Finally, finally I've managed to get back to writing. I decided almost immediately to focus entirely on finishing up Reaper. I'll continue DF 7 once Reaper is concluded. That being said, this was not the easiest chapter to start back up with. So many plot elements converge on this chapter, and it had been so long since I'd done any work on it that I'd forgotten a lot of the details. I had to go back and do a lot of reading to make sure everything was fresh again before I could begin.
It took a while.
Either way, I really enjoyed writing this chapter. Finally the four mains have converged and they reach something like an understanding. These are four smart, capable people, and the four of them pooling their resources can only serve to help things along. I'm really looking forward to writing more interactions between these people. It was a lot of fun writing them here. As for updates, they will come as I can complete them, though they will probably still average one update a week.
Chapter Thirteen
Aftermath
Everything was blackness and pain, but the blackness was, by far, more prominent. The pain was more like the backdrop for that blackness. Max tried to look around, but he couldn’t move, because he wasn’t really there. That blackness wasn’t a real place. It was a part of him, a place where his mind went when the pain of the real world got too great, and he was forced to retreat into himself and recover. This place, where he had gone in his mind after the loss of his parents, and again after the loss of his old friend Randy. A place where he’d stayed until the actions of a young man named John had inspired him to step out of the darkness again and choose what kind of man he wanted to be. It was a place that Max refused to return to ever again. He bore down mentally, and he felt himself emerge from that place within himself, and the pain stepped into the foreground along with him. He couldn’t help himself, and he cried out.
Everything was red, a deep red, like blood. Max could smell blood. The pain forced him awake in only a moment, and he recalled that it was his own blood. Everything came back to him, clouded ever so subtly by the intense pain that still plagued him. He remembered the arrival of the detectives, their confrontation, the violation of Detective Thompson’s mind, and the arrival of the man, so sure of himself, so confident that he was in control of the entire room. He remembered facing the man, and being completely and utterly defeated by three simple, impossible words.If he hadn’t already been pale from the shock of his injuries, he was sure that the color would have drained from his face. He choked back further cries of pain, and desperately he diverted all of his concentration to the bond between him and the Soul of Life. There was a bright amber glow, and the pain immediately began to subside.
Max’s vision, blurred since his return to consciousness, began to come into focus. He saw someone kneeling beside him, and he felt a pressure on his wound. It was El, trying to hold the long diagonal cut closed, to keep the blood from flowing out and adding to the broad pool of the sticky red liquid already spread across the floor beneath them. For some reason Max found himself focusing not on the potentially mortal wound, or the tears streaming down El’s cheeks, but the fact that she was kneeling in the puddle, that her hands were covered in the viscous substance. That if she stayed there much longer, she would never get it out of the fabric. He stirred, trying to make her aware, and she realized for the first time that he was awake. She seemed so relieved, but he barely registered why until the glow from his Soul began to die down, reduced to an intermittent flickering, taking even more of the pain with it. His head cleared further, and he realized that El was upset because she thought he had died.
“We have to get you help,” El began, but Max choked out a hasty response.
“No,” he insisted, “we have to go after him. He’s getting away with the file.”
“You’re in no condition for that,” El argued. “You almost died.”
“That doesn’t matter,” max argued. He could feel his flesh knitting back together. It hurt even more than the wound itself, like when you cut your finger, but you don’t really feel it until it starts to close. Only across his entire torso, all at once. He didn’t let this break his concentration, though. He didn’t let the exhaustion get the best of him either, acknowledging the strain that his magic was putting on his wounded body only enough to bury it. He was clammy already, and soon he began to sweat cold. The darkness of unconsciousness began to invade the periphery of his vision, and he pulled a knife from his belt and drove the point slowly into his thigh, giving him something else to focus on, to draw himself back to full awareness.
