CHAPTER TWO.
(Here Continues The Story.)
He kept his first coin, the gold one with the hole bored right through the centre of it, strung on leather cord around his neck. Even if he thought he could get something for it, Soul wanted to hang onto it. He couldn't rightly say why he wanted to, but fortunately no one ever thought to ask.
He had received a number of coins since then, whenever it so happened that people were drunk enough to part with a coin or two. Most of them were American dollars, but like the gold one, a few strange and foreign coins were mixed in.
He kept those, the ones from far away ports, adding them to the cord around his neck as best he could - threading the cord through a round bronze piece with a square punched out of its centre, boring holes in an irregular silver rectangle and a copper square.
They hit against each other as he walked, clinking softly as he went about his business. He was getting to fit right into this town, where he found the people to be friendly but not over curious as to his motivations to arriving in the town. And by the by, anyone who was curious about the newcomer settled down when there was not much to know.
Soul was a man of mystery, but people liked their men of mystery to fit a certain image, and he did not fit it. Some people took a notion to approaching his horse, and more than a few of them left Falada nursing purple bruises.
She and he both were left much alone after that, and Soul took to riding out with her every morning, as early as he could stomach getting up after at late night entertaining the patrons.
And so life went on.
Soul took great pains to avoid Miss Albarn after the incident in the church, even though he heard no more about it. That said, even if there had been more about it to hear, Soul, although beginning to form close acquaintances in the little town, could not rightly say that he was inducted into the circle of those who gossiped and chattered around town about what went on behind closed doors.
She was easy to avoid in the day, caught up in running the schoolhouse and picking up where the Sheriff left off, and even easier to avoid at night, where she holed up somewhere her Daddy was unlikely to be found.
Of course it would make sense that the next time he encountered her, some weeks after their first not entirely successful meeting, it was in the wake of a second grisly death.
Soul found him, out on a ride with Falada. He liked to ride Falada out the outskirts of town, looping slowly back to the saloon, speaking softly with her. She was calmer there, away from the noise of the town, and away from someone to start a fight with. He was out on one such ride when he came across the body.
To tell the tale from its beginning, which I am not wont to do, he came across a murder of crows clustered around something, squawking and squabbling. Soul was a curious enough man to wade through the chaos to see what on earth could cause such a frenzy, swinging his leg over and climbing down off Falada to see what all this fuss was about. Something was tugging at his stomach, a gut feeling he'd soon regret. He nudged the squabbling birds out of the way, shooing them, but he didn't cut an intimidating enough figure to scare them much farther than a foot away.
It was, as the eagle eyed reader may have ascertained, a human corpse, the body of one Akane Hoshi. His punctured eyes stared up at him, dried blood crusting his cheeks like tears. Well, it was as much of a body as Hiro has been a body. Soul couldn't tell what killed him, or what hurt had been done before the birds had set their beady eyes on him. He was ripped apart, shredded and torn to pieces with the carrion birds fighting over the meat and tugging at his flesh, pulling pieces off, tearing morsels away and gobbling them down and...
Soul threw up in the dirt, tasting bile, sick to his stomach at the sight of a good man torn open like that. He probably would've thrown up at the sight of a bad man torn up like that, strewn around like wedding rice. Falada sidestepped, dodging Soul's breakfast. She pushed her nose into his shoulder in a rare gesture of compassion, if he was to guess.
Soul wouldn't've recognized him, only he was wearing the same clothes as the night before - a nicer suit than most of town had put together, if getting a little shiny at the knees. Akane was a devout soul, went to the church because he believed in it, really believed in it. Soul swung his leg up to climb on Falada, speaking softly to her as if this was no different to any other ride. He scrubbed his mouth as clean as he could, but it still tasted of acid and he still felt all kinds of wrong as he urged Falada to turn and head back into town.
Someone had to tell the Sheriff.
He was in the stable, or what passed for a stable, talking softly to Falada, who was still a little spooked by the encounter, or perhaps knew there was some mileage to be gotten out of this. Soul didn't know, she was a very clever horse. Much cleverer than he suspected any horse had a right to be.
At any rate a man was dead and a horse was demanding attention, and he gave to her his fullest attention, so much so that when Miss Albarn entered the stable and spoke to him, it took him some minutes to notice her presence.
Some minutes, and a lot of pointed throat clearing on the behalf of Miss Albarn.
"Miss Albarn!" He spluttered, startled by what appeared to be her sudden appearance. He glanced around, looking to see if there was some quick escape available to him. No such luck.
