Hangman Chapter 40

Chapter 40-

The window that made up the top quarter of the door had been obscured by a black sheet. The handle was locked, but neither Noire nor Gruse had any intention of rising from their seats and going inside. If one of them were to press their ear to its cold metal, they would have been able to hear groans and cries of pain.

“Do you think you could do that?” Noire broke the silence, pointing limply at the door.

Gruse looked back and forth from him to the room, thinking her answer through carefully.

“No, it would be worse for me,” she finally answered, looking down.

“Really?” Noire didn’t believe it. “How many people have you killed? And you couldn’t torture someone?”

“There’s a big difference between killing someone and torturing them,” she replied curtly. “It makes me sick to see people hurting for too long, that’s why my Vocation will kill anything instantly.”

“Do you need it to be that fast?” he questioned, studying his nails.

“If I wanted to, I could control it to be slower,” she explained. “I just don’t need to most of the time.”

The door opened with a terrible squeaking noise that made them both recoil and cover their ears. Eroh’s boots echoed on the room’s concrete floors, as he emerged from the darkness, his claws dripping with venom.

“How’d it go?” Noire inquired, standing up and stretching.

Eroh scoffed.

“He talked pretty quickly; I knew he was one of those political types, so I wasn’t expecting him to last very long. They don’t take pain very well.” He smirked to the side, away from them, as if it was a joke he was sharing with himself.

“So, any names, then?” Gruse only wanted to get on with it. She was hoping the ambassador would break early, as she didn’t think she could stand the perverse pleasure Eroh took in the activity.

“Nothing we didn’t know already,” he leaned against the wall and spoke lazily. “Mostly security officers that were on record, the location, yadda yadda…”

Eroh scratched his head, trying to remember any more important details, before his eyes lit up.

“Yeah, yeah!” he said, snapping his fingers. “There was one name that sounded kind of familiar.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, some, eh… Gideon Jepta, I think.”

Noire’s brow furrowed for a moment. Abruptly, he burst into laughter.

“Jepta?” he cackled. “The Gideon Jepta?”

Gruse watched him, spin around on one foot, his arms clutching his sides.

“Mello’s gonna get a kick out of that!” he continued through peals of laughter. “Just wait til’ he gets back, my God!”

When he was excited, Noire’s voice became high and effeminate. He’d once shared with Gruse that he had no friends as a youth for his effeminate nature, and while it showed in his manner of dress, he now sounded the part as well. When she was a girl, her mother had told her that the laugh was the closest thing to proof of one’s soul, and that thought remained stuck at the back of her mind in this moment.

“Speaking of Mello,” she interrupted. “Where was he again?”

“He’s in his room,” Eroh shrugged, pacing around.

“Oh,” her tone rang with confusion. “You made it sound like he’s out.”

“He might as well be, when he goes up into the clouds like that.”

“Hmph…” Gruse folded her arms and looked around awkwardly. The silence was suddenly broken by a gurgling noise. She drew her arms away from her stomach and looked at it, like it was an oddity.

“Hungry?” Noire teased.

“When are they gonna be back with food?” she asked with a newfound impatience.

“Beats me,” Eroh answered dismissively, waving his hand. “Advent might get distracted by a centipede or something.”

“Well, Myst’s there to keep him on track,” Noire reminded him.

“That’s as much for Myst’s sake as it is Advent’s,” Eroh scoffed. “Otherwise, he might just spend the whole day working out; I don’t think I could handle that.”

“You just can’t stand anyone, can you?” Gruse returned to a nearby table and opened her book again.

---

“Aaaaand…” Advent’s finger floated back and forth in front of the rack of food. “Why not some apples?” he wondered aloud.

“How many?” Myst wasn’t too interested in shopping for food, as long as it was generally healthy, and occupied himself more with observing the others customers of the little grocery store they found themselves in.

“Only two, I know you don’t want to go too over-budget.”

“Over-budget?”

