Wow, I simply could not get into the mood to write this chapter. This is where, for the first time, the darker side of the vigilante lifestyle has to be addressed. Max may be of the Batman mindset, that killing criminals should be avoided, and El might only be interested in killing one man, but their lives still come with steeper consequences than most. The end of the chapter is leaning toward hopeful, but the rest of the chapter is anything but, and while I think it came out okay, and is interesting, writing it was a drag. I don't like stripping the happiness from my characters, I really don't.
Consequences
Max woke up early the following morning, as had become his instinct. He was surprised to find El lying against him, snoring softly. The events of the previous night came back to him instantly, and he felt himself blush. Careful not to wake her, Max slipped from the bed and quickly pulled his clothes back on. He looked around, unsure what to do from here. He couldn’t, and wouldn’t leave, but a large part of him didn’t want to be around when El awoke. Meaning just to step outside into the pre-dawn for a breath of fresh air, Max took a step, and El stirred. Max turned to face her as her eyes fluttered open and met his.
“Morning,” she said drowsily. Max nodded in response.
“Sneaking away while I sleep?” El asked, in jest. “I didn’t take you for that kind of guy.”
Then she saw where he was standing and, sounding worried, she asked seriously, “You weren’t leaving, were you?”
“Of course not,” Max replied. “I was going to step out for some air. I didn’t want to wake you.”
“I’m glad you did,” she said. “We need to get out of here before the morning cleaners come ‘round and find us squatting.”
Max nodded. He hadn’t thought of that. He was more shaken than he’d realized, and he became even more so when El slipped from beneath the sheets, completely nude. Max’s cheeks burned again, and he turned away.
El chuckled, “Don’t tell me you’re embarrassed around me. There really isn’t much of me that you haven’t seen at this point.”
Max still didn’t look at her. “Do we need to talk about what happened?” El asked as she pulled her clothes back on as well, and then reached for her body armor. “Because I’ll tell you right now, I don’t regret for a second what happened. I’m not sure yet if it’s something I want to do again, but I really like you, and I think you like me, and we trust each other, and I think we both needed to unwind a little after hitting such a frustrating dead end. And just life in general.”
Max thought about that. It wasn’t like he’d hated the experience. He just never expected to ever be so intimate with anyone. He didn’t want to be. Connections tended to become weights to drag you down. It was why he’d left his recent allies behind. But he was already connected to El, wasn’t he? He’d committed just the night before to helping El with her crusade, no matter what, and he’d genuinely meant it. Adding another level to the connection that they shared didn’t really make things all that more complicated. So, as El finished snapping her armor on, Max met her eyes again.
“There you are,” she said, smiling. She looked out the window, at the sunlight peeking up over the horizon, “What do you say we get outta here? Maybe take the day off while we decide what to do next? I can stash my gear somewhere, along with your cape, and we can hit a restaurant or something. I haven’t eaten anything that wasn’t stolen in months. Well, I mean it would still be stolen, since I’ll be paying for it using a fraudulent credit card, but you get the point.”
Max smiled contemplatively, “You know, that actually sounds like it might be interesting.”
“Things I come up with usually are,” El remarked. She seemed even more open with Max today than she’d already been, and he was beginning to feel the same way with her. If one thing could be said for the experience of the previous night, it was that, now that he’d pushed past his initial aversion, Max really felt like he knew El. Also, surprisingly, he didn’t mind the thought of knowing her better.
“First we’ve gotta go,” El finally said. She’d put all of her armor on, save for her helmet, which she’d strapped to her pack. She slung it onto her back, and reached out with right hand. Max took it in his left, and with a flicker of his Soul of Life, the two of them dissolved into smoke and bled into the air outside. Max willed the smoke to lighten and blend with the morning clouds, and the pair rose upward. Max almost wondered if this could be true. Could he really be content? Happy, even? It was a question that he’d never had cause to ask himself, and one which, unfortunately, he wouldn’t answer today, because from above, he saw something that killed his good mood dead.
The stream of white smoke changed direction, swirling toward a nearby rooftop. With a flutter of wind, the two reformed and ran to the roof edge. El had seen it too. “Those are police cars,” she said.
“Yeah,” Max agreed.
“And they’re heading right for the hospital we visited yesterday.”
