DISCLAIMER- I DO NOT OWN YOUNG JUSTICE! IF I DID THE SHOW WOULD BE COMING OUT WITH A THIRD SEASON!

I ONLY OWN THIS STORY.

~My Light Of Life


Chapter 5- Murder By The Sea

"I knew you would be here."

She was laying down with her legs dangling over the edge of the cliff. "White Cliffs of Dover stretch east and west from the town of Dover in the British county of Kent. They say it can be seen across the English Channel from France."

Nightwing smiled. "You never seize to amaze me." He stopped a few yards from the edge. "What is it with this place?"

"What are you doing here? How did you find me?"

"You came here when you were six after you told me about your past. Then again when you were eight after my parents...your strong, I know you. You can get through anything."

"That still doesn't answer my question." She sat up and threw a rock over the edge, never hearing the splash that would come.

"You found this place when you were five years old." Nightwing laughed. "You were so excited to show me, you ended up teleporting us ten feet off the edge.

" That wasn't funny, I had nightmares for weeks." Shadow stood and turned to face Nightwing. "Did you find anything on the laptop?"

" We did, it seems that Axel started killing when he was nineteen but the killings abruptly stopped four years later. No one ever solved them."

Shadow turned and looked down over the cliffs. She was tired and wanted to go home. "The bodies were never discovered. I couldn't have the cops on my ass, couldn't afford it." Shadow never told Super Boy the rest of the story, she never told anyone.

"When I found Axel he was so far gone, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to bring him back. The night my Coven and I met him, I watched him torture and kill a man. Axel ripped out all his fingernails, hammered screws into his hands, cut him all over, and then left him. The man bled to death. To be cut like that it would take almost three hours to bleed out." Shadow turned again to look at Nightwing. "Do you know what it's like to wait for death, never knowing when it will come."

" I don't."

" After that, I... helped him. We found child molesters, captured, tortured, and then left to die. Four years later, I... told Axel everything. He didn't think we were crazy." Shadow threw her head back and laughed. "He was insane, hell we all were. I turned him immortal, the coven didn't really want a human, but they warmed up to him."

" Shadow that wasn't you, it's been almost a hundred years since then." Nightwing dared to step closer towards Shadow, towards the edge.

"How can you say that! It is me! Richard it's me!" Nightwing winced. She was the only one who ever called him that. "I've been alive since 1416, I remember everything since the day I was born! When I die, the curse repeats itself. My mother becomes pregnant once again, she hates it! The curse that she, we have together is all because of her! She killed my father, the man she used to love. I saw it all. The final spell that killed my father, rebounded and hit me instead. I didn't know the effects of it until I was killed. My own mother didn't understand it! I die she becomes pregnant the following Halloween." Shadow began to pace back and forth on the cliffs edge. "But she's an immortal witch, so she casts a time spell, speeds the process up, then dumps me somewhere. It takes the Coven awhile to find me. I don't have my full memories until I'm five!"

"Last time she left you with Hal. You were great, everyone loved you. You had a real family."

Shadow smirked. "'Had', key word there. I cannot go back to that life, it's not me. I'm going to find out who murdered my men. Then I'm leaving."

Shadow turned east and saw the sun beginning to rise. Nightwing stood there speechless, he didn't want her to leave. "You can't leave I just got you back."

"No, you didn't that girl you knew ten years ago that's not me." Shadow didn't look at him. "Let's go, I'll meet you back at Clark's house." Shadow studied Nightwing, looking him up and down for a moment.

"What?"

"Did I say anything?"

"No, but you're eyeing me funny."

Shadow looked down at the water below. "How far do you think it is?"

"I don't know, 300 feet."

She smiled. "Well my naive friend, I'd say it was at least 350." And with that she winked at Richard, spread her arms and fell off the cliff.

Nightwing's eyes grew wide. "SHADOW!" But she was already gone.

AT THE KENT'S HOUSE

"Is Shadow here?" Nightwing said walking into the barn.

"Were over here." Super Boy said. He was standing behind Shadow who was staring at the laptop screen. They had both changed, he was wearing black shorts and a white tank, while she had on a white shorts and a black tank top. "You guys look like an old fashion diner floor." Nightwing said walking over to them.

"Yeah, that's great come look at this. It looks like Axel kept a journal of some sort." Shadow clicked on a document.

"Did I just hear you right?" Super Boy gave Nightwing a strange look. Nightwing smiled sheepishly. "You've spent to must time with the rookies." Super Boy said moving over so Nightwing could see the screen.

"What am I looking at?"

The screen had black and white strange looking symbols, in a straight line, like sentences in a paragraph. "I think it's some kind of code." Super Boy said.

"No, I don't think so Axel liked puzzles and art not so much code breaking that was Heath." Shadow grinned.

