Hey everybody. Thank you very much for taking the time to read this, and I'd really appreciate any feedback you guys have for it. As anyone who's read any of my stories before knows, reviews give me motivation to continue, so I can never get enough of them. If you don't like my story, please don't be afraid to tell me so I can fix it in the future.
Just one thing to NOT put in a review: please do not tell me what to change about the plot, a new character to add, or anything else that would change the course of the story at all. I have this entire story outlined, meaning I know how many chapters this story will have and everything that's going to happen in each and every single one of those chapters, and nothing you say will convince me to change what I've planned.
Enough of that. So, without further adieu, The Deathbringers.
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"Come on, Tucker! Sam!" yelled the black haired boy as he sat in the food court at the mall. He was sitting on a solid bench right in front of the food court, which was adjacent to the movie theater. "Where are you guys?"
"Ugh…Tucker waited until the last minute to start on his project…again!" Sam, the boy's friend, said into the phone.
"Hey!" Tucker (another of the boy's friends) yelled in the background. "I didn't wait until the last minute! These are just some last minute changes. And besides, this isn't just any old project. This is for the science fair, and I'm more determined than ever to walk away with first place this year!"
"Just like you were last year when you tried to find a cure for ingesting rat poison with iced tea and battery acid?" Sam asked.
"I'm telling you, that was supposed to work according to my calculations. Besides, this time, I'm working on a voice distorter. Nothing beats a voice distorter. Nothing! You hear me, Danny?"
Danny, the black haired boy, just sighed as he slumped into his chair. "Whatever you say. Just please hurry up and get that done? The movie is starting in thirty minutes and you know how much I like seeing the very, very beginning."
"Yeah, yeah," Tucker said into the phone. "Don't worry about it, I'm almost done with it. See you in half an hour!"
Tucker hit the button to disconnect the call and looked at Sam. "Hey, thanks again for helping me out with this."
"Don't mention it," the Goth said in a non-caring way. "Just hurry up, because my parents aren't going to want to give us a ride if we take too long."
"We can run there," Tucker said with a smile on his face.
Sam laughed, but when she saw Tucker's confused reaction, she realized that he wasn't kidding around. "You're serious?"
"Of course!" Tucker said gleefully. "I'm a great runner! We could run to the mall faster than driving there."
"Tucker, you aren't a good runner. If you try running, you will slip. And you will fall. And I will laugh."
Meanwhile, at the mall, Danny repeatedly slumped lower and lower in his bench as he took repeated double-takes at the large clock on the wall and the line at the movie theater.
"Sheesh, what's taking them so long?" Danny asked. "If Tucker was really putting the finishing touches on it, why aren't they already on their way?"
A while from the mall, Sam and Tucker were walking out of Tucker's house now.
"See, that wasn't so bad, was it?" Tucker asked Sam as they walked over to the mall.
"It doesn't matter," Sam said. "Let's just get to that movie fast so we don't keep Danny waiting that long."
Back at the mall, Danny was still sitting on his bench in the food court as he waited for his friends to show up. Finally, he got tired of waiting and decided to find something to fill the time that he was devoting to waiting for his two friends.
Danny walked over to the counter of a restaurant at the food court and ordered himself a soda that would tide him over as he waited.
"Hey. One Mountain Dew, please?" Danny politely asked the middle-aged man at the counter.
"Coming up," the clerk said, walking to the back of the room.
As Danny stood at the counter, he noticed that there was a small television screen coming from the wall, and the news was on. The news story immediately caught Danny's eyes.
The reporter was sitting at the desk and giving the camera a very serious look. On the screen, the words BREAKING NEWS were written in a small gray box displayed behind the reporter's head with the station's graphics.
"We have breaking news from Channel 24," the reporter said as she stared at the computer in a completely neutral way. "Two teenagers were found murdered on the sidewalk of Malbury Street just a few minutes ago."
On the screen flashed the images of the two teenagers who were killed, and Danny's heartbeat completely stopped when he saw who it was. One was a picture of a Goth girl staring at the camera in a grudging way with an expression that said, "Take that picture and I'll rip your face off".
The other was a picture of a dark skinned boy with glasses waving to the camera, looking very casual.
"The teenagers have been identified as Sam Manson and Tucker Foley, both fourteen years old and students in the local high school. Paramedics are on the way and will be looking for a cause of death. Right now, there are no suspects."
Danny looked at the screen in complete horror. He dropped his soda as the clear liquid started fizzing all over the floor. He continued staring at the screen with every single feeling in his body going off the wall.
"Sam…Tucker…no!" he yelled.
Darting away from the counter, Danny ran into the boys' bathroom and ran into one of the stalls. As he ran into the stall, he suddenly began morphing. His red and white t-shirt changed into a black jumpsuit, and white gloves appeared on his hands. His jeans turned into the lower part of the black jumpsuit with white boots on his feet that replaced the sneakers. His hair turned a snowy-shade of white and his blue eyes turned to a haunting emerald color. All of this happening while a ring popped up around his midsection and split itself apart, one half traveling up his body while the other half went downwards.
Now changed into his ghostly alter-ego, Danny went intangible and flew through the roof of the mall and started flying very quickly of the skies, trying to find Malbury Street before anything worse happened.
It was personal now. Normally, Danny would be looking for someone as cold blooded as a murderer in order to stop them from committing any more crimes, even though ghosts didn't normally commit murders, and ghosts were the thing he considered himself responsible for hunting down and stopping.
