Slayers Resurrection
Part II
Chapter One
Jack Stilston-Laws
The curt tap-tap of his secretary's heels on the polished tile floor was really what woke him up, but, tired as he was after last night's fiasco, Jack Stilston-Laws didn't raise his head till she spoke to him.
"Sleeping on the job Again, are we Jack?"
Yawning, and smiling sardonically he looked up at her, and immediately wished he hadn't. Jillian Crut was one of the ugliest women he had ever met, and today she had decided to overdo her make up again. Jeeze.
"Why, yes, Jillian, I was sleeping on the job. Were you?"
She rolled her eyes, which forced him to notice the bottle of mascara that had been forced onto her eyelashes. He shuddered involuntarily. "Jack. Rex Draconis is coming today for the Rivers case you assigned him to. You do remember, right?"
Of course he remembered. God. He hadn't been drinking that much. Jack bit the inside of his mouth and glared at her until he was able to speak civilly. "Really Jillian? Thanks for reminding me! I really did forget!"
She looked smug. "He's down the hall with his new-uhm-girlfriend. Shall I call them in?"
"Certainly, Jillian, you do that."
He looked down at his desk again, until the tap-tap of her heels told him she had retreated, and sighed. Rex. Today. He did not need this. All too soon, the sound of several pairs of feet alerted him to her return, and then his door was flung open.
It was hard to distinguish, from the squirming tangle of arms and legs that appeared in the doorway, his tall, charismatic colleague Rex Draconis. What Jack saw instead was a whole lot of thick, ebony hair, big, bouncing breasts, and long, tan, shaved legs. Here and there he saw a large hand, a shock of red hair. He sighed and looked down at his desk again. He did not need this. Not today. Not right now.
"Jack!" the jovial voice woke him from his attempt to count all the little black dots in the plastic covering of his desk. 33. Damn.
"Rex." It sounded more like a grunt than a name. Oh well. He tried. Jack looked up, to see that they had disentangled themselves. Now a broad shouldered, tall, god of manhood sat in the chair opposite from Jack's desk, his somewhat scary red hair and eyebrows contrasting with his wide smile. Perched near his right arm was one of the most beautiful women Jack had ever seen. The black hair he'd noticed before was short and stylishly cut, her legs were amazingly, unbelievably long, her body beyond perfect. She gave him a half smile, and he sighed. This was Rex's girlfriend. The urge to put his head down again was almost overwhelming.
"Soo, Jack, you have an assignment for me?"
Don't put the head down. Don't put the head down. Just don't do it. "Uuuh, yes. Yes. The River's case."
"Rivers?"
He started thinking again. "Yea. Rivers. Very freaky case."
"Freaky. Hmm."
Rex looked distinctly uninterested. Well, that was too bad because he'd have to take this case. "It all started several weeks ago when this woman came in, saying her daughter had disappeared. She was really upset, crying and tugging her hair out. When we got the story out of her, the situation turned even more weird. Apparently, at some ballet recital or something, this strange boy with purple hair talks to their daughter and she flips. Beats this boy into a pulp and then runs out the door. She'd been gone ever since."
"What did you do?"
Jack stood up and moved so that he was looking out the window. Little people below him twisted and turned, their lived peaceful and undisturbed. He saw three petty little crimes transpire, a car whose meter had run out several hours ago, a taxi illegally parked, a little boy pickpocket this rich old man. He leaned his head against the glass and sighed, his men would probably miss all of them. "Well," he continued, "we checked at the hospital. The kid was there. Some guy named Valerie Garth. Strange looking kid, tall, skinny, blue hair-"
"Blue?"
"Yeah. Blue. Said he'd dyed it in the begging of the year. At any rate, he was there and he confirmed the story. The girl that had beat him was Melina Rivers. She had disappeared right after committing the act. So we started to look here and there, you know, with any extra men we had. The boys liked the idea of the case, they spent a lot of time fantasizing about what had happened, what the freaky guy had told her. After a couple weeks, though, we kinda gave up. Other stuff to do, you know, other cases to run. Actually, the Rivers situation slipped my mind until yesterday."