"If it is a puzzle or a code, that means Axel did it for as reason. He knew someone would find it one day. When was the last entry updated?" Nightwing asked.

Shadow moved the cursor and showed the desktop. She clicked on the recent documents.. "Oh my God, he updated all his journal everything the night he died. Do you know what that means?" Shadow was putting two and two together thinking of a way to explain it so her new friends would understand. "This was the last document that he wrote in." Shadow pulled up a word document.

"You care to enlighten us" Super Boy said.

"Nightwing can you put this on the smart screen?" Shadow stood up so Nightwing could sit down.

"Uh, yes." Nightwing plunged in a chord and clicked somethings, then the strange lettering appeared on the large screen in front of Shadow.

She stared at the screen for almost ten minutes. The two men looked at her, wondering if she would say something or if they should.

"You guys do realize I can hear everything you think, right."

"Well don't, that's invasion of privacy." Super Boy leaned against the wall.

"Yeah, whatever y'all think to loud. Anyway he opened all his documents the night he died."

"You said that already. Get to the point."

Shadow glared at Super Boy. "It means he knew something, he knew he wasn't coming back anytime soon. So he made his whole laptop one giant puzzle."

"Okay, that's a start but, we need to figure out what all this says." Nightwing explained.

"I was always the only one that could figure his puzzles out, the others either didn't want to or didn't know how. Wait a sec, look at the black lines they are spaced differently after two."Shadow's eyes grew wide. "That's it! Look at the white between each black symbol. They form a letter!"

"So the first word says." Nightwing was filling in the spaces. "The first few words are..."

"Two. The youngest is the best. The rejected comes to play. The prey come to coward. The forgotten is to remember. Five." Shadow read the the words taking them all in.

"Great, so he talked in riddles, were never going to figure this out." Super Boy sulked.

"No we will, we just have to think like Axel would. The youngest is the best. That could be Axel he was my last, and he is technically the youngest in the group. But the rest I'm not sure, we were never rejected, the prey or crying."

"What kind of powers did the rest of your Coven have?" Nightwing asked.

"Heath could sense things and alter time for people you know like see the future, read auras and.."

"Prey?" Super Boy was thinking. "Were you hunting anything when they died?"

"No, we were the prey, the people with those special bombs were hunting us."

"You said Axel liked riddles and puzzles and all that shit, so thinking like he would, he wouldn't make it this obvious. When you figured out his other riddles in the past, what were they normally like?" Super Boy walked towards Shadow.

"The last one I did, you had to use a mirror, to you read it. But it was in about four different languages. Why, you think there's a pattern?"

"When you put letters in front of a mirror there backwards right?"

"Super Boy, where are you going with this?" Shadow looked at Nightwing for help.

"Backwards...forwards...same...OPPOSITES! That's it."

Shadow and Super Boy both looked at Nightwing. "What?" They said in unison.

"There opposites, look at them again but read the opposite of what it's saying, and two and five that must be the words that you have two change. The second and fifth word." Nightwing looked ecstatic.

"So, the oldest is the worst. The accepted comes to...what's the opposite of play?" Shadow asked the guys.

"Rest, maybe stop?" Nightwing offered.

"Work." Kid Flash said walking into the barn.

The three of them turned to look at him. Wallie grinned. "What I can't help my oldest pals out?" No one said anything for a few seconds.

"Um, so... am I aloud to ask a question?" Shadow didn't wait for an answer. "Why are you here? You quite, and what was with that stunt you pulled the other day? There's no way in hell you're that out of shape."

"I was just here to meet you, Dick offered me a spot in training, and I figured what the hell?"

"Uh, huh. Anyway, work yes that sounds right."

Nightwing eyed KF, he was the only be who knew about Shadow. Nightwing had told him some time after they meet.

Shadow ignored the stare down between the two men. "The accepted comes to work. The hunter comes to fight. The remembered is to forget. I still don't get it!" Shadow slammed her hand down no the table. "Damn it!" She grumbled under he breath.

The three men stood and waited, not wanting to interrupt her fit.

"We just need to think this through. Let's start from the beginning." Shadow said walking over to the bulletin board with her men on it. "There's something here. We're missing something. If the oldest is the worse? Could that mean you had something to do with it." Shadow touched Heath's picture. "Heath was 26 when I turned him, the oldest of the five. I met him in 1872, Hamburg, Germany. He was a pianist. Sylas, Vicken, Apollo and myself went to the Hamburgische Staatsoper. It's German for Hamburg State Opera House. He knew we were there the whole time. Heath looked in you, never at you. And that's exactly what he did to me that night, what he did to all of us." Shadow hugged herself thinking back to that night.


AH! And the beginning of yet another flashback.

UNTIL SUNDAY!

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~My Light Of Life