[fic][dgure] Village of Dreams (2/?)
Village of Dreams (2/5)
Previous Chapter Here
by vikki
Warnings: gore, sexual themes in later chapters
Summary: A village in France is assaulted by near-daily severe thunderstorms. Convinced it's a piece of Innocence, the Dark Church sends Allen and Rinali to investigate. Intrigue! Serial killers! And . . . people General Cross owes money to? Uh oh.
Visibility was terrible in the rain. The street was dark, any lamps on the road deadened by the harsh weather; the only light available was the faint ones provided by the lit buildings up and down the street. Allen shielded his eyes with his arm in the wind, blinking rapidly against the rain and wind. "Can you see anything?" he shouted to Rinali.
Rinali was peering in the same direction, but she didn't reply before a flash of lightning illuminated the building in question. Like many older villages in France, the buildings here were constructed sturdily of stone and mortar, but the tree that had collapsed was ancient and great - perhaps older than the town itself. The front of the building was torn open, the roof caved in the front; the lower branches had mostly destroyed the covered porch. Thunder drowned out Rinali's voice as she pointed. They ran closer, and now there were drenched woodchips under their feet - the strike of lightning that had toppled the tree had exploded its trunk at the base.
There was no way in through the front door, the branches were so thick there, so Allen scrambled up the side of the trunk and into the branches; there was a flare of light in Rinali's direction and she leapt to join him, her boots on brilliant fire with active Innocence. Through the collapsed roof it was possible to slip into the upper level of the store. Allen struggled through the branches and halfway fell into the destroyed room, abruptly aware of his drenched clothes clinging to his chest and arms and thighs in the almost-dry space. Timcampi flitted to Allen's side, shuddering from wingtip to tail to rid itself of excess water, then nestled itself between Allen's neck and collar.
It only occurred to Allen as Rinali slid in more gracefully to join him that no one one, up and down the street, had so much as opened their doors to survey the damage or offer help - even if no-one were friends in this town, surely cruel human curiosity would have driven them to come see, at least? He didn't voice his concerns.
They stood in a bedroom, that much was obvious, although the bed in question was broken in half by one great branch. A gas lamp lay shattered on the floor. Leaves and broken twigs were everywhere, and the floor groaned under their feet. It would have been too dark to see, but Rinali's boots lit the room.
"It's very quiet," Rinali murmured.
"The floor might collapse," Allen observed, beckoning for Rinali to follow him further into the house. "We'd best be quick." They went into the hallway, where the stairs crossed against the opposite wall; there were two more doors on the floor. Allen gestured to the far one and pointed to himself, and Rinali nodded, going to the first door. The doors opened to more shattered gas lamps, a bedroom and a sitting room, but that was all.
"It seems like no-one was home," Rinali observed in the hallway, ending her invocation.
"Let's check downstairs first," Allen suggested, and so down the stairs they went. It opened immediately into a general store, and a bit more light; the door was banging open from the tree branches that had ripped it from its hinges. The glass window was broken. The storm was finally slowing, but it was still dark, and the rain came down in a steadily lightening downpour. Water made the floor slippery, and Allen noted with some small dismay a batch of ruined flour. But for the damage of the tree and the wind and water, the only things in the room that needed repair was the gas lamps set in the wall - every single one had been shattered. The scent of burned air and gas and rain was overwhelming, but there was something else too, relatively faint: the smell of blood.
Allen frowned at this, but then he heard Rinali's strangled gasp. "Allen--!" He whirled and followed her voice around the back of the stairs, where a variety of cooking tools hung on the wall.
There sat on a shelf, casual as anything could be, the head of a dark-haired man, his face pulled back in a terrified grimace that seemed to slide off the side of his face. A bloody butcher knife was embedded in the wood beside its ear. Blood ran down the shelf, and now that Allen was so close the stench was overpoweringly horrible. Allen felt a bit green at the gills and covered his mouth and nose.
Rinali's hands were at her mouth and she was very pale, but if anything, she recovered more quickly than even Allen. "Th-this must be Pierre. Wh-where ... where is the body ...?" she asked faintly.
Allen looked away. He had seen a man beheaded before, another gift to him from this God-forsaken country, but even then the severed head had only been visible for a moment. To see such a thing on display--! Allen had never known even AKUMA to participate in such depravity.