"This her?" Jack glanced over at Rex, who was looking intently at a picture from the file. He looked focused and serious, apparently the case had started to interest him. When he saw Jack looking at him, he handed him a photo, a snap shot of a girl with really short, bright red hair. She was wearing punk paraphernalia, what some of the freaky kids on the streets wore nowadays, really baggy blue jeans and a black and maroon pinstriped dress over them. It was a photo that Mrs. Rivers had given them, a shot of her daughter from a couple months ago. Jack shuddered involuntarily as he looked at it, at the clear red eyes that stared unblinkingly up at him. He had seen plenty of criminals in his time, and this kid had their eyes. There was no mercy in those eyes.
He drew in a shuddering breath before continuing. "Yea. Melina Callie Rivers. Mel for short."
"Says something on the back." Rex said, frowning down at the thing. " 'Mel gets her lovely red hair chopped off. Mom in tears. Dad grounded her for a week. Don't worry, Daddy, Mommy, I'll grow MY hair out.'."
"That was her sister. Luma Serena Rivers. Older by two years. But anyway, yesterday." He sighed again, his breath turned the window opaque. "Yesterday a car went down on the highway, a pretty coastal road actually. Very nice. Not maintained by the state, some woman keeps it up. Anyways. The car is said to have blown up. Only four eyewitnesses that we could find. Three girls, Fiona Drygoon, Sabrina Kyria, and this little kid. Alia, she said her name was. One guy, Gabriel Riev. This is what they tell me." He passed Rex a typed sheet.
The man's eyes flew down it, first surprise, then amazement on his face. He put it down and looked at Jack, whistling softly beneath his breath. The woman with him grabbed the paper and started reading it.
"What do you want me to do?"
"First, I want you to know that as of this morning, Melina Rivers, Ami Wilson and the guy that was with them on the beach, they have all disappeared. Gone. I want you to find out where the hell they are. Also, I want all the info on everyone involved that you can get. Last, I want to know what's going. Why does this girl disappear? What motivated her to blow up the car? I want to know it all Rex. You can start with the first one."
"Hmm?"
"Where the hell are they!"
Eric Zelgadis Grey
"I want to know exactly what happened." Zel's voice shook with barely controlled rage as he faced his best friend Melina Rivers in their first conversation since she had run out of the reception for the ballet recital, several weeks ago. Since then there had been nothing, nothing at all, until she had appeared on the beach, almost blowing him up, but instead, hitting a car and killing two innocent people. Then, it had been him who had realized that the poliece would probably be after them, him that had pulled her to the airport, got them tickets using Rezo's credit card. It was him who had let got them on the plane. The only thing she had done, in the past hours, was convincing him to bring Ami along. Which, he felt after half an hour of the girl's babbling about God, since she was gone for a bathroom break it was blissfully silent, had been a distinctly bad decision on Mel's part.
"Tell me everything." He repeated himself, because Mel had given no sign at his first question that she had heard him.
Now, though, she looked up, and spoke for the first time in a really, really long time. "No."
"Mel, dammit, tell me!"
She looked up at him, her eyes red from crying, her hair a mess, her mouth set in a determined line. "No."
"I Need to know." He knew he couldn't shout on the plane, knew the stewardesses would hear him and question him, but his voice rang with urgency. He did need to know.
Her eyes turned sad, and took on a quality of age. "Don't make me, Zel, please. I can't. Zel, please, don't do that to me." She was pleading with him. Pleading! With him, her best friend! She wanted him to wait! Well, dammit, he was done with waiting!!