“What are you doing?” El snapped, reaching down and attempting to pull the knife from his hand. He let her, and she threw it away. He didn’t need it anymore. He pushed El aside, and he sat up with a grunt. The bleeding had stopped. He pulled the severed sections of cloth that had once been his favorite hoodie apart, and he was even more surprised than El to see that his wound had closed. Now all that remained was a deep, gnarly scar so wide that he could put his finger tip in it and run it, submerged, all the way across his chest. It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective. He wouldn’t die from his wound. Though the effort of repairing it had, in and of itself, almost done that job. He took a moment to let out a relieved sigh in celebration of the fact that he was alive, and it seemed like he would be staying that way, at least for a little while longer.
“Y-you fixed it yourself,” El stammered. “I thought you said that your magic heals you over time. How did you know that you could make it happen all at once like that?”
“I didn’t,” Max told her as she helped him to rise uncomfortably to his feet and stand on legs made of jelly, “and I almost didn’t. I got luckier than I deserved, after failing so completely.”
El put her arm gently around him, and straightened his hood, “You can’t be serious. You fought him. You almost beat him. If he hadn’t broken out of your spell, you would have had him.”
Max looked away from her. He was reminded of how his skirmish with the man had ended, and he felt faint again. He didn’t correct El. He didn’t tell her that he was powerless against the man, that his spell couldn’t have succeeded. That the man was the one person on Earth that Max couldn’t understand, couldn’t outwit, and couldn’t defeat alone. That’s when he remembered that he’d been fighting the man alone. He could understand the hesitance of the detectives. James had been surprised by the man’s sudden appearance, and Thompson had still been recovering from what Max himself had done. But El had been waiting her whole life for the chance to face this man. Where had she been during the encounter?
Max thought back. The strain of his healing magic had given him a piercing migraine that was taking far too long to fade, but when he made himself, he recalled El standing off to the side, un-moving, with paralyzing fear plastered across her face. The memory hurt him, because he had felt fear like that before, and knew what it could do to someone. It also hurt him because, in that moment, despite his best efforts, he felt anger well up in him, aimed at El. Anger and blame. If she had fought with him, they might have won and this would all be over. Even though he tried his hardest not to, Max couldn’t help but cast blame on her for his failure.
He forced it down, but as he did, the question slipped out, “What happened to you back there?”
El recoiled from him by a couple of feet and looked away, ashamed.
“I failed,” she said plainly. “He appeared, and I wasn’t able to do anything. I almost got you killed because I was too afraid. I heard him laugh, and I couldn’t move.”
When she mentioned the man’s laugh, it reminded Max of something. “His laugh seemed familiar,” he told El. Knowing that El’s reaction to the man was a result of his laugh let him make the deductive leap he needed to realize where he had heard it before. “He laughed like that,” Max continued, “in your memory. At the time I thought that it was your fear and the age of the memory skewing your perception of the moment. But he really does sound like that.”
Suddenly he couldn’t blame El anymore. He still had nightmares about the voice of the man who had destroyed his life and made Max his servant. Who had killed Max’s first friend. Who had killed countless others, and made Max do the same. If he had been faced with that man again after so long, even having stood up to him once, Max didn’t know if he would have the strength to do so again. He stepped forward, and he wrapped his arms firmly around El, and he pulled her close. She was surprised, but after a moment she turned her head and pressed her face into his welcoming shoulder, and she wept silently.
They remained like that for several minutes. They didn’t say another word. They didn’t have to. They understood each other on the deepest of levels. It was at that point that Max realized that he loved El, that he couldn’t help but love her, because she was the same as he was. She had many of the same scars, figuratively speaking, and so she could look on his scars, and not feel compelled to look away.