"Mr. Eater," she said quietly, offering him a delicate cup of bone china, probably one of the most expensive items for miles around. Falada didn't count as an item, though Soul recalled her as being fairly expensive. Or at least, she had cost his parents a significant sum of money. "My Papa told me you weren't doing so well with the discovery. I came right over."
Soul looked at her, and she huffed.
"Alright," she admitted. "I came right over after I went out to have a look at Akane."
"That sounds more like you."
He took the cup, and it smelled strong and unfamiliar. The brew was yellowish in colour, and he sipped it cautiously.
The taste was unfamiliar but not unpleasant, and he continue to drink it, holding the cup gently in his hands.
"It's a ginger tea," Maka explained. "To settle your stomach."
"You are aware of my affliction, then?"
"I don't think throwing up at the sight of of a dismembered corpse counts as an affliction."
"And you are quite sure about that, Miss Albarn?" Soul asked hopefully.
"Quite sure," she said. "But I have yet to receive my medical license -"
"Are you planning on studying to be a doctor?"
"No, no," she blushed. "I thought about it for a while, but I think I may be turning out like my Papa after all."
Soul looked at her quizzically - it was no secret that Miss Albarn detested her father intensely, and she was loathe to admit to any commonalities between them.
"I did not, Mr. Eater, lick my knack for solving puzzles up off of the ground," she said. "And my somewhat dogged determination, well I doubt it came from my Mama, or she might still be here."
"Oh, I'm sorry - when did she pass?"
"She isn't dead, Mr. Eater, but she is long gone and I am beginning to think she never had any intention of staying."
Soul didn't know what to say to that, so he took another long sip of tea instead.
Falada leaned over to smell it, but turned her nose up in disgust.
"Don't be rude," Soul said reflexively. Then, remembering Miss Albarn: "Not you, Falada."
"I suspected as much," she said, and smiled. She was in possession of the sort of smile that brightened up an entire room, and was just a little hard to look at. She leaned over to pat Falada gently on the nose.
"Don't!" Soul warned, reaching out to stop her. Falada cautiously nuzzled into the contact.
"She's a big sweetheart, she'd never -" Maka pulled her hand back quickly to avoid Falada's sudden change of heart and also, her teeth.
Soul pushed Falada's nose away from where she stretched out to seek human flesh. She's tasted blood before, and she was ready to taste it again.
"She's beautiful," Maka nodded at Falada. "How long've you two been together?"
"Since she was a foal - hauled her into this world kicking and screaming myself," he smiled. It had all seemed like a huge illicit adventure at the time, being up late, the high stakes andthe mess and the stable master happy enough to have a helping hand instead of insisting on him going to back to bed. "First order of business was to give me a hell of a black eye."
Falada whinnied like she could remember it, and that remembering it was bringing her great joy. Soul wasn't inclined to argue with an seventeen and a half hand horse.
"Second order of business was," Soul lowered his voice as if to prevent Falada being upset by what he said next. "Well, Falada's mother started and ended her brooding career with her."
His mother had been so angry, infuriated at the loss of her investment - Anserinae had pedigree, a line that stretched back to Diomedes and a price tag to match. She was supposed to be matched with some stud of equal value to create some kind of super horse⦠but Anserinae and a big old draft horse who worked the fields named Broomtail had other plans.
The stable master called all the working horses some visual descriptor or another. Grulla and Flaxey, That Ol' Brown Dun, all spoken in the gruff manner if someone who wanted to pretend they didn't care as much as they did. And Broomtail, a beast of a horse. 20 hands at least, and seeming like the top of the world when Soul was a kid.
"She was too big," Soul said, scratching between Falada's ears. "I raised her after that."
Who else would? The stable master was busy, and Falada wasn't worth anything.
"You did a great job," Maka said dryly. "She's got them real ladylike manners."
"Did you just insult my horse?"
News of the death spread quickly, and the circumstances of the death were so uncannily similar to that of Hiro's that everyone was forced to reconsider the classification of such as an unfortunate accident involving extremely wild animals.
The absence of Akane would not felt widely, but he had enough people who saw him him regularly enough to miss him, and enough people to shed tears when they learned of his tragic and untimely end.
And it was both tragic and untimely, Soul could tell. Akane Hoshi did not seem like a man in a great hurry to die - he was serious, yes, but he never needed drink to crack a smile. He tossed Soul the odd coin now and then, especially when Soul played something a little more classical than the other patrons preferred.
He kept the last coin Akane gave him. It was still in his pocket, real lonely with all the nothing else he'd got last night. Bored a hole in it and strung it on the cord next to the other, instead of spending it on a portion of lamp oil that wouldn't last all that long anyway.
