Fox Trott (First Book of the Shadow Series)

Chapter 47: 83

            That night was the longest night Mystic had ever lived through. It was torture, crying until the white irises in her eyes turned pink and the blood from her chest stained the ground. Bexous did come back, but when he saw her curled up in a corner—half-conscious and so broken that the tears in her eyes had forced them out of focus—he freaked out more than she had ever thought possible. He picked her up and moved her into a different room. When she was laying on the bed, crying softly as he worked in a corner for a minute, he even apologized before injecting her with another liquid. Even though it was enough to calm her down, it didn't help her sleep.

            The entire night, she lay on the rocky bed in silence as Bexous worked at his desk. Every few minutes, he would glance over his shoulder at her. She refused to move. He didn't have the care, or possibly the heart, to ask her what had happened. Hours passed where Mystic was left to deal with her thoughts alone. It was worse than the nights in her cell. At least she had had one person to talk to there. Here, she was completely alone.

            When Bexous had begun to grow tired, he walked over to the bed and sat next to Mystic. She didn't move, look at him, or even notice him. Her eyes were locked on her hands that lay in front of her face.

            Bexous sighed deeply and began to talk. She was surprised at first, but listened to him despite her best efforts to stay buried in her thoughts. It started with how he was sorry for what he had done. How he knew what he was doing was wrong, but didn't know what other solutions there could be. What the solutions were for: he wouldn't say. He changed the subject quickly after that, trying to lighten the mood. He told her how he had seen many things in his life. How great it was when he was able to visit Europe and go as many places as he wished, how even when he had to resort to thievery, he made and lost friends. He changed it again, moving on to what places he had seen and what beauties he had experienced. He talked for hours, his eyes unfocused as he recalled memories that were centuries old. The first car, the first hot air balloon, even being there when the first piano was made. Mystic listened, grateful that she wasn't alone, but still not able to look at his face.

            If there had been a clock in the room, they would have realized that they stayed up well into the morning hours. But in the end, Mystic did fall asleep. It wasn't deep, it wasn't comfortable, and it was filled with painful aches in her chest, but she did sleep. And eventually, Bexous left the room and went back to his work. Completely alone.

            She woke up in a quiet room, vacant of any other living thing save for herself and the spider that clung silently to the cold wall. She sat up to find that her bandages had been replaced while she had been sleeping. The burning need to tear herself apart had faded into a dull throbbing pain. She looked around the room, spotting a bottle of pills sitting on top of a note. She walked over to the desk they were on, leaning on the walls and the bedpost to make sure she didn't fall over on her venture to the other side of the room. The note under the bottle was written neatly, nothing like the writing in her journal that Bexous had left her. It read:

            "Take the day off. Feel free to do what you want; we'll be back soon. Take care. Here are some pain killers if you need them. Take two at a time every 6 hours.

            Sincerely, Gynesis."

            Mystic picked up the bottle and read the label, only to find the bottle stripped of it. She simply set them down again. If she had to go through the pain, she would do it herself and not with questionable medicine.

            She went out of the room and back to her own, grabbing one of the spare brown jackets in the closet. She headed down the hall to where the exit would be. She checked every room along the way, making sure that they were both really gone. At the end of the hall, there were two sets of stairs. One lead straight down to the door with the eye engraved in it. Screams of the monsters on the other side made the door rattle.

            The other set lead upwards, towards light that crept through the crack under the door. No sound came from the other side.

            Something in her chest told her to go up. It couldn't have been her heart, for it was long gone. It pulled her towards the light, but her mind told her to pull away from such petty things. The darkness was predictable, but the light could hold anything.

            She took a step back from the stairs, took a deep breath, then headed down.

            The decent into hell took only a moment, but the weight on her shoulders made it feel like every step took centuries. Every individual stride felt wrong; out of place. But she pushed the fear aside and continued. As she descended into the darkness, fear filled the hollow part of her chest. She whispered quietly to the darkness, as if it could hear her.

            She took a slow breath in, speaking quietly as if she were talking to a sleeping baby, "You don't scare me... but you should be afraid of me." It fled from her chest with an exhale and receded to the darkest corners of the entrapping stone walls. She opened the door cautiously, but she was no longer afraid of what came from the other side.

            The sound of screams and quiet talking mixed with the smell of stale blood. That was enough for her to know that Bexous had truly left. She walked along the hall slowly and quietly. None of the creatures seemed to notice her as the shadows concealed her body well enough. She crept along. Plates with numbers carved into them were screwed into the thick walls that stood between every individual cell, worn white around the corners and red and brown spots mottled the lower numbers. She passed by many of them, reading them silently and glancing into the cells. 10PW, 28FB, and 30 held silent silhouettes of people that seemed mostly human. Halfway down the hall, she let herself read more. 25LC and 6CAP both held some sort of canid creatures. Directly across from the two cells juxtaposed two more that held somewhat human things, although one seemed to be decapitated and abnormally silent. She moved the rest of the way down the hall, almost moving to where The Witch was before she instinctively stopped at one to the right. She looked at the cell, a strange lump in her throat as she did. The silvery metal plate engraved with "83FG" caught her eye. She stared at it for a moment, then looked down at her collarbone. Despite a claw-mark scar separating the 8 in unequal halves, she could see it.

            As if by instinct, she could sense what was there. Tattooed neatly on her chest, just on her sternum, the dark number of 83 stained her. She was only just now acknowledging it, even though it had probably been there the entire time she was here. She looked in the cell. The blood stains were familiar, and her wrists ached looking at the chains that sat still on the stone ground.

            There was a stain that flowed upwards from the floor and nearly reached the ceiling, born from when her kill had been messier out of the rage she felt towards her captor that day. Yet she couldn't remember what the victim looked like, only the anger. The puddle that refused to dry over the course of two weeks where she had seen a human for the first time in what felt like a year. This had been her cell. This was where she had done as she was told, and was turned into something she swore since she was little that she would never be. She felt her muscles tense as anger flashed once again in her mind.

            He had done this to her. Everything. The pain, the torture, the dehumanization of what she had once been, it had all been Him. The Devil who played God. Yet, wouldn't that make her a demon?

And who better to overthrow a king of hell than his own loyal servant?