But Rinali had a valid point; the body was missing. It wasn't even immediately evident that the act had been carried out within the store; as the sky brightened and the rain lessened, Allen realized there was no blood anywhere else in the room except pooling freshly under the man's head. "Was he even killed here ...?" Allen wondered.
"Where else could he have been killed? Or perhaps his body was t-taken away?" Rinali wondered aloud, wrapping her arms around herself.
"It would be impossible without spilling a drop of blood," Allen said quietly. He swallowed, closing his eyes. "If it was an AKUMA, it might be possible if the man was petrified first, but his head clearly ..." Allen swallowed back bile and took a few steps backwards. "And whomever did this, if they ran their tracks will be washed away by the rainfall."
Rinali touched his shoulder, and Allen opened his eyes again. "Allen, look." She pointed at the wall where the row of gas lamps lay shattered. "Don't you think it's odd that only the lamps were broken?"
"They were the only things destroyed in the whole house," Allen recalled. He licked his lips as he realized something else, and he grimaced. "We should leave. If we're found here, being outsiders, we might be blamed for this."
"But we just got here today," Rinali pointed out. Still, she followed Allen up the stairs to the hole in the roof where they had broken in.
The rain had dropped off to a drizzle; the sky was still dark, but the setting sun had fallen beyond the cloud cover and cast the whole street in orange hues. "It won't matter," Allen grunted as he pulled himself up on a branch. He offered his hand to Rinali, but she was already hauling herself up to his side. "I wouldn't blame them for being mis--"
"Hé, étrangers!" Hey, strangers! translated the device in their ears.
Allen's shoulders jerked upwards and Timcampi squirmed against his collarbone. Allen twisted to look over his shoulder at the small crowd of people that had gathered at the base of the fallen tree. They were mostly men, and several had axes in hand. Allen froze where he was, and Rinali crouched beside him, silent. She cast him a glance; Allen shook his head. No, none of them are AKUMA. But even as he struggled for something to say, one of the men jerked his chin at the destroyed home-cum-shop. "Were you in there?"
Allen hesitated for a moment before admitting, "Oui." He opened his mouth to explain but the man cut him off.
"You friends of the folks that came here a few weeks ago? Strange ones, they were. Lurkers."
Allen looked at Rinali in confusion. "The Finders?" Rinali asked under her breath.
It was possible, but Allen didn't know if it would be wise to admit a connection to them. Allen changed the subject instead, stumbling over his French. "N-nous voulons aider," he said. We want to help. "Nous--"
"Your lurker friends are dead," the man interrupted again. Clearly he had little interest in what Allen had to say. "Like you, they foolishly entered a dark home in the storms. You are not dead - are you sorcerers?" His gaze lingered on Allen's face and hair, and drifted to Rinali, who was undeniably foreign in appearance. "Or witches?"
Allen and Rinali looked at each other again. How could they answer that? Innocence might appear as a sorcerous power to an outsider. But this was an Orthodox country; sorcery was condemned even more heavily in France than in England. It would be troublesome to be driven out of the small village. "Non," Allen said after a moment. Should I say more? He'll probably just interrupt me again. He motioned to Rinali to continue climbing down with him; his arms were starting to ache from bracing himself on the branches.
"Then why are you here, investigating fallen trees?"
Allen's lips twitched. "Why are you fearing dark places?" he asked in French, letting himself down off the last branch. He dusted off his wet pants ineffectually. "Once more we are hearing of - of keeping the lamps on."
The man shook his head and chuckled. "We are cursed," he said simply. Allen said nothing; the Frenchmen shifted on their feet, perhaps upset by their apparent leader's frank words. But the man simply stepped forward, closing the distance between himself and Allen to an umcomfortable couple of feet. "If your mute witch--" here he gestured to Rinali, who pursed her lips but said nothing - "-can lift this curse, then free us! Or leave before you share our fate." And so saying, he shouldered Allen aside. "Come, men!" He lifted his axe to the tree branches blocking the way into the shop.
Allen stood stiffly, turning to watch the men's tedious work, done in tense silence. Rinali faced him, but her gaze didn't lift from the ground. "I haven't been called a ..." she trailed off, as if thinking better of the statement, and glanced over her shoulder at the working men. "They hardly said anything worth hearing."