Myst rifled through the cart, checking the prices of everything once more.

“We aren’t even close to over-budget,” he noted. “You know, I don’t mind spending a little more, if that’s the case.”

Advent smiled nervously, his eyes darting around.

“Well, I kind of wanted to save some money to visit this bookstore down the block.”

Myst returned a befuddled look.

“That’s… that’s fine…”

The sunlight was a refreshing change of pace from the usual dingy atmosphere down in the lower levels of the city, and Myst found himself enjoying the clean air that now brushed across his face as they exited the store.

“Isaiah.”

Angelique held a hand up in front of his friend, keeping his eyes glued across the street.

“Wha-? What is it?” the stout veteran tried to follow his line of sight.

“No, don’t look,” Angelique turned his gaze away, keeping Myst and Advent in his peripheral vision. Isaiah caught on quickly; even though he didn’t quite know what was happening, his reactions were still sharp enough to reassume his casual demeanor.

“We’ll cross.”

A hushed tone.

“Got it.”

Myst and Advent made their way down the sidewalk, weaving through foot traffic with no sign of rushing. The crossing guard still had not raised his flag. Seconds ticked.

“I don’t want to lose you now.”

The flag raised, and the pedestrians waiting by the curb embarked to the other side of the street.

Angelique leaned a half-inch closer to Isaiah.

“The one in the suit, it looks like he’s with the one in the cloak.”

Wordlessly, Isaiah confirmed their objective.

The made a turn at the corner and began tracking the two assassins.

“This one up here?” Myst pointed from his hip to a sign that read “JAY’S BOOKS AND COMPENDIUMS.”

“Yep, that’s the one,” Advent gripped their groceries tighter.

Angelique’s eyes were peaceful, but a cold flame burned behind them, focusing intently on the two through the midday crowd.

“The one in the suit,” he whispered to Isaiah. “I saw him with somebody who did something peculiar the other day.” He paused for a moment, unsure of whether to say his next words. “Something like Gideon said they would be able to do.”

The word that he couldn’t bring to part from his lips was impossible.

Jay’s Books and Compendiums was a store of some size, not like some other book shops in the city, which were more like elaborate mazes of shelves and desks, but larger than the humble used shops which were more common below-ground. Advent had picked it out for exactly this reason. The bell above the door jangled as they stepped inside.

“You see, the really big ones are impossible to find anything in, but the small ones won’t have what I’m looking for,” he explained. Myst, who hadn’t entered a book store in many years, took a moment to smell the inside. The scent of ink on paper, combined with the warm interior lights, gave the place a welcoming aura that he was unused to feeling in a business.

“Excuse me,” the younger man waved politely to the employee at the curved front desk. “Do you have any new releases in entomology?”

The employee, an older gentleman in a tweed jacket, brushed his eyes and recited his answer as if from memory, speaking in a skippy and bright accent.

“That’ll be in the’r Sciences section, under Biology. Ther’s a new release, about t’ree months ago, from Professor Stant’n on Ent-y-mology.”

“Thank you, sir, and-” Advent’s voice raised a half-tone, straining to be as polite as possible. “What aisle would that be in?

The bell at the door rang again.

“Oh, should be in aisle eight, on the sec’nd floor.”

Angelique’s ears picked up every word.

From where they entered, the store was split down the center by a clear aisle that ran straight to the employee’s desk. On either side of the aisle were five rows of bookshelves, in addition to the walls, which were also lined by shelves. Above them, low hanging gas lights emanated a warm orange glow throughout the business. Behind the front desk, two staircases descended in opposite directions from the center of the back wall, both coming down and curving towards the front of the store. The layout of the shop was quite symmetrical, a design decision that pleased Isaiah’s sensibilities.

Angelique took the lead, ducking into the left aisle of shelves. Isaiah followed suit, whispering again to him.

“They’re taking the stairs on the left.”

Angelique’s gaze flew past the spines of countless books.

“We’ll work our way around to the other side.”

