Prologue

The two main characters are introduced, along with a couple of their friends.

He didn’t know how long he spent down there, but he did remember how white it was. The difference was in the silver tools they used, the food they gave him, their dark hair and pale faces. He didn’t know what he looked like, but he was wearing white, too, so he thought he probably looked the same.

There was one person, though, who was a different color. She wore blue under her white coat, her face was light brown and framed in dark red hair. She was smaller than the others. She had to stand on her toes when they had him standing up, but everyone else either leaned forward or crouched down. She was almost blinding, how colorful she was compared to the clean white of the place.

He found himself wanting more of those colors. At the time, it was just a need for something different than what he’d known. White smelled bad. It was too clean, too sharp. If he’d been able, he would have made her stay with him, just to see something besides that awful, stifling white.

He was lying in what they called a “waiting room”, on a wheeled, metal table they called a “cart”, when it happened. They were probably getting ready to put that thing over his mouth and nose and wait for him to sleep with white masks over their faces. He never liked it when they did that. He always woke up with pain somewhere on his body.

But when the black came"when the lights above him flickered and turned off"he suddenly realized that wasn’t going to happen this time.

He started to sit up, almost forgetting about the white straps holding him to the cart. He did that a lot. Sometimes, when he didn’t forget, he would try to pull at the straps. As if he could get them off this time. He never actually did, though.

This time, though, he felt them loosen and fall off. The silver buckle hit his wrist as it fell, but he barely felt the cold metal anymore. There was someone standing over him, and as his eyes adjusted, he saw the red of her long hair in the darkness.

She didn’t talk, but her hands were fast as she pulled him off the cart. Something was slung over his shoulder, and he felt the weight pull him down slightly as whatever it was bumped against his leg.

She took his hand, and then they were running, through dark halls that he was usually wheeled through. His legs and throat were burning, and he tried to ask what was going on, but his voice wouldn’t work.

Soon, they came to a thick, white door. Behind them were the sounds of people running, and the thump of something big moving toward them. She turned to him, and her eyes were almost black.

“Through this door,” the girl said as she reached for the handle, her voice sounding more like breath than voice. “You have to go alone from here, James.”

The “something big” thumped again, closer this time. The boy had too many questions. He felt something pounding in his chest and wondered what it was. But she pushed him out the door and closed it behind him before he could voice his concerns.

And, of course, once he was outside, the sensations of everything around him distracted him from even remaining frightened.

Outside smelled good. There was none of the sharp bite of chemicals, nothing clean out here. It smelled like something he hadn’t even seen in years; the smell of the dirt after rainfall. He didn’t know how he knew that. But he didn’t care, because there was more to see. More to smell. More to feel.

The ground gave under his bare feet. He looked down, expecting some sort of carpet. And there he found one, but it wasn’t any of the carpet he’d been aware of. It was bright green and so long that it brushed against his knees.

Beneath even that, he felt something against his toes: gritty and cold, and a bit wet, but he found he loved the sensation. He knelt and brushed his fingertips against the stuff; when he brought his fingers back up to his face, they were covered in some sort of brown stuff that fell off his fingers in clumps and disappeared back into the grass.

Grass, he remembered. That was the carpet. And the brown stuff was the dirt he was smelling. He peered closely at the grass and saw droplets so tiny he had to wonder how they got so small.

Nothing out here was the bright, fake white of the rooms he’d been kept in for half his life. He dreaded nothing"no white-coat-clad people dragging him into another lab for another test, no scary thump, no big long words he couldn’t even decipher the meaning of.

Out here, it was anything but white.

Remembering that there was more to see, he rose to his feet and looked around. Back where he’d come from, a metal door stood set in a rocky wall. Both seemed out of place. The stones were a bright grey with stark black lines running through them, each cut into as regular a rectangle as the bricks in the building below. The door was silver, as if it had tried to blend in with the rock, but it was too dark a silver and the water-tracks running down it were darker still. He eyed the door warily as he stole of into the other direction.