Finally, El looked up at him, “It’s alright. I’m alright.” The two of them separated, and for the first time since waking up, Max was reminded of the fact that the two of them weren’t alone. James and Thompson were still there. Thompson was facing away from them, his arms crossed, his face screwed up as if he were deep in thought. James was facing them, but looking away as if he were uncomfortable. He glanced over at them uncertainly, and when he saw that they had broken their embrace, he relaxed a little. Instinctively, Max checked his hood, and then looked over at El, whose helmet was nowhere to be seen. She realized his train of thought immediately, and told him, “When I saw you go down, I panicked. I tossed my helmet aside so that I could see you better. I didn’t even think about it.”
Max nodded. James seemed to realize that the two of them were at a place where they were ready to acknowledge him and his partner, and he spoke up, addressing Max specifically. “I saw him hit you,” he said. “No one could survive that. But you did, and you’re even standing, ready to go after him again. You really are a superhero.”
That made Max laugh his unpleasant laugh. “I’m not a superhero,” he insisted. “I’m only what I told you I was when the two of you arrived: someone who is trying to stop the same man that you are trying to stop.”
“I know,” James said hastily, defensively, “I know that for sure now. But it wasn’t me who thought you were the one behind it.”
He looked over at his partner, “I’m an optimist. Detective Thompson is a pessimist and a skeptic. He was the one who insisted that we come in ready to make an arrest, if we encountered you here. I didn’t want to.”
Suddenly Max was surprised to realize that this trained police detective, who was clearly older than Max by at least a few years, was apologizing to him, and looking for forgiveness. Max thought for a moment, trying to decide how to reply.Finally he said, “It’s understandable. When I saw what that man had done to the person in that alley, the first thing I thought was that I could have done it. I don’t blame the police for thinking the same thing. I’ve never been secretive about my existence, or the fact that I go after bad people. And that man was one of the worst.”
James seemed to relax. Max was stunned that this young man seemed to be deferring to him, but he kept his composure. He looked from James to Thompson, and he said, “Unlike you, I do owe someone in this room an apology. Detective Thompson.”
Thompson smiled a wry smile, and let out a brief, hysterical laugh, “He knows my freaking name. Yeah, okay.”
He turned toward the other three, and Max could see turmoil in the older man’s eyes. He was still dealing with the aftereffects of what Max had put him through, while also coming to terms with what he had seen. Max got the distinct feeling that where James had already been a believer in magic, Thompson had been the furthest thing from one. Maybe he just didn’t have a reason to believe it, or he did, and he had made himself remain a skeptic, unwilling to accept a world that he would never fully understand. After a moment’s consideration, Max realized that he would bet on the latter.
“I apologize to you, Detective,” Max told him, trying to sound cordial. “I forced you to relive something that-.”
“Forget it,” Thompson interrupted, uttering another small, hysterical laugh and shaking his head, “I’m trying to forget it. You might as well forget it, too.”
He ran his palm across his face, and looked up at the dark ceiling, exasperated.
“I saw everything,” the older man said. “I was out of it, but I was still aware of what was happening. I saw you fight that guy with the crazy...magic knife,” he almost choked on the word magic, “and I saw him almost do the same to you that he did to all those other people.”
He shook his head slowly, and then looked up at Max for the first time since bursting into the room. His eyes were wild, and they were only very slowly settling down.
“Shit, kid,” he said, “I’ve seen a lot in my years doing this job. Things that I can’t ever unsee. That shit in the alley was the craziest, but not by much. You have no idea how strangely comforting it is to know that something like that can’t be done with just the assets of the average psycho. And seeing what I saw here today, first hand, it sure as hell puts some of the other shit I’ve seen during my career in a new perspective. And explains some shit I could never quite explain. You put me through hell today, but I still don’t think today was a bad day.”
He paused for a second, “Well no, it was pretty freakin’ bad. But either way, I’m sure as hell not gonna try and arrest you two again. At least not yet. Someone’s gotta stop that guy before he does more of what he’s best at, and with there being no anti-magic department of law enforcement, that leaves the four of us.”
“You’re serious?” James asked him in disbelief.