"How can you say that?" She looked startled; she hadn't expected this from him. "How can you say that? I'm your friend, Mel, your best friend! How can you say 'don't do that to me' when you've already done the unspeakable? How do you think it felt, Mel, being alone? Not knowing where you were, if you were safe? Do you know how I felt like I was going to throw up when your parents told me that you hadn't come home that night, that they thought I was with you? Do you know Mel? There's nothing that you can't tell me!" his voice broke, there was a haunted look in his eyes as he turned away. "You don't know what it's like to be abandoned."
He was surprised to feel a hand on his shoulder. Turning, he saw Mel, and her eyes mirrored his own. "Yes. Yes I do." Their eyes looked so similar, he could see his in hers. Amber light fractured a billion times in the red depths before him, her irises seemed to glow with her intensity. "But I'd better start from the beginning. Once upon a time, so long ago you can't remember it, there was a sorceress. Her hair was the color of flame; she wielded the power of nightmares. Her name was Lina Inverse."
Ami Wilson
There was silence, welcome, beautiful silence for her to sink into, to dwell in. She thought that Zel, behind her, had fallen asleep. At least he had stopped talking to Mel, stopped pumping her for info on their past life. The life she had said they'd once led. Ami shivered, even though the plane was well heated. That life. The life she'd never known.
So engrossed in her thoughts was she that she didn't' hear the quiet, sniffling crying for several minutes. When she did hear it, she got out of her seat, moved to sit down with Melina and Zel again. It was Mel that was crying, softly, the tears slipping down her face, as each had to fight for her to let go of them. Her eyes were bloodshot, her hair disheveled, it hung in clingly clumps around her cheeks.
Ami watched her for a moment, then sat down. "Why are you crying?"
Mel looked up, startled. "Oh, Ami. I didn't realize-"
"Its okay. You guys were engrossed."
"You heard?"
"Yeah. Don't worry about it. It was my life too, right?" Ami smiled, trying to cover that she really had been hurt, as she marveled at this sensitive turn on Mel's personality. At school, she'd always seemed so loud, so in your face about everything. Now she was . . . subdued? Was that the right word? After seeing her blow up a car so recently, Ami couldn't be sure.
"I'm sorry."
"Why were you crying?"
Mel reached up and wiped her tears, didn't answer. Ami didn't persist, her brother was like this sometimes. People need their space. Finally, Mel turned to her. Her eyes were more bloodshot than before, she'd been doning more crying.
"Do you think I really killed those two people in the car?"
In one simple movement, Mel was crying into her shoulder, and Ami was kissing her hair as maternally as she could. She felt different, older, more mature. She felt like she was someone else.
So it was that, holding her in an embrace, Amelia murmured "Lina" into Melina Rivers hair.
The sun sank into the sea.
Kelly West
As the soft-spoken, brunette stewardess rustled up and down the aisle, she took particular notice of the kids that had gotten on from Massachusetts. (Or was it New York? She never could remember . . .)
The boy, who, though he was a whole head shorter than Kelly, was very attractive, slept. The others did too, of course, but he had been the first to fall asleep. His face was relaxed and soft, even with the acne along it, he screamed of innocent youth. She could love such a face.
Beside him, in a gangly embrace, were the two girls. His sister and girlfriend, she decided, for two of them had the same black hair. The other, the red head, attracted her attention. She was beautiful, in a strange way, a different way. Her features were delicate but at the same time had strength. Her mouth looked diminished without a smile, but it was her hair, her glourious red hair, that made people stop to pause. It caught the light shinning down on it, it glowed. Kelly breathed softly, then reached for the light that they had left on.
As she was stretched over them, so she couldn't see who said it, someone spoke, one word, which she didn't understand.
She walked back up the aisle rolling it on her tounge. "Rezo . . . Rezo . . ."
A.N.: Thanks so much for all the support that I've been getting and I love each and every one of you for it and YAY!!! I feel so special and happy and good and YAY!!!! Okay, I will stop eventually and apologize for not putting this up for so long and for not making it very long but I hope you like Rex and Jack and Natalie and Kelly, even though she probably won't come back into this. I love you all so much . . .
Toodles . . . love should be peace but isn't right now . . .
