No text messages had been exchanged on the smart phone, so he dug through the archive of old texts on the crummy old phone. Lots sent to Emma. Some sent to a Madison. Others, relatively few, to a mom, a Terry and an Alan.
When he’d gotten sick of paging through the texts in the order that they’d been sent, he went looking for the saved texts, the messages Sophia had deemed important or noteworthy enough to save from being deleted. What he uncovered was telling. He had to do more digging to find the rest of the discussions for each message Sophia had saved, in order to get as much a sense of things as he could. It was hard, when each series of texts was in response to some event he hadn’t participated in.
Some were inane, others he just didn’t understand. Then he found one that gave him pause, that confirmed his suspicions about who Emma was.
Emma: what r u doing with her bag?
Sophia: am in art class atm. was thinking i can fill it with paint when teach leaves room. put it in lost&found. her art midterm is inside so she might look for it and find it and
Sophia: be all yay i found it and then she looks inside and sees its fucked
Emma: lol.
Sophia: what did you say to make her cry? that was awesome. blew my mind.
Emma: (SAVED MESSAGE) crying hrself to sleep for a week? she told me she did after her mommy died
Sophia: you r so evil
Emma: ya ya
Sophia: can i use that one on her? saving that one for posterity btw
Emma: won’t have same bite to it. brilliant bit was the suprise. that slow realization abt what i meant.
Sophia: teach me o master
Emma: lol
Emma: wont be as good but i was thinking of that day. think i remember musc we were listening to when she got the phone call abt her mom.
Emma: we shld wait a while and then see if she cries agn if we play it in hallways or b4 class.
Sophia: and we cant get in trouble for just listening to music
Emma: ya
Sophia: cant believe you were her friend.
Emma: she was lame but not depressing and lame @ same time.
Regent closed the phone, threw it casually into the air, and then caught it on the way down. He did that a few more times, thinking.
“Huh,” he said.
Long seconds passed. He knew he should feel bad for the dork, but he only felt annoyed. He felt worse about the fact that he didn’t feel bad than he did about what he’d just read.
Something to thank father for, maybe.
“You are not a nice person,” he spoke to Sophia with a note of irony in his voice. He could feel her try to respond.
He smiled slowly, “Let’s see…”
He thumbed through the phone’s menus until he found an email option. He verified it could send attachments.
The smart phone in his other hand, he found the web browser and did a search for local high schools.
“Hmmm. What school do you go to? Arcadia? No. Immaculata? No. Clarendon? Nope. Winslow?”
He felt the slightest of reactions from her. A hitching of breath, maybe. And there was nothing she could do to stop it, because the reactions were hers only because they were involuntary.
“Awesome.” He searched for the web site for Winslow High School, and whistled tunelessly to annoy Shadow Stalker as he found the teacher’s emails. He began painstakingly entering them into the recipient field.
When he’d done that, he began the process of attaching the texts to the email. It would have been mind-numbingly dull if it wasn’t for that gradually building sense of trepidation he was experiencing from his gracious host.
He typed out a message for the email itself:
found phone. stuff inside is concerning. thought u should see what ur students r doing.
Her thumb hovered over the button that would send the email.
“Nah,” he decided. He felt a wave of relief from his host.
That relief swiftly faded as he turned her eyes to the smart phone and searched for Brockton Bay’s police force.
When he’d added that email to the list, he added another line:
contacting police to make sure something is done
He sent the email.
He felt an explosion of rage from within Shadow Stalker’s body. Her hands even shook with it. He laughed, and her anger mixed with his amusement to create something that sounded unhinged.
Probably was, when he thought about it. She had multiple personalities, in a way.
He stepped from the roof, and waited until the last second to use her power. Her body exploded into a cloud of shadows. As she pulled back together, he felt a strong discomfort. Not quite pain. In seconds, she had condensed back to her normal form. The pain his hosts felt was something distant. It didn’t bother him half as much. He couldn’t be sure if it was because he instinctually prevented it or if it was something else.