“Yeah,” Thompson replied begrudgingly, looking again right at Max, “as much as I still don’t like you or what you do, I’m not the kind of person to ignore something that’s right in front of my eyes. That guy has been following a trail that led him here, to that file that he stole, and he’s been dropping bodies along the way. I can only assume that he’s going to drop at least a few more. I don’t stand a chance of stopping him. I can’t do the shit that he can do. Bullets seem to hurt him, so I could probably take him down if I brought enough manpower, but if I went to the chief with this story, he’d make me prove it, and that’s assuming that he didn’t suspend me pending psychiatric evaluation. It’d take time either way, and who knows what this guy’s got planned, or what his timetable is. We have to assume that each minute we waste we’re risking another life. It makes sense that we work together.”
He sighed deeply and shook his head again, “Shit, I can’t believe I just said that.”
James looked on his partner with something between respect and disbelief, “Neither can I.”
“Yeah, okay,” El said, speaking to the pair of them for the first time, in a harsher version of the sarcastic way that she’d spoken to Max when they’d first started working together, distancing herself from the two of them emotionally purely out of habit. “It seems like the two of you are in the midst of a transformative moment here, but in case you’ve already forgotten, we’re on borrowed time. Even ignoring the threat of our mystery man, we have other problems, mainly the knife marks all over this room, the bullet hole in the wall over there, and oh yeah, the huge pool of my friend’s blood. Eventually someone is going to come in here and see this, and it’s going to require an explanation.”
“I’m surprised that someone hasn’t come by already,” Thompson interjected, "with all the noise we were making in here,”
“That’s my fault,” Max replied flatly. “When magic-users fight, it creates something called a Shadow Game and isolates you from the world around you, to a point.”
“Not to mention,” El continued, ignoring their brief exchange, “that he made off with the file. That was our last clue to whatever this guy is planning. Without it we have no idea where he went, or what he’s trying to accomplish. If we can’t find another lead, that’s it, it’s back to chasing after reports of his attacks. I am not willing to take so many steps back when I’m this close!”
She was practically screaming by the end of her rant, and all eyes were firmly on her. Thompson was the first to speak up, without even blinking, “Been chasing this guy a long time, I imagine?”
“Yes,” El replied fiercely, “for a long time, for reasons that are my own. There is no one who wants to take this man down more than I do, and I’ll keep fighting to do just that, with or without the two of you.”
Thompson scrutinized her for a moment, as if sizing her up, and then he said, “You’d be the right age. Hair color is right. You’re their daughter, aren’t you? The first time this guy killed, two of his victims were archaeologists with a kid daughter. The file said she survived. You’re her, right?”
El was taken aback, and Max was caught between anger at Thompson’s presumption, and amazement that he had been able to make the connection at all with everything else that was currently swimming around in his head. Even his own partner was impressed. This was the brilliant detective that James had heard stories about.
“I am,” El said, finally, deciding in that moment that she didn’t care that they knew, that it didn’t matter in the end, “why do you care? It only confirms my dedication to bringing this man down.”
“It also raises a few question,” Thompson countered, with the tone and conviction of a trained and experienced interrogator, “like how far you’re willing to go to bring this guy down? What happens if some innocent civi gets in your way?”
El fumed, “Then I’d go around them. I remember my parents enough to know that they wouldn’t want me to avenge them if it meant hurting someone who had nothing to do with anything.”
“And what do you plan on doing with this guy once you catch up with him?” Thompson asked immediately, not missing a beat, meeting El’s eyes, and keeping the pressure on her.
El kept eye contact with the man, not even looking as she raised her bow, knocked an arrow, and fired it over Thompson's shoulder at the bullet hole in the far corner of the room. The arrow lodged itself perfectly within that same hole. El narrowed her eyes as she replied, “I plan to kill him.”