Allen licked his lips before speaking. "They're very superstitious." It was only natural, with such unexplained phenomena occuring around them on a daily basis, if the reports were to be believed. "But ..." if they were truly superstitious they should have feared sorcerers and witches in their midst. They should have been calling on the church to save them, exorcise their town.
I didn't see a church steeple.
Allen's lips parted at the sudden realization. This town was very old. There should have been a formal Catholic church here. Where was it? He snapped his head up, looking up and down the street, squinting into the dying sunlight.
"Perhaps we should go dry off again," Rinali suggested sotto voice.
Allen shook his head slightly. "Yes," he agreed awkwardly.
&
"There's no church in this village."
Rinali settled herself across the wood paneling of the floor in a perfect center split and slowly lowered her torso to lay flat on the ground. Like Allen she was down to her smallclothes; their outfits had been laid out to dry again along the edge of the room.
Allen was balanced on one hand, his toes pointed to the ceiling, doing pushups. Rinali watched him with her cheek pressed against the floor; his balance was exquisite, barely wavering. "Is that unusual?" Rinali asked.
Allen dropped his left hand to the ground to join the other and carefully left his handstand in a back walkover. He gave Rinali a surprised look. "Well - perhaps not, in England," he mused. "But this town is very old, and France is Catholic Orthodox. The cathedral should be the centerpiece of the village; it should have been the first thing we saw."
Rinali mentally filed the information away as useful. She had little use for the organized religions of the West, even though the Black Order was associated with the Vatican; she had never seen any reason to take especial note of the practices of Europeans in regards to their God. If she were to be perfectly honest, she was feeling a little bitter. It was silly to feel that way, but the last time she had been called a witch--
It didn't bear thinking about. Rinali gracefully raised her torso off the floor and stretched over her left leg. "I think we should focus on the murder of Mr. Pierre," Rinali pointed out, redirecting the conversation.
Allen dropped onto his back, crossed his ankles, and began doing curls with his arms behind his head. "Do you think it's a lead on the Innocence?" he asked.
Rinali had no idea. She could still see the severed head in her mind's eye, sickening her, but she stared hard at the far wall until the image left her head. "I can only think of two things that would be able to perform that murder; AKUMA or something possessed by Innocence. Perhaps Mr. Pierre was an AKUMA ...?" she trailed off, looking at Allen questioningly.
Allen glanced her way and offered a brief smile. "I don't know; I would have to have seen the skull. Once the soul has gone I can't see an AKUMA any more." But he seemed to think of something then. "You didn't touch the blood, did--"
"No," Rinali answered, cutting him off. If Pierre had indeed been an AKUMA, his blood would be poisonous as the bullets fired by Level Ones. "We would have seen the signs by now if I had."
Allen merely sighed in relief, still doing curl-ups. "Still, it seems strange that an Innocence could only operate in the dark. Why would it shatter all the gas lamps? If that's what's causing it, I mean. And why leave the head?"
Rinali twisted to stretch over her other leg. "I've seen Innocence do many strange things."
"But the Finders disappeared ..."
"That could be the work of AKUMA." Rinali laid her head against her knee. The Innocence could be effecting the weather if it needed the darkness; it would then attack the AKUMA through, perhaps, its Accomodator, or whomever it possessed. It would be best if it was an Accomodator, or the Innocence would destroy the person using it. Even Accomodators were hardly safe from its power.
Allen 'hmm'ed. "You've been with the Order a lot longer than me, and I never met another Accomodator before I came there," he observed as if talking himself into assenting to Rinali's assessment. "I hardly know what Innocence can do."
Rinali looked over at him. "You don't agree, though?" she asked mildly, curious what Allen was thinking. Although he may not have been with the Order long as an Exorcist, he had been trained by General Marion Cross, after all.
Allen tilted his head slightly, his shoulders jerking into a shrug, but he didn't stop his regimen; his breath came a little short now. "I don't know." He paused for a few situps. "I might just be effected by all the talk about sorcery." He laughed shortly.
"My brother says that sorcery is hardly practiced in the West," Rinali protested. "I thought it was strange they would talk about it so ..." Cruelly. "Casually." She got to her feet and arched over backwards into a bridge, bringing her feet and hands within a foot of each other.