Divine Firefly
Part II
Chapter One
Jack Stilston-Laws
The curt tap-tap of his secretary's heels on the polished tile floor was really what woke him up, but, tired as he was after last night's fiasco, Jack Stilston-Laws didn't raise his head till she spoke to him.
"Sleeping on the job Again, are we Jack?"
Yawning, and smiling sardonically he looked up at her, and immediately wished he hadn't. Jillian Crut was one of the ugliest women he had ever met, and today she had decided to overdo her make up again. Jeeze.
"Why, yes, Jillian, I was sleeping on the job. Were you?"
She rolled her eyes, which forced him to notice the bottle of mascara that had been forced onto her eyelashes. He shuddered involuntarily. "Jack. Rex Draconis is coming today for the Rivers case you assigned him to. You do remember, right?"
Of course he remembered. God. He hadn't been drinking that much. Jack bit the inside of his mouth and glared at her until he was able to speak civilly. "Really Jillian? Thanks for reminding me! I really did forget!"
She looked smug. "He's down the hall with his new-uhm-girlfriend. Shall I call them in?"
"Certainly, Jillian, you do that."
He looked down at his desk again, until the tap-tap of her heels told him she had retreated, and sighed. Rex. Today. He did not need this. All too soon, the sound of several pairs of feet alerted him to her return, and then his door was flung open.
It was hard to distinguish, from the squirming tangle of arms and legs that appeared in the doorway, his tall, charismatic colleague Rex Draconis. What Jack saw instead was a whole lot of thick, ebony hair, big, bouncing breasts, and long, tan, shaved legs. Here and there he saw a large hand, a shock of red hair. He sighed and looked down at his desk again. He did not need this. Not today. Not right now.
"Jack!" the jovial voice woke him from his attempt to count all the little black dots in the plastic covering of his desk. 33. Damn.
"Rex." It sounded more like a grunt than a name. Oh well. He tried. Jack looked up, to see that they had disentangled themselves. Now a broad shouldered, tall, god of manhood sat in the chair opposite from Jack's desk, his somewhat scary red hair and eyebrows contrasting with his wide smile. Perched near his right arm was one of the most beautiful women Jack had ever seen. The black hair he'd noticed before was short and stylishly cut, her legs were amazingly, unbelievably long, her body beyond perfect. She gave him a half smile, and he sighed. This was Rex's girlfriend. The urge to put his head down again was almost overwhelming.
"Soo, Jack, you have an assignment for me?"
Don't put the head down. Don't put the head down. Just don't do it. "Uuuh, yes. Yes. The River's case."
"Rivers?"
He started thinking again. "Yea. Rivers. Very freaky case."
"Freaky. Hmm."
Rex looked distinctly uninterested. Well, that was too bad because he'd have to take this case. "It all started several weeks ago when this woman came in, saying her daughter had disappeared. She was really upset, crying and tugging her hair out. When we got the story out of her, the situation turned even more weird. Apparently, at some ballet recital or something, this strange boy with purple hair talks to their daughter and she flips. Beats this boy into a pulp and then runs out the door. She'd been gone ever since."
"What did you do?"
Jack stood up and moved so that he was looking out the window. Little people below him twisted and turned, their lived peaceful and undisturbed. He saw three petty little crimes transpire, a car whose meter had run out several hours ago, a taxi illegally parked, a little boy pickpocket this rich old man. He leaned his head against the glass and sighed, his men would probably miss all of them. "Well," he continued, "we checked at the hospital. The kid was there. Some guy named Valerie Garth. Strange looking kid, tall, skinny, blue hair-"
"Blue?"
"Yeah. Blue. Said he'd dyed it in the begging of the year. At any rate, he was there and he confirmed the story. The girl that had beat him was Melina Rivers. She had disappeared right after committing the act. So we started to look here and there, you know, with any extra men we had. The boys liked the idea of the case, they spent a lot of time fantasizing about what had happened, what the freaky guy had told her. After a couple weeks, though, we kinda gave up. Other stuff to do, you know, other cases to run. Actually, the Rivers situation slipped my mind until yesterday."