But with Sam and Tucker being the victims, Danny had more motivation than ever to find the killer, or killers. Now, it wasn't for justice or for the safety of the other people. Now, it was strictly for revenge.
Danny finally found the street. He swooped down and landed on the sidewalk, and right in front of him were the bodies of Sam and Tucker, lying completely lifeless on the sidewalks. There were policemen, detectives and paramedics starting to swarm all over the place and ordering everyone around to get back and to stay back. Danny ran behind a tree and morphed out of his ghost form and came out from behind the tree looking the way he did when he ran into the bathroom at the mall.
Desperate to get a closer look at what was going on, Danny ran over to the two bodies to get a closer look. But his time to do so didn't last very long.
"Hey, kid!" yelled one of the police officers as he looked at Danny. "Get away from here!"
"Those are my friends!" Danny insisted, pushing the officer away and getting right in front of the corpses of Sam and Tucker, both of whom were alive only a few minutes before.
Danny looked up when he heard shrieking in horror and despair. When he saw who it was, he felt even more glum.
Tucker's parents were there and Sam's parents were there. The couples were embracing each other and were sobbing in each other's arms. In all honesty, Danny couldn't blame them. He knew that those were their children who had just been killed, and he felt a lot of remorse and grief for them as well.
"Who did this?..." Danny softly asked amidst all the chaos. "Why would someone want to come out of nowhere and kill two innocent teenagers who didn't do a thing?..."
Danny's silent muttering to himself was abruptly cut off. He looked up into the sky and saw something: a ghost. However, for the first time in a long time, the ghost that he was looking at seemed genuinely terrifying. It was wearing a long, black cloak and the face was completely concealed.
"Y…you!" Danny weakly said. "You're the one that killed my friends, aren't you?! I'll bet you have some elaborate plan to killing my friends to try to make me join you in some scheme! Well, guess what? It's not working!"
"Danny…" the ghost said in a raspy and sinister voice.
"Oh, so you're Dr. Claw, huh?" Danny asked in reply to the ghost's voice.
"Danny, don't go getting yourself into this situation. Allow nature to run its course and let the problem be resolved on its own," the cloaked ghost warned.
"How do you know my name?!" Danny demanded.
"Don't ask questions and listen," the cloaked ghost warned. His raspy voice was so terrifying that normally it would be enough to give a person nightmares just hearing it. "If you try to get yourself involved in what's going on, you will find yourself in great danger. Let the problem work itself out."
"You've gotta be kidding!" Danny snapped. "Someone comes along and kills my two best friends in the entire world. I can't see them any more; I can't laugh with them anymore; I can't confide in them anymore! And you're telling me to just let it go?!"
"Yes," the cloaked figure said. "If you know what's good for you, you will."
"Yeah? Well, if you know what's good for you, you'll stop trying to tell me what to do!"
Not wanting the conversation to go on any longer, the cloaked ghost flew away and into a thick patch of trees. Danny didn't want any more trouble, so he simply flew behind the tree and morphed back into his human part. He was enraged that he would never see his two best friends again. Nothing had ever made him that angry. Ever.
"There you are!" screamed someone.
Danny turned around and he saw two very well dressed and very proper looking people staring at him. One was a man and the other was a woman, and Danny knew who it was automatically. It was Sam's parents.
As if that weren't bad enough, Danny turned around and he saw Tucker's parents there as well. Simultaneously both of his friends' parents started bickering at Danny and were criticizing and somehow blaming him for the deaths of Sam and Tucker.
Danny got so frustrated with it that after a while he grabbed his raven-black hair and looked up into the sky. He squeezed his eyes shut and let out a deafening scream that emptied him of all his frustration, anger, depression and rage in one outing. The criticism continued after Danny's unleash of his strong emotions.
Meanwhile, up in the tree, the cloak figure was watching the entire scene. He was watching Danny get endlessly criticized and blamed for something out of his control. He had no part in it, and yet he was being blamed. Just because he was Sam and Tucker's best friend.
"Heh," the cloaked figure smirked. "Sorry, kid." There was a long pause as the figure continued to watch. Then, he slowly lifted his head up. "At least it's working."
Danny was so full of rage that he felt like his insides could just burst. Never before had he felt so obliged to suicide. Of course, he didn't believe in suicide, so that was automatically ruled out.
Inside his mind, thoughts of revenge and payback flooded Danny's mind.
"No, I can't get revenge," Danny thought to himself as he drowned out all the complaining that Sam and Tucker's parents were giving him. "Revenge is never worth it and it's not morally right. There's gotta be some other way."
Then Danny's fists clenched up. His teeth grit and his eyes seemed to get even icier. He was starting to look scary and he wasn't even in his ghost form. "No way. Killing my friends is going too far. I'll find the one responsible for this and I'm gonna make him pay! I'll make sure he feels the same amount of pain he's causing me right now, and then some."
Danny's mind was officially made up. He was going to get his revenge and that was the end of it. He would avenge Sam and Tucker's death. He was going to find out who committed the murders and he was going to give the murderer his own sense of justice.
Little did Danny know that this one decision to avenge his friends would take him on a twisting and shocking adventure that he would have never anticipated from the beginning. This adventure would not only prove to be dangerous for Danny, but dangerous for his loved ones. For his entire town. And if things didn't go right, possibly the whole world could be in jeopardy if Danny didn't succeed at what would soon become one of his most dangerous adventures yet.