"Oh," Allen panted, grimacing, "It isn't a dead art yet. It just - well, in the right hands - it's still very effective. Take Timcampi, for example. Speaking of which ..." Allen rolled from a situp to a standing position. "Tim? Tim, where'd you--oh. No."
Rinali looked at him quizzically; Allen was staring at the bed. "Tim, did you record all of ... this?"
Rinali walked out of her bridge back to her feet, blinking. Timcampi had floated off the bed; the golden golem was bearing its teeth as if in a smile. Allen had gone quite pale. "Erase that! Erase that whole last conversation! Ow!"
Timcampi did not seem inclined to do as Allen ordered; it bit Allen's ear. Allen grabbed at it in frustration. Rinali sighed. "Allen, we were just exercising. We can't help it if we have to share a room."
"Do you think your brother will see it that way!?" Allen asked, his hand fisted around Timcampi's tail. "I mean it, spit it out! Or should I feed you to an alley cat!?"
Rinali couldn't help the small giggle that escaped her at the comical scene; she had never seen any member of the Order actually have to fight with their golem to get it to obey. But Allen could not be coaxed from the fight until Rinali had promised to explain everything to her brother, if it came to that.
"Where will we resume the investigation tomorrow?" Rinali asked as she braided her hair back for sleep.
Allen shrugged as he sat on the bed facing away from Rinali, scrubbing his left hand through his hair. Rinali would never have said anything, but she was impressed by how casually Allen could treat the hand embedded with his Innocence, how it behaved just as if it were a real, normal hand. She wondered how long Allen had struggled and suffered to obtain that kind of control. "I think we should talk to the farmer who told us this place is cursed, to start," Allen said. He didn't look back at Rinali. "And then, we should check the graveyards."
"The Earl of Millennium leaves no mark on the graves," Rinali said automatically.
"But a sorcerer might," Allen said, throwing back the covers. "Goodnight, Rinali."
Rinali crawled under the covers on her side of the bed and stared at the far wall, thinking of a severed head and bones, sinew, rotted flesh: maggots and overturned graves, and dark voices behind the door.
"Brother," she whispered, "please protect me." And she closed her eyes.
tbc
Previous Chapter Here
by vikki
Warnings: gore, sexual themes in later chapters
Summary: A village in France is assaulted by near-daily severe thunderstorms. Convinced it's a piece of Innocence, the Dark Church sends Allen and Rinali to investigate. Intrigue! Serial killers! And . . . people General Cross owes money to? Uh oh.
Visibility was terrible in the rain. The street was dark, any lamps on the road deadened by the harsh weather; the only light available was the faint ones provided by the lit buildings up and down the street. Allen shielded his eyes with his arm in the wind, blinking rapidly against the rain and wind. "Can you see anything?" he shouted to Rinali.
Rinali was peering in the same direction, but she didn't reply before a flash of lightning illuminated the building in question. Like many older villages in France, the buildings here were constructed sturdily of stone and mortar, but the tree that had collapsed was ancient and great - perhaps older than the town itself. The front of the building was torn open, the roof caved in the front; the lower branches had mostly destroyed the covered porch. Thunder drowned out Rinali's voice as she pointed. They ran closer, and now there were drenched woodchips under their feet - the strike of lightning that had toppled the tree had exploded its trunk at the base.
There was no way in through the front door, the branches were so thick there, so Allen scrambled up the side of the trunk and into the branches; there was a flare of light in Rinali's direction and she leapt to join him, her boots on brilliant fire with active Innocence. Through the collapsed roof it was possible to slip into the upper level of the store. Allen struggled through the branches and halfway fell into the destroyed room, abruptly aware of his drenched clothes clinging to his chest and arms and thighs in the almost-dry space. Timcampi flitted to Allen's side, shuddering from wingtip to tail to rid itself of excess water, then nestled itself between Allen's neck and collar.
It only occurred to Allen as Rinali slid in more gracefully to join him that no one one, up and down the street, had so much as opened their doors to survey the damage or offer help - even if no-one were friends in this town, surely cruel human curiosity would have driven them to come see, at least? He didn't voice his concerns.
They stood in a bedroom, that much was obvious, although the bed in question was broken in half by one great branch. A gas lamp lay shattered on the floor. Leaves and broken twigs were everywhere, and the floor groaned under their feet. It would have been too dark to see, but Rinali's boots lit the room.