He resumed his whistling as he hopped up onto the railing of a bridge and walked atop it. He dialed Emma, felt a mild reaction from his host: Annoyance with a note of anxiety.
Emma picked up on the fourth ring. “What the fuck soph… what the fuck!? It’s three AM!”
“Terribly sorry,” Regent tried to sound convincing, but it came out sounding sarcastic.
“You said you’d call me hours ago, to give me a recap.”
“I’m sorry,” Regent didn’t trust himself to pull off a sincere apology, so he lowered her voice to a hush instead.
“What’s going on?”
“I needed to talk to someone,” he spoke.
“…Are you hurt? What happened?”
“Nothing. There was this brawl at the headquarters, Dragon showed up, but that isn’t what I wanted to talk about.”
Regent held his breath, waited.
“Seriously, you’ve got me worried. You’re making it sound like this important thing, and you woke me up at ten past three in the morning, so it had better be important. Dish. Explain.”
“I’m lonely.”
Emma’s voice rose in pitch, irritated, “Seriously? That‘s your issue!?”
“I miss you.” He knew she wasn’t in town from the most recent texts he’d read on the phone.
“This doesn’t sound like you. Are you high, or did you get poisoned or something?”
“I really miss you,” Regent breathed into the phone.
“What.”
“I’ve been in love with you from the beginning.”
“Sophia, stop. If this is a prank-”
“Why do you think I pushed you to turn on that depressing little shit of a friend, way back then? I was jealous of her.”
“This is retarded. Don’t fucking call me again until you’re ready to grow up,” Emma growled.
“Please,” Regent managed to pull off a pleading tone, but Emma was already hanging up. He heard the dial tone and swore, “Fuck.”
He hopped down from the railing as he reached the end of the bridge. He commented, “Don’t think she bought it.”
Sophia tried to respond, and for the first time, she almost succeeded. The distance between Alec and Shadow Stalker was too wide, now. It would only get worse. He could feel it in his other body, too.
“Let’s see,” he grinned, raising the smart phone. Her hand shook as she held it. “Ooh, maps.”
The map application still showed the last route Shadow Stalker had requested from it, detailing directions from a point in the south end of the Docks to a place downtown.
“Thirty-three Stonemast avenue.”
Again, that slight reaction from her that told him he’d found something.
“That got your attention. Let’s go pay a visit.”
He set the phone to display directions from their current location to Stonemast avenue, and then he ran once more.
Her movements were more awkward, now. Her reflexes were slower, her balance worse. Activating her power was becoming a chore, a slower, harder process. Above all, it required more of his attention. He had his
Regent-self put his headphones in and turn on some music. It was an excuse to ignore the others, and to have his attention elsewhere. They weren’t at their destination yet.
Shadow Stalker reached Stonemast avenue before Regent, Tattletale, Skitter, Imp and Grue got to Coil. It was funny, but with the route they were taking, if the timing was a little different, the group could have theoretically crossed paths with Shadow Stalker. At least his control was improving as the gap between them closed.
Thirty-five, thirty-four, thirty-three. It was a residential area. The houses here weren’t in the best shape, and a lot of houses had trash or belongings in the yard. Thirty-three Stonemast avenue had a toddler’s toys sitting on the front lawn. The hedges between the property and the neighbors was overgrown, and the tree at the front of the property looked dead. It might have seemed deserted, but someone had taken up the effort of picking up the detritus the tidal wave had brought in and piling it at the front corner of the lawn, by the driveway.
He walked her through the front door, felt rising anger and worry from his host.
That anger and worry peaked when a young man, nineteen or twenty, stepped from the living room to the front hall, heading towards the kitchen, and saw her. The man stopped and stared.
“Mom!” He shouted.
A tired looking middle-aged woman entered from the kitchen, holding a four-year old girl in her arms. Regent had grown up around lots of kids. He liked to think he was a good judge of ages.