They held each other's’ gaze, neither of them backing down, and to the surprise of everyone in the room, except Thompson himself, it was Thompson who blinked first, much sooner than anyone would have expected. He sighed, frowned, and put his hands leisurely in his pockets, “I’m a good cop. I believe in bringing the bad guy in, not taking him out, but after seeing what this guy is capable of, I guess I can live with that.”
Suddenly, and thankfully, most of the tension in the room disappeared. “Now,” Thompson said, “we just have to figure out where to go from here, without a lead to go on.”
Aftermath
Everything was blackness and pain, but the blackness was, by far, more prominent. The pain was more like the backdrop for that blackness. Max tried to look around, but he couldn’t move, because he wasn’t really there. That blackness wasn’t a real place. It was a part of him, a place where his mind went when the pain of the real world got too great, and he was forced to retreat into himself and recover. This place, where he had gone in his mind after the loss of his parents, and again after the loss of his old friend Randy. A place where he’d stayed until the actions of a young man named John had inspired him to step out of the darkness again and choose what kind of man he wanted to be. It was a place that Max refused to return to ever again. He bore down mentally, and he felt himself emerge from that place within himself, and the pain stepped into the foreground along with him. He couldn’t help himself, and he cried out.
Everything was red, a deep red, like blood. Max could smell blood. The pain forced him awake in only a moment, and he recalled that it was his own blood. Everything came back to him, clouded ever so subtly by the intense pain that still plagued him. He remembered the arrival of the detectives, their confrontation, the violation of Detective Thompson’s mind, and the arrival of the man, so sure of himself, so confident that he was in control of the entire room. He remembered facing the man, and being completely and utterly defeated by three simple, impossible words.If he hadn’t already been pale from the shock of his injuries, he was sure that the color would have drained from his face. He choked back further cries of pain, and desperately he diverted all of his concentration to the bond between him and the Soul of Life. There was a bright amber glow, and the pain immediately began to subside.
Max’s vision, blurred since his return to consciousness, began to come into focus. He saw someone kneeling beside him, and he felt a pressure on his wound. It was El, trying to hold the long diagonal cut closed, to keep the blood from flowing out and adding to the broad pool of the sticky red liquid already spread across the floor beneath them. For some reason Max found himself focusing not on the potentially mortal wound, or the tears streaming down El’s cheeks, but the fact that she was kneeling in the puddle, that her hands were covered in the viscous substance. That if she stayed there much longer, she would never get it out of the fabric. He stirred, trying to make her aware, and she realized for the first time that he was awake. She seemed so relieved, but he barely registered why until the glow from his Soul began to die down, reduced to an intermittent flickering, taking even more of the pain with it. His head cleared further, and he realized that El was upset because she thought he had died.
“We have to get you help,” El began, but Max choked out a hasty response.
“No,” he insisted, “we have to go after him. He’s getting away with the file.”
“You’re in no condition for that,” El argued. “You almost died.”
“That doesn’t matter,” max argued. He could feel his flesh knitting back together. It hurt even more than the wound itself, like when you cut your finger, but you don’t really feel it until it starts to close. Only across his entire torso, all at once. He didn’t let this break his concentration, though. He didn’t let the exhaustion get the best of him either, acknowledging the strain that his magic was putting on his wounded body only enough to bury it. He was clammy already, and soon he began to sweat cold. The darkness of unconsciousness began to invade the periphery of his vision, and he pulled a knife from his belt and drove the point slowly into his thigh, giving him something else to focus on, to draw himself back to full awareness.
“What are you doing?” El snapped, reaching down and attempting to pull the knife from his hand. He let her, and she threw it away. He didn’t need it anymore. He pushed El aside, and he sat up with a grunt. The bleeding had stopped. He pulled the severed sections of cloth that had once been his favorite hoodie apart, and he was even more surprised than El to see that his wound had closed. Now all that remained was a deep, gnarly scar so wide that he could put his finger tip in it and run it, submerged, all the way across his chest. It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective. He wouldn’t die from his wound. Though the effort of repairing it had, in and of itself, almost done that job. He took a moment to let out a relieved sigh in celebration of the fact that he was alive, and it seemed like he would be staying that way, at least for a little while longer.
