Chapter two: The bloody murder of four girls and the quest to find home.
Linian moaned as she opened her eyes and stiffly sat up. It was very dark and the floor that she was sitting on was cold like concrete. The air was cold and heavy, the smell of rotten wood hung in the air. A groan sounded next to her and Linian managed to make out a form clad in black.
"Kyu!" A white lump hopped onto Linian's stomach and Linian petted With.
"Linian? You okay?" Dark asked next to her as he sat up and she nodded.
"I think so, yea. And With seems to be okay." She looked at Dark. She could see his eyes in the darkness, very though they were a dark purple.
"What about you?"
"About the same, a little sore though." Dark stood and offered a hand to Linian which she took. With bounced up her arm and perched himself on her shoulder.
"Wonder where the hell we are." Dark murmured.
"I think we're in the basement under the building." Linian said as she blindly began to search for the small flashlight.
"Here." Dark took five feathers and lit them like candles. Linian rolled her eyes at the trick.
"Showoff." A cocky smirk twisted his lips, showing off his teeth.
"Yep."
"Baka." She muttered loud enough for him to hear. She ignored the mock hurt look that she got from the Phantom thief and scanned the floor for the flashlight. Remarkably, it wasn't broken from the fall and was lying on the ground not far from where Dark and Linian had landed. Linian walked up, picked it and flickered it on to be face to face with Krad. She yelped, jumping back in surprise. An amused slight grin twisted the white angel's lips.
"Did I frighten you, Linian?" He teased and she angrily glared at him.
"I don't need you sneaking up on me like that! It's bad enough that I get that from Dark." She hissed angrily, glaring at the other angel, who merely grunted. Linian turned and pointed the flashlight around the room to see that the room was littered with wooden crates of different sizes. Linian hummed when she saw that some of the crates were rotten. She walked up to one and with a grunt, managed to open it with one hand.
"Nothing in here but dust and a few spiders." She announced on a sour note. Dark opened another one.
"Nothing of interest in this one." Krad opened one that was in one of the farther corners of the room.
"Or in this one." Krad dropped the lid, making a loud 'BANG!' Dark glared at him as Linian moved to another crate. This one had something interesting inside. A book that was bond with a faded black cover with faint silver stenciled letters in it.
"If you two are done glaring at each other, I think I found something." Dark peered over her right shoulder and Krad over her left shoulder. Linian's hand brushed away the thin layer of dust on the cover.
'Heavenly Corridors Elementary School. Years 2001-2002' The cover read in silver. Linian rested the book on one of the crates and opened to the book to the third page to find the page filled with rows on rows of photos of students in oval borders with their names and class rooms underneath.
"Looks like an old yearbook, but why would someone leave it in the basement?" Linian shrugged.
"It must be a clue from the girl with the scissors that pulled us into this. It's our guide in her little game." Linian turned the page and Krad frowned.
"Isn't that her?" He pointed to a picture of a girl looking dully at the camera. Her long black hair was half shielding her dull gray eyes.
"Koska Akane. Room E-2." Dark read the caption underneath.
"Hm, now at least we know her name."
"True, but we don't know why she left this for us to find." Linian pointed out. Krad looked over to see a scrap piece of paper pinned to one of the crates.
"What is this?" He asked as he unpinned the piece of paper and looked at it.
"Here, read this." Dark took the paper and Linian pointed the flashlight at the scrap. It was a clipping of a news article dated June 18 2002.
"Although the some of the details of Sunday's discovery in the basement of the Heavenly Corridors Elementary school are clouded, it has been confirmed that there were indeed four bodies of the four young girls that disappeared last week. All the girls were the ages between the ages of ten and twelve. Although we are not allowed to release the names of the victims in respect to the morning families, the police have allowed this newspaper to publish the details of the serial murders and kidnappings. I will warn you readers that the details are gruesome." Dark and Linian shared a sideways glance.
"According to the police, each victim was bond and blindfolded, to sprawled out in a line and was murdered one by one." Linian shuddered as Dark continued to read.
"The first victim died from serve blood loss due to the removal of the organs. Her ribs were broken and her heart, and liver were removed. Her discarded organs were found half buried beneath the earthen floor of the school basement where the bodies were discovered. The second victim died of multiple stab wounds to the torso, specifically the stomach with a large pair of sewing scissors, which were found in the suspects' hand. The third victim had her left eye stabbed with the aforementioned scissors until it had a jelly like consistency and was scooped out of her eye-socket. She was then left to die, slowly bleeding to an agonizing death. The final victim had her spinal cord severed and her head removed, which was later discovered discarded in the sewers."
"So what does this have to do with that?" Krad asked. Linian turned and gasped to see a deep crimson liquid was on the page before the photos. She turned to see blood forming words on the blank page.