The woman stared at Shadow Stalker, then turned, “Terry, take your sister upstairs.”
“But-”
“Now!” the woman barked.
Terry moved to pick up the child, who was looking increasingly concerned over the raised emotions and the strange person in their hallway. Regent reached out and grabbed Terry’s arm.
“Chill, bro,” Regent was making a guess here. From the way the boy stared at Shadow Stalker, he knew he’d hit the mark.
“Sophia!?”
“Yeah,” Regent grinned behind her mask. “Duh, moron.”
The woman stepped between Shadow Stalker and Terry, a look of fury on her face, “Sophia! Kitchen. Now!”
With a swagger, Regent walked Shadow Stalker into the kitchen. There was a flurry of hissed words between Terry and Shadow Stalker’s mother. Among them was a surprised, hurt, “You knew!?”
Regent sat down at the kitchen table and put her feet up. Dirty water pooled on the table’s surface.
It was nearly a minute before the mother came storming into the kitchen. She pushed Shadow Stalker’s feet off the table.
“Explain!” she demanded.
“What?” Regent lifted one shoulder in a shrug.
“We had a deal. You could do this thing of yours, but your siblings were not to know!”
“It’s a pain in the ass,” Regent said. He pulled off Shadow Stalker’s mask and started tapping the edge against the table, idly.
“It’s the rules in my house! If it’s going to keep you out of prison and on the straight and narrow, fine. But I will not have you glorifying violence-”
The mother stopped mid-sentence as Regent opened Shadow Stalker’s mouth in a very real yawn. Funny that his other self yawned as well, in that sympathetic reaction to someone else yawning. The mother slapped the mask from Sophia’s hand. It clattered to the ground. “Listen to me!”
“Whatever,” Regent drew a crossbow and turned it over in his hands.
The mother stared at it. Her voice was hushed as she spoke, “That doesn’t look like the tranquilizer dart the Director showed me.”
Regent quirked an eyebrow, “Oops.”
“What are you doing, Sophia? Do you want to go to jail?”
“I’m bored,” Regent replied.
“You do not have the right to complain about something like being bored! I work two jobs for you three! I put in overtime, I attend every school function, I come into the office every time you get reprimanded because you’ve got anger issues! You aren’t even taking care of your sister, or helping out around this house! What do you think-”
“And now you’re making me even more bored,” Regent cut her off.
The mother slapped Sophia so hard that her head turned to one side. Her cheek burned.
“Don’t you dare,” the mother intoned.
Shadow Stalker stood at Regent’s directions, then pointed the crossbow at the mother. The woman’s eyes widened, and she hurried to back away as Shadow Stalker advanced. They stopped when the mother’s back was to the wall by the kitchen door, with Shadow Stalker’s crossbow bolt pressed against her throat.
“I think I’m done with listening to you whinge,” Regent whispered.
“What are you doing? What’s wrong with you?”
“Like you said,” Regent shrugged, “Anger problems. I promise you, you don’t have the slightest idea of what I go through.”
When in doubt, be vague.
“If you’re talking about Steven…”
Steven. Regent could feel a reaction from Shadow Stalker at the name. “I’m not talking about Steven.” He put some inflection in the name. He dropped the crossbow to one side, stepped away and stretched. The mother didn’t budge from where she was pressed up against the wall. “I’m going to my room. Don’t disturb me.”
He bent down and grabbed the mask, but he didn’t put it back on. He stepped out into the hallway, and saw a vacuum cleaner parked in the corner. An extension cord trailed from it to a neighboring room. An office? He unplugged the cord from the wall and the vacuum, and then headed upstairs, winding the cord into a simple coil.
Shadow Stalker’s body was a cocktail of emotion. Fear, anger, anxiety, worry, panic and sheer fury. Regent staved off the worst of the physical reactions, the trembling and the heavy breathing, and managed to make Shadow Stalker seem calm as she reached the top of the stairs. Terry was up there in the hallway, staring, uncomprehending.