That direction was far better. It wasn’t long before he realized he was up high; no matter which direction he walked, he was going down. He stepped on a lot of things. A weird black-shelled thing he recognized as a beetle, a small puddle that made such a satisfying splash that he had to go back and try it again, several sticks, and a couple of rocks. One of these rocks was beautiful; he picked it up and examined its jagged edges and the one corner that caught the sunlight and shimmered. His chest did another weird thing, but it felt more like some winged insect had taken over one of his lungs as its nest than the scary pounding it had been doing before. He stuffed the rock into his bag full of papers.

In doing so, he freed one of the papers from the bag; with a rustle that almost made him cringe, thinking it was a scientist with a clipboard taking notes, the page caught the breeze and floated out gracefully. He watched it in a sort of dumb awe for a moment before he remembered how important those pages were.

“Hey!” His own voice startled him, but he chased after the escaped page into the trees. Trees"that was a word he’d almost forgotten, too, but he’d often seen these in his dreams. He’d run among them, like he was doing now. Chasing after something"someone"some long-forgotten memory. Instinct told him to stay clear of roots and low-reaching branches. The page fluttered against a tree and stuck there, pinned by the rogue breeze.

Now seeing no need to hurry, and being exhilarated as he was with his chase and the euphoric feeling of what he now realized was freedom, he let out a soft chuckle that quickly grew in gusto and volume. The leaves swirled around him in his run, reds and golds and browns rustling up against him and away from him in a way that papers never had. The sun lent its own golden gaze to the show, shining at him between the leaves as if greeting him. His laughter echoed around the autumn-struck forest as he danced in circles around trees and over roots and…directly into someone who had been hiding in the bright light.

The leaves rained down around him as he stopped in his tracks. The person he’d run into was wearing red, but everything else about them was white. Their long hair, their pale skin, the sash around their red coat. They held his page in one hand. His ecstatic feeling was gone, replaced by fear. He cringed back and collided with something else"the trunk of a tree, hindering his escape.

Oh, no. Oh, no. Please don’t bring me back. I just got here. I want the trees"the grass"the mud and the sun"please"

The person stepped out of the sunlight and smiled at him. It didn’t seem like a fake smile, like a ‘We’re about to hurt you but here, have a lollipop’ kind of smile. Their eyes crinkled up around the edges and a tinkling sound escaped their mouth.

“Hello there, little one,” they said. Their voice was musical, and they held out the page he’d dropped. The boy stiffened and pressed himself against the tree behind him, the force of his trembling nearly shaking the leaves.

The person frowned and glanced behind him. Their bright blue eyes hardened, and their voice was harsher this time as they spoke.

“Go away,” they growled. “Can’t you see this boy is frightened enough? You can come and talk to him later.”

The boy blinked and peered around the tree to see who they were talking to. A man stood there, hiding in the shadows with his hands in his pockets. His hair was messy and a dark yellow, brighter than the gold of his eyes. His clothes were filthy and disheveled, but looked like they’d been nice and clean at one point. His face, the only bit of skin on him that the boy could see, was so pale, the freckles stood out almost black against his cheeks. And he looked angry, with his sharp eyebrows almost meeting in the middle and creating deep lines in his forehead. He glanced at the boy, and he flinched back a little, until he saw the angry in the blond’s eyes soften a bit.

His voice was gruff, the complete opposite of that of the person in red. “Then I will be back later,” he growled. The boy watched as he turned and disappeared"almost immediately"into the darkness of the trees.

He heard a sigh, and turned back to the first person, who was scratching their big, pointy ear. “Let’s try this again,” they said. “I’m sorry, little one, he does like to butt in when something’s different. He’s only curious, but I don’t think you need that right now.”

“Who are you?” the boy asked, his voice sounding strange to him. He hadn’t ever spoken to the people back at the white place; the only person he could remember speaking to was the girl that had gotten him out. And that was such a blur, he couldn’t even believe it had happened.