Carefully, they walked from bookshelf to bookshelf, crossing the aisle to the right of the store. Isaiah watched as Myst and Advent climbed the stairs to the second floor, and motioned to Angelique. The two proceeded deeper into the store, timing their movements so that they were no more than ten seconds behind their trail.

The second floor’s layout was similar to the first, but without an empty aisle bisecting the room. From their view as they arrived at the top, the shelves were arranged in neat rows, with signs visible on their sides to denote their section.

Angelique’s eyes scanned the labels, passing over them until he caught sight of a shelf marked “SCIENCES.”

“Gee, it’s only thirty cents for this one?”

Advent held a thick pamphlet entitled “An Entomological Study of the Northern Impas.”

“How much would that leave us after tax?” Myst was feeling generous today, and was happy to indulge his junior.

“About… fifty cents!” Advent reexamined their bag, impressed with their frugal spending. “Hey, if it’s okay, do you think we could pick up one more?”

“Is there another bug book you were looking at?” Myst was almost sarcastic.

“I wanted to pick something up for Gruse, actually,” Advent corrected him. “She was really excited about this one author who just came out with a new book.”

From the other side of the shelf, Isaiah listened intently, pretending to be flipping through a book on engineering.

“It’s a romance, then, I’m guessing?”

“One of those spooky ones, from an Antiquity writer,” he explained. The Antiquated Continent was generally considered by literary scholars to be the most influential in dramatic, overly wrought storytelling. Andeidran narratives were comparably more realistic and concerned grounded novels about frontier life or folk tales.

Myst paused for a second, looking off into space pensively, before laughing to himself.

“Do you think you could just make a copy of the book while you’re in here?”

Advent furrowed his brow.

“I suppose if I had enough time I could,” he considered the idea. “But Loki N Roll has limits- I can’t just cough up an infinite supply of the mud.”

Isaiah stopped flipping.

“What are they talking about?”

The bell at the front door rang again. Advent and Myst exited, followed moments later by the investigation team.

“There’s definitely something strange about them,” Isaiah affirmed. “It might just be a hunch, but it would be wise to follow them.”

Down the sun-soaked streets, they trailed their people of interest. After about five minutes of blending into crowds and keeping their views focused, they watched Myst and Advent arrive at an elevator terminal.

Angelique’s mind went into high gear, assessing the situation.

“They’re going underground, but where to?

We need to follow them, but the time between cars arriving is too long, if we don’t get on with them now, we’ll lose them-!

But… If we get in with them and follow them down, we run a much higher risk of being caught; we’re relatively safe up here in public, but the lower levels have less security the further down you go…”

It all came down to the next few steps; time seemed to slow to a crawl while he thought. Breathing deeply, he continued forward.

“Of course, who am I kidding?”

Myst’s eyes glazed over as he waited for the bulb above the door to light up, signalling the next car’s arrival. Without warning, the hairs on the back of his neck stiffened, and a sensation like electricity brushed past his ear.

“What was that-?”

It was like a classic example of a bad omen, some sixth-sense baked deep into our survival instinct. He craned his neck around just enough to see two strangers approaching the terminal. A stout man who seemed to be graying early, and a taller, more girlish-looking one whose bang was tied elegantly into a braid.

Angelique caught Myst’s eyes. In the split second he was able to register it, he knew that he could not betray any suspicious intent, not a shred. With a thought as fast as lighting, he commanded himself:

“There is no ill will in your heart, none at all. Your heart and mind are utterly unclouded.”

Myst stared at Angelique for a moment longer as they approached.

“Pfft.”

He returned to waiting for the elevator. For a brief instant, he could’ve sworn he saw something in the stranger’s eyes, but it was just his imagination.

“I never can trust my senses, can I?” he mused. “Because I can never know what’s truly real, can I?” This poetic little line of thought crept into his head quite often.