"This her?" Jack glanced over at Rex, who was looking intently at a picture from the file. He looked focused and serious, apparently the case had started to interest him. When he saw Jack looking at him, he handed him a photo, a snap shot of a girl with really short, bright red hair. She was wearing punk paraphernalia, what some of the freaky kids on the streets wore nowadays, really baggy blue jeans and a black and maroon pinstriped dress over them. It was a photo that Mrs. Rivers had given them, a shot of her daughter from a couple months ago. Jack shuddered involuntarily as he looked at it, at the clear red eyes that stared unblinkingly up at him. He had seen plenty of criminals in his time, and this kid had their eyes. There was no mercy in those eyes.
He drew in a shuddering breath before continuing. "Yea. Melina Callie Rivers. Mel for short."
"Says something on the back." Rex said, frowning down at the thing. " 'Mel gets her lovely red hair chopped off. Mom in tears. Dad grounded her for a week. Don't worry, Daddy, Mommy, I'll grow MY hair out.'."
"That was her sister. Luma Serena Rivers. Older by two years. But anyway, yesterday." He sighed again, his breath turned the window opaque. "Yesterday a car went down on the highway, a pretty coastal road actually. Very nice. Not maintained by the state, some woman keeps it up. Anyways. The car is said to have blown up. Only four eyewitnesses that we could find. Three girls, Fiona Drygoon, Sabrina Kyria, and this little kid. Alia, she said her name was. One guy, Gabriel Riev. This is what they tell me." He passed Rex a typed sheet.
The man's eyes flew down it, first surprise, then amazement on his face. He put it down and looked at Jack, whistling softly beneath his breath. The woman with him grabbed the paper and started reading it.
"What do you want me to do?"
"First, I want you to know that as of this morning, Melina Rivers, Ami Wilson and the guy that was with them on the beach, they have all disappeared. Gone. I want you to find out where the hell they are. Also, I want all the info on everyone involved that you can get. Last, I want to know what's going. Why does this girl disappear? What motivated her to blow up the car? I want to know it all Rex. You can start with the first one."
"Hmm?"
"Where the hell are they!"
Eric Zelgadis Grey
"I want to know exactly what happened." Zel's voice shook with barely controlled rage as he faced his best friend Melina Rivers in their first conversation since she had run out of the reception for the ballet recital, several weeks ago. Since then there had been nothing, nothing at all, until she had appeared on the beach, almost blowing him up, but instead, hitting a car and killing two innocent people. Then, it had been him who had realized that the poliece would probably be after them, him that had pulled her to the airport, got them tickets using Rezo's credit card. It was him who had let got them on the plane. The only thing she had done, in the past hours, was convincing him to bring Ami along. Which, he felt after half an hour of the girl's babbling about God, since she was gone for a bathroom break it was blissfully silent, had been a distinctly bad decision on Mel's part.
"Tell me everything." He repeated himself, because Mel had given no sign at his first question that she had heard him.
Now, though, she looked up, and spoke for the first time in a really, really long time. "No."
"Mel, dammit, tell me!"
She looked up at him, her eyes red from crying, her hair a mess, her mouth set in a determined line. "No."
"I Need to know." He knew he couldn't shout on the plane, knew the stewardesses would hear him and question him, but his voice rang with urgency. He did need to know.
Her eyes turned sad, and took on a quality of age. "Don't make me, Zel, please. I can't. Zel, please, don't do that to me." She was pleading with him. Pleading! With him, her best friend! She wanted him to wait! Well, dammit, he was done with waiting!!
"How can you say that?" She looked startled; she hadn't expected this from him. "How can you say that? I'm your friend, Mel, your best friend! How can you say 'don't do that to me' when you've already done the unspeakable? How do you think it felt, Mel, being alone? Not knowing where you were, if you were safe? Do you know how I felt like I was going to throw up when your parents told me that you hadn't come home that night, that they thought I was with you? Do you know Mel? There's nothing that you can't tell me!" his voice broke, there was a haunted look in his eyes as he turned away. "You don't know what it's like to be abandoned."