"Four little girls all better then me,
But they fail to see what lies beneath.
Black on black, red on red,
I have nothing to dread." Linian read aloud. She was silent then looked at the other two.
"It's a message, she knows what she did was wrong and she feels no regret."
"Why?" Dark asked and she shrugged.
"I don't know, but I do know that if we find something that all four girls shared, we can send them to the afterlife and maybe find our way home."
"What will we use?" Krad asked. "For all we know, they could have been complete strangers."
"Dark, let me see that article." Dark handed it off to her and she scanned it will the flashlight.
"Ah ha!" She smirked triumphantly.
"What?" Dark asked.
"Kyu?" With asked from Linian's shoulder.
"The article says that all of the victim's tongues were removed after they were all killed."
"Why would that girl remove her victim's tongues?" Dark asked.
"I remember Katsan telling me that if you remove a person's tongue after death, the ghost can't speak. Until their tongue is found and returned, then the spirit can't tell their story, and it means that they have a harder time moving on."
"So you're thinking that she cut out their tongues to keep them here?" Dark asked and Linian nodded.
"Remember what I said before? About how a spirit can't move on because they need to be released? If we return the tongues to the girls maybe we can free them and they'll help us find a way back." Dark glanced at Krad.
"We'll have to rely on you, Linian. You're the only one that can speak to them."
"I know, by the way, Krad, you can't see the spirits." She pointed the feather in her hand at the white angel.
"I can fix that." Before Krad could react, she cast the same spell that she cast on Dark earlier.
"There, now you both can see and hear the spirits, but you can't talk directly to them."
"Now that we can see the spirits, how do you suggest we find the girl's tongues?" Krad asked. Linian passed With to Dark and closed the yearbook. She pointed the feather in her hand at the cover to reveal scribbles in blood red ink.
"Spirit writings. They'll give us clues as to where each of the girl's tongues are hidden, but it wouldn't give us help as to who it belongs to. That we will have to figure out on our own."
"So what do they say?"
"In a hall, black like the night,
Awaits the past filled with spite.
Here it lies, the treasure you seek,
Find it and it's yours to keep."
"Hallway?" Dark asked and Krad snorted.
"No really? That was a stupid question, Dark." Dark glared at his other half and Linian sighed.
"You two are acting like you're thirteen. Honestly, Katsan was more mature then this." She snapped and Krad and Dark looked at her.
"What? It's the truth."
"Dark was the one that asked a stupid question." Krad retorted.
"I don't care, you two are still acting like a pair of thirteen year old boys, Now I'm telling you to knock it off." Dark and Krad shrugged.
"Look, lets just look for some way to get out of this place." Linian said, glancing around the room, pointing the flashlight at nearby objects. All of a sudden, she caught a glimpse of a wooden door not too far away. She approached said door, but it was locked.
"Damn." She muttered.
"Better find a key, then..." She started off in a random direction, dragging the other two behind her. After a few minutes of searching, Dark exclaimed very loudly,
"I found it!" Linian and Krad both looked in his direction, and he was indeed holding a rusted key to the door. Linian snatched the key from his hand and turned back to the door, and tried the key. The lock clicked and the door creaked as Linian pushed it open. As she poked her head into the dark hallway on the other side, she heard a sound she was rather familiar with, the sound of a girl crying. She turned the flashlight in the direction of the sound, only to see the eerie electric blue glow of a spirit. The trio stopped dead in their tracks. The small girl was sitting in a corner of the corridor with her knees up to her chest and her face on her knees. The sobbing continued to echo in the hallway until a small squeak from Krad's left boot gave them away, and the sobbing halted, causing a deadly silence to overcome them, making a shiver run up the spines of all three of the living occupants in the room. The girl looked up and Linian swallowed down the lump in her throat. The girl stood and started to slowly glide towards them. She stopped only three steps from Linian and started to glow angry red.
'Step aside and allow us to past!' Linian hissed in Latin, the feather in her hand glowing bronze and blasting the spirit back.
"Now run!" Linian yelled and the trio bolted down the corridor as the spirit squeaked angrily after them. With held onto Dark's shoulder as the three of them dashed though the corridor to escape that ghost. They stopped and tried to catch their breath.
"What was that?" Dark asked. Linian looked at him.
"That was must have been one of the victims, I wonder where the last one is."
"I don't know, but I don't intend to have another encounter like that again." Dark said. Krad rolled his eyes as they followed Linian down the corridor again.
A/N: And here is the next chapter to Darkness between innocence. Gold star to Bottomless pit of EMOTIONS for reviewing! :D Have a cookie! Anyways I only own Linian, Katsan and the other characters that I created. TTFN!