Before Angelique and Isaiah had reached them, the bulb above the door blinked to signal the arriving car. The light solidified as the doors opened, and the four of them entered together. With a hiss, the metal gates closed, sealing as they met, and the great whirring noise that usually became nothing more than background noise accompanied the elevator’s descent.

“This is it,” Angelique realized. This quiet elevator, standing side-by-side with these two, sent a shiver up his spine. As if some momentous occurrence was underway, something began in the pit of his stomach and swelled to his chest.

“Professor Stanton?” he commented, noting the book held beneath Advent’s arm.

“P-pardon?” the pale-faced young man was caught off guard.

“The Biologist,” Angelique clarified, gesturing to the book. “I’m familiar with his work.”

“Oh-” Advent’s voice was light and airy, his heart’s beat quickened. “Y-yeah, I’m a big fan of his.”

“I met him at a conference some time ago,” the professor continued.

“Really?” Advent’s eye and lips widened. Myst didn’t face Angelique, but watched cautiously from the side of vision.

“So I take it you’re interested in entomology?”

“Yes, very much,” Advent nodded furiously, a silly smile coming over his face.

“I have a similar interest in the medical sciences,” Angelique explained. “I grew up reading the journals of a lot of famous doctors.”

“Yeah? Like who?”

“The usual big names,” he looked up at the ceiling as he called forth a long list of names. “Thomas Julian, Edward Vanderbilt, Johannes Guthret-”

“William Renning?” Advent couldn’t contain his excitement and suggested one of his scientific idols.

Tingles burst through Angelique’s body, like static pouring deep into his being.

“This sensation-?”

His soul came alive, and suddenly, the words that leapt from Advent’s mouth, a pre-rehearsed spiel about his admiration for William Renning, were no longer just sounds. They carried with them sights, smells-

“Thoughts, memories!”

Myst, whose spirit sight was weak, but existent, felt the eruption of spirit energy from Angelique. He now turned all the way to face him, planting his foot on the floor of the elevator. Isaiah noticed a change in the air, a change in Angelique’s presence, as well as Myst’s newfound intent.

The elevator suddenly stopped, halting at Level 1 of Braid Park. The car lurched downwards before the cord at its top reeled it back into place. The doors opened and a small electronic tone played to announce their arrival. The doors parted; the air of the car was sucked out, blowing past their clothing, and with it, the sudden magnitude of energy released by what Angelique would later understand to be his Vocation.

“Well, we’ve got to be going, this our stop,” the professor remarked, looking to Isaiah. The stout man blinked to cover his confusion, before realizing that something had changed in the situation.

“Angelique,” he thought. “You’ve discovered something new, haven’t you? I should have expected it out of you.”

The blond professor exited briskly, followed closely by Isaiah. Myst’s eye was kept glued to them, staring with a peculiar expression. Even after the doors had closed, his gaze remained fixed in the direction they’d left. Advent noticed his glare, and blinked curiously at him.

“Is something wrong?”

Myst’s brow furrowed.

“You didn’t notice anything… strange about that man?”

Advent frowned.

“No? Should I have?”

Myst paused once more, the buzzing noise of the elevator’s descent being the only thing to fill the silence.

“When we get back, let’s check the records.”

Angelique’s white boots tapped the concrete sidewalk; Isaiah took a sigh of relief now that they were out in the relatively safe open.

“So,” he asked, inspecting the nearby stores as they walked by. “What did you figure out?”

Angelique couldn’t help but grin.

“I can’t tell you how I saw it, but when that guy in the cloak was talking, just when he cut in to talk about William Renning, I felt this wave of energy in my body- to tell you the truth, I still feel kind of fuzzy.”

“Angelique?” Isaiah couldn’t have guessed what he was talking about.

“Well, let me say this,” he continued. “While he was talking, I think I was able to see his thoughts.”

“His thoughts?” The veteran squinted at him.

“I saw images- I think they’re his memories.”

Isaiah peered at him scrutinizingly.

“Do you have anything in your system right now?”