“Y-you fixed it yourself,” El stammered. “I thought you said that your magic heals you over time. How did you know that you could make it happen all at once like that?”
“I didn’t,” Max told her as she helped him to rise uncomfortably to his feet and stand on legs made of jelly, “and I almost didn’t. I got luckier than I deserved, after failing so completely.”
El put her arm gently around him, and straightened his hood, “You can’t be serious. You fought him. You almost beat him. If he hadn’t broken out of your spell, you would have had him.”
Max looked away from her. He was reminded of how his skirmish with the man had ended, and he felt faint again. He didn’t correct El. He didn’t tell her that he was powerless against the man, that his spell couldn’t have succeeded. That the man was the one person on Earth that Max couldn’t understand, couldn’t outwit, and couldn’t defeat alone. That’s when he remembered that he’d been fighting the man alone. He could understand the hesitance of the detectives. James had been surprised by the man’s sudden appearance, and Thompson had still been recovering from what Max himself had done. But El had been waiting her whole life for the chance to face this man. Where had she been during the encounter?
Max thought back. The strain of his healing magic had given him a piercing migraine that was taking far too long to fade, but when he made himself, he recalled El standing off to the side, un-moving, with paralyzing fear plastered across her face. The memory hurt him, because he had felt fear like that before, and knew what it could do to someone. It also hurt him because, in that moment, despite his best efforts, he felt anger well up in him, aimed at El. Anger and blame. If she had fought with him, they might have won and this would all be over. Even though he tried his hardest not to, Max couldn’t help but cast blame on her for his failure.
He forced it down, but as he did, the question slipped out, “What happened to you back there?”
El recoiled from him by a couple of feet and looked away, ashamed.
“I failed,” she said plainly. “He appeared, and I wasn’t able to do anything. I almost got you killed because I was too afraid. I heard him laugh, and I couldn’t move.”
When she mentioned the man’s laugh, it reminded Max of something. “His laugh seemed familiar,” he told El. Knowing that El’s reaction to the man was a result of his laugh let him make the deductive leap he needed to realize where he had heard it before. “He laughed like that,” Max continued, “in your memory. At the time I thought that it was your fear and the age of the memory skewing your perception of the moment. But he really does sound like that.”
Suddenly he couldn’t blame El anymore. He still had nightmares about the voice of the man who had destroyed his life and made Max his servant. Who had killed Max’s first friend. Who had killed countless others, and made Max do the same. If he had been faced with that man again after so long, even having stood up to him once, Max didn’t know if he would have the strength to do so again. He stepped forward, and he wrapped his arms firmly around El, and he pulled her close. She was surprised, but after a moment she turned her head and pressed her face into his welcoming shoulder, and she wept silently.
They remained like that for several minutes. They didn’t say another word. They didn’t have to. They understood each other on the deepest of levels. It was at that point that Max realized that he loved El, that he couldn’t help but love her, because she was the same as he was. She had many of the same scars, figuratively speaking, and so she could look on his scars, and not feel compelled to look away.
Finally, El looked up at him, “It’s alright. I’m alright.” The two of them separated, and for the first time since waking up, Max was reminded of the fact that the two of them weren’t alone. James and Thompson were still there. Thompson was facing away from them, his arms crossed, his face screwed up as if he were deep in thought. James was facing them, but looking away as if he were uncomfortable. He glanced over at them uncertainly, and when he saw that they had broken their embrace, he relaxed a little. Instinctively, Max checked his hood, and then looked over at El, whose helmet was nowhere to be seen. She realized his train of thought immediately, and told him, “When I saw you go down, I panicked. I tossed my helmet aside so that I could see you better. I didn’t even think about it.”