“They would seem to be,” Max replied, his voice somber. The duo didn’t meet each others’ eyes. They didn’t say another word. They knew that their day of relaxation together had ended before it had begun. They had work to do, and, in that moment, Max suspected that El had the same notion that he did, that they wouldn’t have work if not for their own actions. They didn’t take each others’ hands this time. Instead, Max’s magic was what reached out for El, wrapping her up. They dissolved into smoke again, and followed the cruisers toward their destination.
Max pushed himself as hard as he could. He and El arrived at the hospital just after the police did. “Wait here,” Max said, “I’ll slip in and blend with the shadows and see what’s going on.”
He didn’t have to say which room he planned to visit first. He and El shared the same lump in the pits of their stomachs. El nodded, and Max went to work. He dissolved once again, and retraced his path from the previous night. He traversed the air vent, weaving through the walls of the building, and seeped into Arlen Cord’s room. He merged himself with the only deep shadow, in the corner of the room adjacent to the window, just as the police came in. Max was shocked to see, alongside the local police, the two detectives from the crime scene in the alley, the younger of the two carrying a laptop case on his back. They looked around the room. The local police were taken aback, but the two detectives clearly recognized the scene before them.
The older detective sighed heavily and exclaimed, “Jesus Christ.” He waved the other officers out of the room as the younger detective immediately leaned in and began to examine the sight before him. Max wasn’t surprised by what he saw. He’d expected it. The scene now under inspection by the pair of detectives looked much like the one in the alley, except that what had been done to Arlen Cord seemed to have more purpose. He was splayed open, as the mystery man’s last victim had been, but the damage had clearly been inflicted more slowly. The elderly man had been tortured. Max could see it, so he wasn’t surprised when the two detectives came to the same conclusion.
“The real question is,” the older detective said, “what was he tortured for? And what connection does this man have to the last victim?”
“Maybe he doesn’t have any connection to him,” the younger detective replied. “Maybe this is all random.”
“You wish it were,” the older detective said judgmentally. “Your friend the Reaper is purposeful and methodical. If these killings are random, it means he’s off the hook.”
Max took a deep breath. He’d expected that he was a suspect in these killings, but hearing it and expecting it were two very different things. He didn’t allow himself to react, though, and continued to listen to the older detective speak.
“No,” the downtrodden-looking man said, “this isn’t a coincidence. To come from the city all the way out here to kill some random old guy, the same old guy that your search found in relation to similar killings just a day ago, it isn’t random. Whoever is doing this, whether it’s Reaper or somebody else, they were, for whatever reason, only just made aware of this guy’s existence here, and they came to extract information from him. We have no way of knowing what it was that this guy knew that was worth killing for, or if the killer got what he wanted before this poor bastard bled out.”
“Detective Thompson,” the younger detective said very formally, turning to face his comrade.
“Detective James?” Thompson said, almost mockingly, one eyebrow raised inquisitively.
“It’s just,” James continued, “the way you see connections, it’s inspiring. People always say you were one of the best in the city and now I see-.”
“Don’t call me that,” Thompson interrupted. He was forceful and aggressive, but Max saw the truth in the man’s eyes: he was pained by James’ words, not offended. “Don’t call me ‘the best’. I lost everything to those words.”
James looked upon his partner with interest, but it became clear very quickly that Thompson wasn’t going to elaborate, and even though James clearly hungered to know more, he turned his attention back to the crime at hand. “What now?” he asked.
“Now we get the locals in here to bag and tag the scene. Then we head down to the local precinct and I take a nap while the tech guys, and you, figure out what to do after that.”
“I have been meaning to run another search,” James said, ignorant of Thompson clear fatalistic attitude, “on Professor Cord to see if he is connected to anything else in the area. He was committed for saying some very outlandish things, but he made the choice to be placed in a hospital in New York. I’m curious as to why. What connection did he have to this state?”
“Yeah, you do that,” Thompson said, turning and leaving the room with an exasperated sigh. After a moment, James turned and followed. Wasting no time, Max emerged from behind the blanket of shadows which had been hiding him, and he stepped close to Arlen Cord’s mutilated body. The man’s hands were clenched so tightly that even death hadn’t relaxed their grip. Max felt an aching in his heart. If his theory was correct, this was his fault. This man would be alive if not for Max, if not for the Reaper, appearing in his room the previous night. It was strangely ironic, and Max found, that despite the horror of it all, he had to stop himself from laughing.