“No! No!” Angelique assured him. “It doesn’t sound like it should be possible, but it was like when I spoke to him, and he cut me off-”

“Something changed in the elevator, didn’t it?”

What Isaiah didn’t realize was that his own words had triggered a response from deep within Angelqiue’s soul. He came to a dead stop in the middle of the sidewalk, his hands shaking.

“Angelique?”

The professor again saw images as Isaiah spoke to him, like a tree grew upwards, each branch a memory that spread out into the air, all of it he could see.

“Hey, Angelique? Angelique?” Isaiah waved his hands in front of his friend, but only got a preoccupied stare in return.

Angelique felt himself falling off balance, and as quickly as he’d fallen into it, he was ripped out of his trance.

“Hey, watch it! Don’t just stand in the way!”

A grumpy-looking older man in a suit and tie had bumped into the doctor, knocking his foot back. Angelique returned to his physical consciousness and, in a spacey, distressed frame of mind, apologized profusely. The man merely huffed and carried on with his day.

“What was that?” Isaiah pleaded. “Are you alright?”

Angelique had an odd look in his eyes, as if he understood something now.

“When you were talking just now…”

“Uh-huh?”

He scrunched up his face a bit, like he was about to ask an uncomfortable question.

“Is your house behind a creek?”

Isaiah could have sworn his heart had stopped.

“W...What?”

“And your workshed, the door has a little damage on the hinge, and it’s been driving you up the wall-”

“Stop! Stop!” Isaiah commanded. “How do you know this?”

Angelique shrugged his shoulders.

“Everything I told you… was true, wasn’t it?”

---

Noire’s voice was filled with frustration.

“Oh really?” he asked, tilting his head to look at Eroh. “And you don’t see a problem with that?”

Eroh had let slip one too many digs at Mello, and Noire felt compelled to confront him over it. The argument had quickly devolved into the two of them hurling insults across the room.

“You’re always a danger to the team more than you help us!” Noire had nearly cried.

“Yeah? Like what?” Eroh had scoffed at him.

“How many people have you killed just since you got here?”

“One or two…”

Gruse listened anxiously to the two go back and forth from her position by the staircase, having removed herself from the situation. If, God forbid, a fight broke out between them, it could cause a tremendous amount of damage.

“Noire’s Vocation can affect such a wide area, and Eroh has this stubbornness that won’t let him concede…” she thought, stroking her hair. “But Noire is more level-headed than that, we’ll be fine.”

The mere thought that he might not murder someone to keep the team’s profile low made Eroh howl with delight.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he gestured condescendingly to the more effeminate man. “When I’m in a big place like this, I make sure I only kill people no one will care about; you know, some lonely saps no one’ll care about-”

Even at a distance, Gruse could see something flicker in Noire’s eyes, an anger long chained within and thought to be suppressed.

“You…” The word barely escaped his lips, but it had the weight of a sledgehammer.

“Oh?” Eroh looked at him sideways, not even giving him his full attention. “Are you gonna get upset over it, now? Some people you don’t even know? Someone you’d kill without a second thought if Mello told you to?”

The air around Noire’s body fell to a chill, so that his long, pointed breath was visible in a little cloud of vapor. Gruse gripped the railing at the foot of the stairs, ready to grab Mello should he need to intervene. Nagging at the back of her mind however, was the possibility that he wouldn’t bother to do anything about it. She could picture him saying something along the lines of “Let Noire kill him, but make sure it’s done privately; help him if you feel the need.”

Eroh laughed hysterically.

“Are you going to show off to me?” he spat between guffaws. “You don’t need to prove you’re a man that badly!”

A thin layer of ice formed around Noire’s feet; he raised his hand, fingers stretched upwards, and shot a glare at Eroh, who in turn began to stroke at the air, a drop or two of venom falling from his nails.

“Both of you, stop!” Gruse shouted, but it was too late. Once the two of them were set on hurting each other, there was nothing she could do. She took off up the metal stairs, each one letting out a booming echo as her boots beat into them.