"It's very quiet," Rinali murmured.
"The floor might collapse," Allen observed, beckoning for Rinali to follow him further into the house. "We'd best be quick." They went into the hallway, where the stairs crossed against the opposite wall; there were two more doors on the floor. Allen gestured to the far one and pointed to himself, and Rinali nodded, going to the first door. The doors opened to more shattered gas lamps, a bedroom and a sitting room, but that was all.
"It seems like no-one was home," Rinali observed in the hallway, ending her invocation.
"Let's check downstairs first," Allen suggested, and so down the stairs they went. It opened immediately into a general store, and a bit more light; the door was banging open from the tree branches that had ripped it from its hinges. The glass window was broken. The storm was finally slowing, but it was still dark, and the rain came down in a steadily lightening downpour. Water made the floor slippery, and Allen noted with some small dismay a batch of ruined flour. But for the damage of the tree and the wind and water, the only things in the room that needed repair was the gas lamps set in the wall - every single one had been shattered. The scent of burned air and gas and rain was overwhelming, but there was something else too, relatively faint: the smell of blood.
Allen frowned at this, but then he heard Rinali's strangled gasp. "Allen--!" He whirled and followed her voice around the back of the stairs, where a variety of cooking tools hung on the wall.
There sat on a shelf, casual as anything could be, the head of a dark-haired man, his face pulled back in a terrified grimace that seemed to slide off the side of his face. A bloody butcher knife was embedded in the wood beside its ear. Blood ran down the shelf, and now that Allen was so close the stench was overpoweringly horrible. Allen felt a bit green at the gills and covered his mouth and nose.
Rinali's hands were at her mouth and she was very pale, but if anything, she recovered more quickly than even Allen. "Th-this must be Pierre. Wh-where ... where is the body ...?" she asked faintly.
Allen looked away. He had seen a man beheaded before, another gift to him from this God-forsaken country, but even then the severed head had only been visible for a moment. To see such a thing on display--! Allen had never known even AKUMA to participate in such depravity.
But Rinali had a valid point; the body was missing. It wasn't even immediately evident that the act had been carried out within the store; as the sky brightened and the rain lessened, Allen realized there was no blood anywhere else in the room except pooling freshly under the man's head. "Was he even killed here ...?" Allen wondered.
"Where else could he have been killed? Or perhaps his body was t-taken away?" Rinali wondered aloud, wrapping her arms around herself.
"It would be impossible without spilling a drop of blood," Allen said quietly. He swallowed, closing his eyes. "If it was an AKUMA, it might be possible if the man was petrified first, but his head clearly ..." Allen swallowed back bile and took a few steps backwards. "And whomever did this, if they ran their tracks will be washed away by the rainfall."
Rinali touched his shoulder, and Allen opened his eyes again. "Allen, look." She pointed at the wall where the row of gas lamps lay shattered. "Don't you think it's odd that only the lamps were broken?"
"They were the only things destroyed in the whole house," Allen recalled. He licked his lips as he realized something else, and he grimaced. "We should leave. If we're found here, being outsiders, we might be blamed for this."
"But we just got here today," Rinali pointed out. Still, she followed Allen up the stairs to the hole in the roof where they had broken in.
The rain had dropped off to a drizzle; the sky was still dark, but the setting sun had fallen beyond the cloud cover and cast the whole street in orange hues. "It won't matter," Allen grunted as he pulled himself up on a branch. He offered his hand to Rinali, but she was already hauling herself up to his side. "I wouldn't blame them for being mis--"
"Hé, étrangers!" Hey, strangers! translated the device in their ears.
Allen's shoulders jerked upwards and Timcampi squirmed against his collarbone. Allen twisted to look over his shoulder at the small crowd of people that had gathered at the base of the fallen tree. They were mostly men, and several had axes in hand. Allen froze where he was, and Rinali crouched beside him, silent. She cast him a glance; Allen shook his head. No, none of them are AKUMA. But even as he struggled for something to say, one of the men jerked his chin at the destroyed home-cum-shop. "Were you in there?"
Allen hesitated for a moment before admitting, "Oui." He opened his mouth to explain but the man cut him off.