He looked once more at the man’s wrinkled hands, and he suddenly had an idea. He summoned up some smoke, and directed it to seep into the man’s hands. After a moment, the smoke sent seeping into the professor’s right hand emerged and deposited a tightly-crumpled sheet of paper in Max’s gloved hand. A piece of paper that Arlen Cord had died clutching, that he’d died hiding from his assailant, hiding it in plain sight. He didn’t uncrumple the paper. Somehow he knew that El should be present when he did. Without another thought, Max dissolved once again and seeped back into the vents, into the wall, retracing his steps to rejoin with the girl waiting for him on the rooftop above. A moment later, the police forensic specialists entered the room, blissfully unaware that a vital clue had just managed to evade their inspection.
Max reformed next to El, who still hadn’t replaced her helmet. She was sitting back against a protruding vent, much like the one that Max had used as cover when they’d met, just staring into space. Max sat down next to her and lowered his hood before handing El the page. He recounted the scene inside Arlen Cord’s room to her. She took a calming breath, and then she read aloud from the page, which looked as if it had been torn from a notebook:
“She came again today, the girl who I protected at the expense of her parents, but she wasn’t a girl this time. Today she was a young woman, and I think she was real, though I’m not sure about her companion. I can’t help but wonder, not for the first time in these many years, if there was more that I could have done to save more people. As soon as Jacob began sending all of the genuine research notes back to the university in secret and replacing them with false reports, I should have pressed him further for more information.
“I still don’t know why he did what he did, or if it had anything to do with the attack that took his life and the lives of so many of his peers. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, and he was just being cautious to protect his work, but I can’t help but feel that there is something more to all of this. After all, it wasn’t my imagination that, as the end neared, Jacob was afraid of-.”
She paused, “That’s where it stops.”
“Jacob was your dad?” Max asked.
El nodded, and then said, contemplatively, “Arlen said he was afraid of something. Afraid of what?”
“Something he discovered during his work?” Max speculated. “A magic item, maybe? Perhaps the same magic item that the killer uses now to make so many cuts of irregular depths in his victims.”
“If this guy already has the item,” El wondered, “then why did he come here and torture Arlen? What else could he want? He already has incredible power if he can do that to people. What else could he be looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Max replied, “but Arlen’s journal page mentions your father’s genuine findings from that dig. I wonder if the answers might be in them. It sounds like Arlen was one of only a few people who knew where your father was sending them.”
“Back to the university,” El said, completing Max’s thought for him.
“I think our next step has to be to find out what university helped fund your father’s expedition, and try to recover these genuine records.”
“Should we?” El asked. “It sounds like my parents were killed over these research notes. What if we lead their killer right to them? After all, it’s what we’ve both been thinking. If this guy was looking for information about my parents’ expedition, there is no reason why he wouldn’t have come here earlier unless he didn’t know that Arlen was still alive. He somehow followed us here. Arlen would still be alive if we hadn’t found him. Can we take the risk of repeating our mistake?”
“I don’t see that we have a choice,” Max replied. “We know that the killer never saw this page, but we don’t know what, if anything, he was able to get Arlen to reveal. He may already know where the research is filed. We have to get to it first. Anything that is so important that he would kill this many people over it is too dangerous to be allowed to fall into his hands.”
El nodded, and she banished the lingering sadness from her expression, “You’re right. Let’s find a place to hold up for a while, and I’ll do some research. I’ll try to reverse engineer Arlen’s employment history and see if I can discover which universities he might have gone too for funding when my dad asked him for help.”
“It’ll be a university in New York state,” Max told her. “I overheard the detectives talking. Arlen was offered residence in multiple institutions, but he chose this one for no real reason other than the fact that it was here. I think he situated himself near to the notes that he must have decided it was his responsibility to protect. But if he was smart-.”
“He was,” El interjected.
“If he was smart,” Max concluded, “he wouldn’t want to draw too much attention to the thing he’s protecting. Maybe it would be somewhere upstate?”
“And they would have to have a good archeology program to have been interested in my father’s work,” El added. She stood up, “It’s a place to start either way.” She reached out for Max. He took her hand with a sideways smile, and she helped him up. A moment later, the two of them were gone, once again spiraling through the sky.
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