Regent found her room, then shut the door. It was small, old-fashioned, with wood paneling on the walls. The furniture was limited to a twin-sized bed, a vanity with a mirror, candles and cosmetics littering the top, a bookshelf and a combination computer desk and dresser with a computer and a printer perched on top. The wall behind the pictures showed Shadow Stalker with a redheaded girl. There were a lot of photos with them laughing. Emma?
“Emma?” he asked. That slight alteration in her heartbeat and her breathing told him he was right.
He found a picture of Shadow Stalker – Sophia – with her family. Her mom looked younger and far less tired there, and was pregnant. Shadow Stalker looked twelve or so, and her brother looked sixteen or seventeen, sporting a fantastic looking afro and a less fantastic attempt at a moustache. They were clustered around one another, but only the mom was smiling.
Regent’s eyes fell on the man who was cut out of the photo, only his hand on the mom’s shoulder, and a sliver of his torso and leg were visible at the edge of the picture.
“Steven?” he asked. Raw hatred boiled up inside Shadow Stalker, for both Regent and the man that couldn’t be seen in the picture. “Steven. So what did he do do you? Believe me, I’ve seen it all. Hit you? Touch you?”
No reaction from either of those. Verbal abuse? Emotional? Something else? He didn’t care enough to quiz her more.
He grabbed the lighter from beside the scented candles and began pulling the photos off of the wall. Using the lighter, he burned a hole in the photograph where Emma’s face was.
“Well,” he said, his tone dry. He had to cough to keep himself from letting her anger turn his voice into a growl. “You sure rose above that shit, treating your classmates like you do, getting in fights, not helping out dear old mom.”
Again, he had to struggle to maintain control as she exploded with emotion. It didn’t help that his other self was trying to listen to what Coil was saying. Better to avoid testing her.
“You and I are more alike than you’d suspect, I think,” he said. “We’re both arrogant assholes, yea
h? Difference is, I admit it, I don’t dress it up and tell myself that I’m a bitch and that that’s a good thing.” He burned Emma’s face out of another photo.
“So, let’s tie all this shit together. I have been working with a goal in mind, believe me.”
He got a piece of paper out of the printer, then found a pen in one of the drawers. He was careful to rely on her muscle memory when it came to the handwriting.
I thought I could manage.
I’m too angry. Too lonely. I hate myself for what I’m doing. Hurting people.
I hurt my mom. I hurt my classmates as Sophia. I hurt people as Shadow Stalker, and I hate myself for enjoying it.
I thought I could manage it. I had Emma. She had my back.
Except she turned me down. I loved her, really loved her, and when I confessed she turned me away. Acted like it was a joke.
This is the right thing to do. I won’t be able to hurt anyone anymore.
Terror surged through her body like ice water. When he laughed in reaction, it came out shaky. He littered the burned photographs around the piece of paper, with Emma’s face missing from each, then drew an arrow from the crossbow’s cartridge and laid it across the bottom edge of the paper. It was overdramatic enough to work.
He stood on the chair and began wrapping the extension cord around the base of the light fixture. He grabbed the cord and hung off it for a few seconds to verify it could hold her weight. The light fixture itself was flimsy , but the frame it was attached to was bolted securely into the wooden beams of the ceiling.
He found moisturizers and soaps on top of the vanity. Using them, he rubbed the end of the extension cord, making it slick. Holding the end, he began tying it into a crude hangman’s knot. When he failed to do it right, he used the smart phone to find a video of how to tie one, then turned the volume all the way down.
“Here’s the thousand dollar question,” he mused, as he began following the steps outlined in the video, putting the knot together, “Will your boss tell your mom what happened with me controlling you? If she keeps her mouth shut, well, this paints a pretty ugly picture, doesn’t it?”
A tear rolled down his cheek. He scoffed a little, blinked the tears out of her eyes.
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