteness until nobody could find him; until his body was eaten away by other things. What the mortals would find -if they did- would be a gold fox, a mutilated, nine-tailed one at that.

One of his victims who he couldn’t remember the name of, had thought that the rain was the angels’ tears from above, and the snow was when the angels were so sad, their heart and tears and voice had frozen; that was when it snowed.

A little by little, the mesmerizingly shaped snowflakes made his skin numb, more than it already was, and somehow seemed to ease away a tiny part of his pain. It felt wonderful; even if the agony was starting to eat away at his body and soul and life.

“…close your eyes and feel what you are going to be missing from, one last time…”

He closed his eyes.