It had been two months since the demise of my parents. Life had nothing left to offer me except the hobby of watching the rainfall, watching every drop as it slid down the muddy sand, even staring at the petals of the beautiful tree close by as they swayed in the wind. I picked up a pocket knife from the ground, then cut out a branch from an old lifeless tree, sharpening the tip of the old branch slowly. I was just withering like a dying flower, fading little by little, and I could not even remember the last time I heard the sound of my own voice.
"Miss Alisa, you needed in the station for interrogation!" a voice called out from behind me, and I did not need to turn to know it was Detective Frank again because his voice had splattered itself into the grooves of my memory from the very first time he looked at me like I was a lunatic, so I chose to ignore him for a moment, still bent low to the ground with my fingers pressing the pocket knife against the tip of the branch that I had started sharpening out of survival instinct or because no one ever taught me a healthier coping mechanism. It felt better to whittle away at something than to let my insides rot in silence where grief of my parents nested.
This was the fourth time in two months they had dragged me into that sterile little interrogation room that smelled like stale coffee, and at this point I felt like I should be earning at least a free coffee every fifth visit, or a voucher to scream uninterrupted for ten minutes in a padded room.
I could still remember their voices calling me insane because I dared to mention the man who murdered my parents being a werewolf or a vampire, who did not care for their flimsy rules of physics or their obsession with everything having a rational explanation. I still remembered the way their voices tripped over each other when I described how he vanished within seconds, like I had just dropped a dead language into the room and expected them to translate it, but in truth, the person I described as the killer of my parents did not fit into their forensic reports or their crime scene diagrams, especially their tired little theories about burglars and angry ex-boyfriends, because he was made of different older human than logic.
The truth sounds like madness only because the truth was never made for people who get nervous when a lightflickers or blame the toaster when their toast burns.
"Why did you want me over there?" I finally asked, lifting my face to him, and I caught the way his eyes narrowed the moment he registered the hollowness of my cheeks and the stillness of my expression as if grief was now redecorating my bones and replacing everything that used to be soft with bricks.
"Since you are the last person your parents spoke with, it would be nice to..."
"Now you trying to accuse me?" I asked, and my smile must have appeared scary.
I soften my voice as I drew on the moist sand. "Sometimes I wonder if truth matters at all in a town like this because you people only believe what comforts your suspicion,"
"That not true Alisa, we are..."
"It is the truth!" I snapped.
When the truth comes snarling out of the woods with teeth and a pulse and a hunger for flesh they will not call it reality, they will call it a panic attack or a hallucination, and they will not call me a witness, they will call me unstable or a girl who needs to be watched carefully and spoken to gently like I might shatter on the floor.
That is why justice always feels blind in Natwon City.
Then the sound of footsteps came quickly through the grass. I remember that scent and turned to that direction, and when I turned back to Detective Frank he was slashed at the throat.
The moment the blindfold slipped over my eyes and the cold snap of the handcuff locked around my wrists, I knew I was no longer in control of anything, and even though I tried with all the strength in my limbs to fight them off and twist my way out of their grip, it was like struggling against a wall made of steel and breath. They were too many and too strong and I could feel from their movements and their silence that they were not amateurs or clumsy thugs but trained, armed, and terrifying, and in that exact moment it occurred to me that this would be a terrible time to die without ever getting to experience my first kiss or at least find the stupid crooked man that killed my parents.
I screamed as loud as my voice would allow, throwing my words into the darkness in front of me and kicking my legs wildly even though I could feel that my feet were no longer touching the ground and that I was suspended in the air like a worn-out doll with an unbrushed ponytail and mismatched socks, and all the while my mind was still stumbling to accept the fact that someone had been killed right outside my house, a detective no less, someone who just moments ago had been alive and talking and now was lying somewhere in the dirt with his neck torn open by one of my captors. I could not even catch a glimpse of who killed him or how they had passed me to reach him.
My fingers were still wrapped tight around the branch I had picked up earlier, and thank goodness that it had not slipped from my grip because I was certain that if I had been taken with nothing to hold on to I might have screamed myself hoarse and fainted from fear, because even if the branch was useless against guns or whatever weapons they carried, it was still something I could pretend was a sword or a shield or a last resort if they made the mistake of getting close enough. Although with the way my wrist was bent right now I probably looked more like an angry baton twirler at a haunted parade, which, given my luck, they wouldn't try anything stupid.
The stumbling sound of footsteps crunching against broken branches and dry leaves told me that they were dragging me through Manville Forest, or at least in that direction, because that was the only place with that kind of sound underfoot, and it terrified me more than anything because Manville was supposed to be far, almost a hundred miles from my home, and I could not understand how they had covered the distance, unless they were not fully human, but either vampires or werewolves or really dedicated kidnappers with great GPS.
I focused every part of my hearing on the air around me and started counting their breaths, trying to make sense of the number of people surrounding me just from the loud, hot, heavy way they exhaled like bulls on a hunt, and I could attest that they were six of them, which felt deeply unfair because even in group projects nobody ever coordinated that well unless they were evil, and I realized that I was being carried over someone's shoulder, someone broad and tall, whose steps did not falter, and it made me feel frightened but also extremely aware that my face was unfortunately pressed right up against his back and now I was going to remember the exact scent of his leather jacket until the day I died, which might be in five minutes or five decades but either way that smell was going to haunt me, it fucking stinks.
What confused me even more was the branch still in my hand because they had obviously seen it and they had already restrained me so tightly I could not lift a finger without feeling the sharp coldness of the iron cuffs, so why had they not taken it from me? The only answers my delusional mind came up with were either that they were so arrogant they thought I was completely harmless or that one of them was secretly rooting for me to escape because he had a soft spot for feisty girls with bad hair and a tendency to mutter insults under their breath.
They suddenly stopped moving, and my lungs seized my breath.
"Drop the girl!" a voice groaned.