“I need to get Mello-” she thought desperately. “He’s the only one who can-”

She stopped running abruptly as she reached the top. Something in the air had disappeared, like a balloon deflating.

“Why did the energy… go down?”

Gruse cast her view down at the ground, where both men were looking at the door.

“Huh?”

Advent and Myst had returned, drawing a sigh of relief from her. Advent was the most likely to calm Noire down, and Eroh was suspicious of Myst; he likely wouldn’t have gone all out versus Noire in his presence, for fear of being annihilated out of the blue.

“What’s going on here?” Myst’s words were like gravity, pulling them back to solid ground. A brief moment of silence passed before Noire simply turned away.

“Nothing,” he said, walking away. “Just something stupid.”

Myst watched him curiously as he left to go sit at the other end of the warehouse in solitude. He looked back at Eroh, who was still scowling.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said in a voice that sunk one’s heart. “But it better not happen again.”

With a huff, Eroh stomped away. Myst motioned Advent to follow him as he climbed the stairs, he was the only one who could help him find what he needed.

Inside the last office on the left of the hallway, he clicked a lamp to life, illuminating a large file cabinet. Myst yanked open the first drawer, which slid out along the in-built track with a crescendoing rattle.

“Can you find a specific person in here?” Myst looked from the rows and rows of papers to Advent.

The younger man sized up the amount of material to sift through.

“If I have a description I could probably do it in five minutes, maybe a little more.”

“Okay, I want you to find the man who was with us in the elevator today, the blond one.”

Advent closed his eye and took a breath to recall Angelique’s appearance.

“Got it.”

Instead of sorting through the no doubt thousands of files on hand, Advent knelt down and clasped his hands together, still without opening his eye; his cloak fell around him at the floor, spreading like a waterfall. Myst stood by in absolute silence, allowing him to concentrate as much as he needed on the task at hand.

Just as he’d predicted, when it had been about five minutes, Advent abruptly opened hs eye, stood up, and reached has hand out, finding a specific shelf, opening it, and pulling out a file. It was as effortless and rehearsed as if he were writing his signature.

“Here,” he handed Myst the file. “This should be him.”

Myst opened the manila folder to see a picture of Angelique front and center.

“Oh-ho,” he chuckled. “You’re good!”

“Thanks…” Advent was too embarrassed to force out any more words than that.

“Angelique Blackwell…” Myst scanned the sheet for any noteworthy information. “Lead researcher at… Hilltop Medical Academy?”

“That was-?” Advent nearly kicked himself for not recognizing him. “I guess I’m just out of the loop…”

“Apparently he served as a doctor in the military for a few years before going into the Academy…” Myst read the entry aloud.

“The military?” he thought. “Does he have a connection to the government?”

He examined an attached picture of Angelique in his military days, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with several men in uniform. At the bottom was a list naming each officer in the photo; one particular name stood out to him.

The hallway’s entrance door flew open again, Myst exited with haste, followed by Advent close behind.

“Eroh,” he called as he reached the bottom. Eroh was leaning against a wall, looking blankly at a crack in the warehouse’s window. As his name was called, both he and Noire, who was at the opposite end of the room, turned to see Myst.

“Yeah?” he asked dismissively, knowing that he could get away with acting catty so long as Myst had an objective.

“Did the ambassador say anything about a ‘Gideon Jepta’?”

Eroh’s eyes widened in curiosity.

“Yeah, he did, actually,” he took his back off the wall. “He said there was a meeting about him being in the President’s security detail.”

A new fire was lit behind Myst’s eyes.

“When’s the soonest we can do an investigation on him?” He spoke mostly to himself, but looked around the room until his gaze settled on Noire.

“Ah! Noire!” he made his way over to where the man was sulking.

“Me?” he asked, a layer of confusion beneath his voice.

“Of course,” Myst affirmed in him. “You’re our own ambassador!”