Despite Sheriff Albarn's best attempts and Miss Albarn's significantly better attempts, someone was determined to violently murder people, and an enforced curfew and sharp eyed schoolteacher weren't going to stop them.
Especially since there were out of towners to be had, people who didn't know of the murders or the violence to which they were undertaken.
Miss Azusa was a friend of Mrs. Stein's, and was supposed to be visiting from the next town over to see her dear friend before she undertook childbirth. As it turned out two things were not in her favor on this journey. First and foremost Marie, who would be terribly annoyed to find that Soul had called her Mrs. Stein, gave birth to a squalling baby girl who was swiftly swaddled and named Hanora. She had her mother's golden hair and her father's unfortunate predisposition to appearing somewhat like a corpse. And secondly, perhaps of somewhat more significance to the tale, Miss Asuza never arrived. Well, to tell the whole truth, she did arrive, she herself was the thing that was not whole upon arrival.
Not that there was any of her missing, or not much by any rate. Not compared to Hiro, anyway, who'd been waiting to be found long enough that the critters had decided to seize a free lunch. To tell a long story short after the long telling of it, she was in pieces, although no pieces were reported missing, by the good doctor. He smiled all the day while he worked, and whether could be attributed to the birth of his first child or his terrifying fascination with the macabre, there was no one willing to speculate.
Her horse was gone, bolted homewards, but her few valuables remained. Hiro had no valuables of note to be pilfered, something Soul could believe, holding as he did Hiro's former position, made available by his untimely demise. At that time, nobody had paid that any mind. It was of note at this time that these few items had been left. Not much really - some good spectacles and a nice rifle, a handful of fresh minted coins - all with the body, or at least in at the centre of the radiating parts of the body, when they could've been taken for the murderer's own personal gain.
Miss Albarn told Soul all of this in an attempt to convince him to help her get a good look at the body as it were, painstaking arranged in the coffin. Dr. Stein didn't have much in the way of work, and putting Miss Azusa back together had been something like work, except for the part where you might get paid. Despite the sawbones' valiant efforts, it was to be a closed coffin ceremony, and her trusty claw foot hammer dangled from her fingers.
He did not ask how she had reacquired the hammer, although he doubted very sincerely that the preacher had just been so kind as to simply hand it over.
Soul was not convinced she even needed his help, nor that he could prove to be any great help even if she did need it. But she smiled at him, so he found himself agreeing to her harebrained plot before his brain could quite catch up with his ricocheting heart.
"How may I be of assistance?" Soul asked, aiming for charming and landing somewhere around endearing.
"I need you to distract everyone so that I can get a look at Azusa!"
"What in damnation makes you think I can do that?"
"You don't intend to make me say it, do you?"
"Say what, Miss Albarn?" Soul looked her her the eye, genuinely uncertain as to what she could possibly mean.
She reddened, and she huffed, and she even stomped her foot, but Soul did not look away even as she cast her gaze to the side and gestured up and down him.
"You're distracting, Mr. Eater, by nature."
It was only fair that Soul would turn a deep shade of red in response to that. After all, what could a man possibly say to that?
She shooed him away, and Soul supposed that this meant he ought to go be 'distracting' elsewhere, ideally where the people moving Miss Azusa might experience its full effects.
And Soul, wondering as he might what on earth he did to be so distracting, did not know where to begin.
Soul turned away on the heel of his boot towards the saloon, figuring he may as well use the gift he paid for so dearly for something worthwhile, The saloon was about as empty as it normally was this time of the afternoon, with the exception of the old sisters in the corner, playing their cards as they always did.
One of them, Ta Goodwin, flashed her eyes at him, glancing up from the cards to nod at him, once. She'd given him the coin, and he suspected that she was soft on him. One of the others, Na, huffed and Ma just turned a card, focused as intently on the game as ever.
The piano seemed to hum under his fingertips, having finally warmed up to him. She was a beat up, mistrustful old beast but she was content to allow Soul coax music out of her. It didn't hurt that he'd tuned her up, but that didn't mean it helped either. It was like the first day he'd met her again, running his fingers in an arpeggio while his hand searched for the sound, before letting go.
Music like this could call people in off the street.
Music like this found people and made them lost.
Musc like this was incredibly distracting.
He wasn't inclined to let himself go like this very often, fingers pounding on the keys, his hands dancing and his whole body taunt with effort. He figured it as the kind of thing that might draw the attention of those he might prefer if their attention was drawn elsewhere. But Miss Albarn had asked him, and she was hard to say no to.
He heard the floorboards creak as folks wandered in off the road to better hear him, but he didn't look up to see if he had pulled in the two strapping young men who'd come out to draw the remains of the late Azusa home.
He just played, and kept playing until the song was done.
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