Max nodded. James seemed to realize that the two of them were at a place where they were ready to acknowledge him and his partner, and he spoke up, addressing Max specifically. “I saw him hit you,” he said. “No one could survive that. But you did, and you’re even standing, ready to go after him again. You really are a superhero.”
That made Max laugh his unpleasant laugh. “I’m not a superhero,” he insisted. “I’m only what I told you I was when the two of you arrived: someone who is trying to stop the same man that you are trying to stop.”
“I know,” James said hastily, defensively, “I know that for sure now. But it wasn’t me who thought you were the one behind it.”
He looked over at his partner, “I’m an optimist. Detective Thompson is a pessimist and a skeptic. He was the one who insisted that we come in ready to make an arrest, if we encountered you here. I didn’t want to.”
Suddenly Max was surprised to realize that this trained police detective, who was clearly older than Max by at least a few years, was apologizing to him, and looking for forgiveness. Max thought for a moment, trying to decide how to reply.Finally he said, “It’s understandable. When I saw what that man had done to the person in that alley, the first thing I thought was that I could have done it. I don’t blame the police for thinking the same thing. I’ve never been secretive about my existence, or the fact that I go after bad people. And that man was one of the worst.”
James seemed to relax. Max was stunned that this young man seemed to be deferring to him, but he kept his composure. He looked from James to Thompson, and he said, “Unlike you, I do owe someone in this room an apology. Detective Thompson.”
Thompson smiled a wry smile, and let out a brief, hysterical laugh, “He knows my freaking name. Yeah, okay.”
He turned toward the other three, and Max could see turmoil in the older man’s eyes. He was still dealing with the aftereffects of what Max had put him through, while also coming to terms with what he had seen. Max got the distinct feeling that where James had already been a believer in magic, Thompson had been the furthest thing from one. Maybe he just didn’t have a reason to believe it, or he did, and he had made himself remain a skeptic, unwilling to accept a world that he would never fully understand. After a moment’s consideration, Max realized that he would bet on the latter.
“I apologize to you, Detective,” Max told him, trying to sound cordial. “I forced you to relive something that-.”
“Forget it,” Thompson interrupted, uttering another small, hysterical laugh and shaking his head, “I’m trying to forget it. You might as well forget it, too.”
He ran his palm across his face, and looked up at the dark ceiling, exasperated.
“I saw everything,” the older man said. “I was out of it, but I was still aware of what was happening. I saw you fight that guy with the crazy...magic knife,” he almost choked on the word magic, “and I saw him almost do the same to you that he did to all those other people.”
He shook his head slowly, and then looked up at Max for the first time since bursting into the room. His eyes were wild, and they were only very slowly settling down.
“Shit, kid,” he said, “I’ve seen a lot in my years doing this job. Things that I can’t ever unsee. That shit in the alley was the craziest, but not by much. You have no idea how strangely comforting it is to know that something like that can’t be done with just the assets of the average psycho. And seeing what I saw here today, first hand, it sure as hell puts some of the other shit I’ve seen during my career in a new perspective. And explains some shit I could never quite explain. You put me through hell today, but I still don’t think today was a bad day.”
He paused for a second, “Well no, it was pretty freakin’ bad. But either way, I’m sure as hell not gonna try and arrest you two again. At least not yet. Someone’s gotta stop that guy before he does more of what he’s best at, and with there being no anti-magic department of law enforcement, that leaves the four of us.”
“You’re serious?” James asked him in disbelief.
“Yeah,” Thompson replied begrudgingly, looking again right at Max, “as much as I still don’t like you or what you do, I’m not the kind of person to ignore something that’s right in front of my eyes. That guy has been following a trail that led him here, to that file that he stole, and he’s been dropping bodies along the way. I can only assume that he’s going to drop at least a few more. I don’t stand a chance of stopping him. I can’t do the shit that he can do. Bullets seem to hurt him, so I could probably take him down if I brought enough manpower, but if I went to the chief with this story, he’d make me prove it, and that’s assuming that he didn’t suspend me pending psychiatric evaluation. It’d take time either way, and who knows what this guy’s got planned, or what his timetable is. We have to assume that each minute we waste we’re risking another life. It makes sense that we work together.”