He was surprised to feel a hand on his shoulder. Turning, he saw Mel, and her eyes mirrored his own. "Yes. Yes I do." Their eyes looked so similar, he could see his in hers. Amber light fractured a billion times in the red depths before him, her irises seemed to glow with her intensity. "But I'd better start from the beginning. Once upon a time, so long ago you can't remember it, there was a sorceress. Her hair was the color of flame; she wielded the power of nightmares. Her name was Lina Inverse."
Ami Wilson
There was silence, welcome, beautiful silence for her to sink into, to dwell in. She thought that Zel, behind her, had fallen asleep. At least he had stopped talking to Mel, stopped pumping her for info on their past life. The life she had said they'd once led. Ami shivered, even though the plane was well heated. That life. The life she'd never known.
So engrossed in her thoughts was she that she didn't' hear the quiet, sniffling crying for several minutes. When she did hear it, she got out of her seat, moved to sit down with Melina and Zel again. It was Mel that was crying, softly, the tears slipping down her face, as each had to fight for her to let go of them. Her eyes were bloodshot, her hair disheveled, it hung in clingly clumps around her cheeks.
Ami watched her for a moment, then sat down. "Why are you crying?"
Mel looked up, startled. "Oh, Ami. I didn't realize-"
"Its okay. You guys were engrossed."
"You heard?"
"Yeah. Don't worry about it. It was my life too, right?" Ami smiled, trying to cover that she really had been hurt, as she marveled at this sensitive turn on Mel's personality. At school, she'd always seemed so loud, so in your face about everything. Now she was . . . subdued? Was that the right word? After seeing her blow up a car so recently, Ami couldn't be sure.
"I'm sorry."
"Why were you crying?"
Mel reached up and wiped her tears, didn't answer. Ami didn't persist, her brother was like this sometimes. People need their space. Finally, Mel turned to her. Her eyes were more bloodshot than before, she'd been doning more crying.
"Do you think I really killed those two people in the car?"
In one simple movement, Mel was crying into her shoulder, and Ami was kissing her hair as maternally as she could. She felt different, older, more mature. She felt like she was someone else.
So it was that, holding her in an embrace, Amelia murmured "Lina" into Melina Rivers hair.
The sun sank into the sea.
Kelly West
As the soft-spoken, brunette stewardess rustled up and down the aisle, she took particular notice of the kids that had gotten on from Massachusetts. (Or was it New York? She never could remember . . .)
The boy, who, though he was a whole head shorter than Kelly, was very attractive, slept. The others did too, of course, but he had been the first to fall asleep. His face was relaxed and soft, even with the acne along it, he screamed of innocent youth. She could love such a face.
Beside him, in a gangly embrace, were the two girls. His sister and girlfriend, she decided, for two of them had the same black hair. The other, the red head, attracted her attention. She was beautiful, in a strange way, a different way. Her features were delicate but at the same time had strength. Her mouth looked diminished without a smile, but it was her hair, her glourious red hair, that made people stop to pause. It caught the light shinning down on it, it glowed. Kelly breathed softly, then reached for the light that they had left on.
As she was stretched over them, so she couldn't see who said it, someone spoke, one word, which she didn't understand.
She walked back up the aisle rolling it on her tounge. "Rezo . . . Rezo . . ."
A.N.: Thanks so much for all the support that I've been getting and I love each and every one of you for it and YAY!!! I feel so special and happy and good and YAY!!!! Okay, I will stop eventually and apologize for not putting this up for so long and for not making it very long but I hope you like Rex and Jack and Natalie and Kelly, even though she probably won't come back into this. I love you all so much . . .
Toodles . . . love should be peace but isn't right now . . .
Divine Firefly