"You friends of the folks that came here a few weeks ago? Strange ones, they were. Lurkers."
Allen looked at Rinali in confusion. "The Finders?" Rinali asked under her breath.
It was possible, but Allen didn't know if it would be wise to admit a connection to them. Allen changed the subject instead, stumbling over his French. "N-nous voulons aider," he said. We want to help. "Nous--"
"Your lurker friends are dead," the man interrupted again. Clearly he had little interest in what Allen had to say. "Like you, they foolishly entered a dark home in the storms. You are not dead - are you sorcerers?" His gaze lingered on Allen's face and hair, and drifted to Rinali, who was undeniably foreign in appearance. "Or witches?"
Allen and Rinali looked at each other again. How could they answer that? Innocence might appear as a sorcerous power to an outsider. But this was an Orthodox country; sorcery was condemned even more heavily in France than in England. It would be troublesome to be driven out of the small village. "Non," Allen said after a moment. Should I say more? He'll probably just interrupt me again. He motioned to Rinali to continue climbing down with him; his arms were starting to ache from bracing himself on the branches.
"Then why are you here, investigating fallen trees?"
Allen's lips twitched. "Why are you fearing dark places?" he asked in French, letting himself down off the last branch. He dusted off his wet pants ineffectually. "Once more we are hearing of - of keeping the lamps on."
The man shook his head and chuckled. "We are cursed," he said simply. Allen said nothing; the Frenchmen shifted on their feet, perhaps upset by their apparent leader's frank words. But the man simply stepped forward, closing the distance between himself and Allen to an umcomfortable couple of feet. "If your mute witch--" here he gestured to Rinali, who pursed her lips but said nothing - "-can lift this curse, then free us! Or leave before you share our fate." And so saying, he shouldered Allen aside. "Come, men!" He lifted his axe to the tree branches blocking the way into the shop.
Allen stood stiffly, turning to watch the men's tedious work, done in tense silence. Rinali faced him, but her gaze didn't lift from the ground. "I haven't been called a ..." she trailed off, as if thinking better of the statement, and glanced over her shoulder at the working men. "They hardly said anything worth hearing."
Allen licked his lips before speaking. "They're very superstitious." It was only natural, with such unexplained phenomena occuring around them on a daily basis, if the reports were to be believed. "But ..." if they were truly superstitious they should have feared sorcerers and witches in their midst. They should have been calling on the church to save them, exorcise their town.
I didn't see a church steeple.
Allen's lips parted at the sudden realization. This town was very old. There should have been a formal Catholic church here. Where was it? He snapped his head up, looking up and down the street, squinting into the dying sunlight.
"Perhaps we should go dry off again," Rinali suggested sotto voice.
Allen shook his head slightly. "Yes," he agreed awkwardly.
&
"There's no church in this village."
Rinali settled herself across the wood paneling of the floor in a perfect center split and slowly lowered her torso to lay flat on the ground. Like Allen she was down to her smallclothes; their outfits had been laid out to dry again along the edge of the room.
Allen was balanced on one hand, his toes pointed to the ceiling, doing pushups. Rinali watched him with her cheek pressed against the floor; his balance was exquisite, barely wavering. "Is that unusual?" Rinali asked.
Allen dropped his left hand to the ground to join the other and carefully left his handstand in a back walkover. He gave Rinali a surprised look. "Well - perhaps not, in England," he mused. "But this town is very old, and France is Catholic Orthodox. The cathedral should be the centerpiece of the village; it should have been the first thing we saw."
Rinali mentally filed the information away as useful. She had little use for the organized religions of the West, even though the Black Order was associated with the Vatican; she had never seen any reason to take especial note of the practices of Europeans in regards to their God. If she were to be perfectly honest, she was feeling a little bitter. It was silly to feel that way, but the last time she had been called a witch--
It didn't bear thinking about. Rinali gracefully raised her torso off the floor and stretched over her left leg. "I think we should focus on the murder of Mr. Pierre," Rinali pointed out, redirecting the conversation.
Allen dropped onto his back, crossed his ankles, and began doing curls with his arms behind his head. "Do you think it's a lead on the Innocence?" he asked.