He sighed deeply and shook his head again, “Shit, I can’t believe I just said that.”
James looked on his partner with something between respect and disbelief, “Neither can I.”
“Yeah, okay,” El said, speaking to the pair of them for the first time, in a harsher version of the sarcastic way that she’d spoken to Max when they’d first started working together, distancing herself from the two of them emotionally purely out of habit. “It seems like the two of you are in the midst of a transformative moment here, but in case you’ve already forgotten, we’re on borrowed time. Even ignoring the threat of our mystery man, we have other problems, mainly the knife marks all over this room, the bullet hole in the wall over there, and oh yeah, the huge pool of my friend’s blood. Eventually someone is going to come in here and see this, and it’s going to require an explanation.”
“I’m surprised that someone hasn’t come by already,” Thompson interjected, "with all the noise we were making in here,”
“That’s my fault,” Max replied flatly. “When magic-users fight, it creates something called a Shadow Game and isolates you from the world around you, to a point.”
“Not to mention,” El continued, ignoring their brief exchange, “that he made off with the file. That was our last clue to whatever this guy is planning. Without it we have no idea where he went, or what he’s trying to accomplish. If we can’t find another lead, that’s it, it’s back to chasing after reports of his attacks. I am not willing to take so many steps back when I’m this close!”
She was practically screaming by the end of her rant, and all eyes were firmly on her. Thompson was the first to speak up, without even blinking, “Been chasing this guy a long time, I imagine?”
“Yes,” El replied fiercely, “for a long time, for reasons that are my own. There is no one who wants to take this man down more than I do, and I’ll keep fighting to do just that, with or without the two of you.”
Thompson scrutinized her for a moment, as if sizing her up, and then he said, “You’d be the right age. Hair color is right. You’re their daughter, aren’t you? The first time this guy killed, two of his victims were archaeologists with a kid daughter. The file said she survived. You’re her, right?”
El was taken aback, and Max was caught between anger at Thompson’s presumption, and amazement that he had been able to make the connection at all with everything else that was currently swimming around in his head. Even his own partner was impressed. This was the brilliant detective that James had heard stories about.
“I am,” El said, finally, deciding in that moment that she didn’t care that they knew, that it didn’t matter in the end, “why do you care? It only confirms my dedication to bringing this man down.”
“It also raises a few question,” Thompson countered, with the tone and conviction of a trained and experienced interrogator, “like how far you’re willing to go to bring this guy down? What happens if some innocent civi gets in your way?”
El fumed, “Then I’d go around them. I remember my parents enough to know that they wouldn’t want me to avenge them if it meant hurting someone who had nothing to do with anything.”
“And what do you plan on doing with this guy once you catch up with him?” Thompson asked immediately, not missing a beat, meeting El’s eyes, and keeping the pressure on her.
El kept eye contact with the man, not even looking as she raised her bow, knocked an arrow, and fired it over Thompson's shoulder at the bullet hole in the far corner of the room. The arrow lodged itself perfectly within that same hole. El narrowed her eyes as she replied, “I plan to kill him.”
They held each other's’ gaze, neither of them backing down, and to the surprise of everyone in the room, except Thompson himself, it was Thompson who blinked first, much sooner than anyone would have expected. He sighed, frowned, and put his hands leisurely in his pockets, “I’m a good cop. I believe in bringing the bad guy in, not taking him out, but after seeing what this guy is capable of, I guess I can live with that.”
Suddenly, and thankfully, most of the tension in the room disappeared. “Now,” Thompson said, “we just have to figure out where to go from here, without a lead to go on.”
No comments:
Post a Comment