Rinali had no idea. She could still see the severed head in her mind's eye, sickening her, but she stared hard at the far wall until the image left her head. "I can only think of two things that would be able to perform that murder; AKUMA or something possessed by Innocence. Perhaps Mr. Pierre was an AKUMA ...?" she trailed off, looking at Allen questioningly.
Allen glanced her way and offered a brief smile. "I don't know; I would have to have seen the skull. Once the soul has gone I can't see an AKUMA any more." But he seemed to think of something then. "You didn't touch the blood, did--"
"No," Rinali answered, cutting him off. If Pierre had indeed been an AKUMA, his blood would be poisonous as the bullets fired by Level Ones. "We would have seen the signs by now if I had."
Allen merely sighed in relief, still doing curl-ups. "Still, it seems strange that an Innocence could only operate in the dark. Why would it shatter all the gas lamps? If that's what's causing it, I mean. And why leave the head?"
Rinali twisted to stretch over her other leg. "I've seen Innocence do many strange things."
"But the Finders disappeared ..."
"That could be the work of AKUMA." Rinali laid her head against her knee. The Innocence could be effecting the weather if it needed the darkness; it would then attack the AKUMA through, perhaps, its Accomodator, or whomever it possessed. It would be best if it was an Accomodator, or the Innocence would destroy the person using it. Even Accomodators were hardly safe from its power.
Allen 'hmm'ed. "You've been with the Order a lot longer than me, and I never met another Accomodator before I came there," he observed as if talking himself into assenting to Rinali's assessment. "I hardly know what Innocence can do."
Rinali looked over at him. "You don't agree, though?" she asked mildly, curious what Allen was thinking. Although he may not have been with the Order long as an Exorcist, he had been trained by General Marion Cross, after all.
Allen tilted his head slightly, his shoulders jerking into a shrug, but he didn't stop his regimen; his breath came a little short now. "I don't know." He paused for a few situps. "I might just be effected by all the talk about sorcery." He laughed shortly.
"My brother says that sorcery is hardly practiced in the West," Rinali protested. "I thought it was strange they would talk about it so ..." Cruelly. "Casually." She got to her feet and arched over backwards into a bridge, bringing her feet and hands within a foot of each other.
"Oh," Allen panted, grimacing, "It isn't a dead art yet. It just - well, in the right hands - it's still very effective. Take Timcampi, for example. Speaking of which ..." Allen rolled from a situp to a standing position. "Tim? Tim, where'd you--oh. No."
Rinali looked at him quizzically; Allen was staring at the bed. "Tim, did you record all of ... this?"
Rinali walked out of her bridge back to her feet, blinking. Timcampi had floated off the bed; the golden golem was bearing its teeth as if in a smile. Allen had gone quite pale. "Erase that! Erase that whole last conversation! Ow!"
Timcampi did not seem inclined to do as Allen ordered; it bit Allen's ear. Allen grabbed at it in frustration. Rinali sighed. "Allen, we were just exercising. We can't help it if we have to share a room."
"Do you think your brother will see it that way!?" Allen asked, his hand fisted around Timcampi's tail. "I mean it, spit it out! Or should I feed you to an alley cat!?"
Rinali couldn't help the small giggle that escaped her at the comical scene; she had never seen any member of the Order actually have to fight with their golem to get it to obey. But Allen could not be coaxed from the fight until Rinali had promised to explain everything to her brother, if it came to that.
"Where will we resume the investigation tomorrow?" Rinali asked as she braided her hair back for sleep.
Allen shrugged as he sat on the bed facing away from Rinali, scrubbing his left hand through his hair. Rinali would never have said anything, but she was impressed by how casually Allen could treat the hand embedded with his Innocence, how it behaved just as if it were a real, normal hand. She wondered how long Allen had struggled and suffered to obtain that kind of control. "I think we should talk to the farmer who told us this place is cursed, to start," Allen said. He didn't look back at Rinali. "And then, we should check the graveyards."
"The Earl of Millennium leaves no mark on the graves," Rinali said automatically.
"But a sorcerer might," Allen said, throwing back the covers. "Goodnight, Rinali."
Rinali crawled under the covers on her side of the bed and stared at the far wall, thinking of a severed head and bones, sinew, rotted flesh: maggots and overturned graves, and dark voices behind the door.
"Brother," she whispered, "please protect me." And she closed her eyes.
tbc