The person in red apparently didn’t share his misgivings. They laughed softly, fixing him with a gentle look that made his shaking calm down a bit. “You may call me Hiko,” they said. “The person who just left is known as Yamiko, but he can’t ever remember that name, so he’ll respond better to the number 42. If I’m guessing right, he came out of the same place as you. Now, do you have a name, or did they stick you with a number, too?”

“A-7,” he said, scratching his arm absently. “But the girl…she called me James.”

The person thought this over, and as he watched, he could see their features soften"and not in the gentle-look kind of way. Their wrists became thinner, the shape of their face more round, their upper chest filling out slightly; they even grew a few inches shorter. Their animal ears disappeared, their white hair receded and darkened into red. Their eyes turned from blue to brown and their skin grew tanner. When it was done, they were looking at him with the face of the girl that had given him the bag and pushed him out the door. James had to rub his eyes.

“This girl?” they"she"asked, though with the same voice they’d had before.

He nodded wordlessly. The girl reached out and gently tapped the bottom of his chin, and he closed his mouth with a snap.

She giggled. “Then I’ll take this form until you’re more comfortable with me,” she said. “I was feeling a bit more girly today, anyway. I like this girl, though. She would always come out for walks, not hurting anything in the forest, just looking around. Like you’re supposed to do in the forest. I hadn’t talked to her, but she seemed to know I was there. Even 42 didn’t mind her presence.”

She came closer, and James shrunk back a little, but all she did was to slip his page back into the bag he held. She laid a gentle hand on his arm, and his eyes widened a little; it was as if she was leeching out the tension in his muscles. His trembling ceased and he let out a slow breath. She nodded, as if satisfied.

“Come on, James,” she said, holding her hand out for his. “I’m not going to hurt you. But it’s getting dark, and there are other things that might want to hurt you, that even 42 may not be able to protect you from. Let’s go back to my home, okay?”

James blinked at her, then at her hand. There were still so many things he was confused about, but he could ask them later. For now, he wanted to be somewhere safe, somewhere he wouldn’t be hurt, stared at, or locked up.

He felt that, with this person, this Hiko, he might just get somewhere like that.

So it was with only a moment’s hesitation that he reached out and took the hand offered to him.

 

“Whoever said looking through the missing ads was a great idea?” Jaelyn growled to herself, closing out of another news website. “We already know he’s missing. My mom was the one who made the damned police report.”

She checked the time; seven minutes until the library closed. Looking around, she took stock of the crowd around her"or the lack thereof. The only other person in her immediate proximity was a boy her age, his mahogany hair cut jaw-length and his strange eyes giving her a casual look.

That was the thing about Ruby that had made the girl aware he wasn’t human. She could always tell by the eyes. Of course, this particular demon’s eyes were a bit obvious in that respect; the irises were probably what gave him his name with their crimson, faintly-glowing hue, but the sclera"the ‘whites’ of his eyes"were black instead.

Apart from that, there wasn’t that much remarkable about him. His ears maybe had a subtle point to them. He wore a black hoodie with an outfitter’s red-orange logo printed to the left of its chest, his jeans were well-worn and “fashionably” scuffed, and his shoes were normal black Converse high-tops with red shoelaces. He had his hands in his pockets and was leaning against a bookshelf as he watched her approach him.

“I think that was my sister’s idea, darlin’,” he told her with a shrug. “She said somethin’ about there bein’ the possibility there was some kind of hint in the ads.”

“Well, Opal’s wrong on this one,” Jaelyn sighed, tying her brown-and-black hair back in a high ponytail. “We need to go, anyway. The library’s closing in a f"”

The intercom came on, recorded words crackling, “The library will be closing in five minutes.”

Jaelyn pointed upward to the ceiling. Ruby snickered behind a hand.

“After you, ma’am,” he said, gesturing toward the door.

As they walked outside, Jaelyn sighed, readjusting the hoodie tied about her own waist. She inhaled deeply and held it for a few moments before releasing the breath through slightly parted lips.

As if sensing her agitation, Ruby came up behind her and put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “We’ll find him, Jae. Y’know that, right?”

She always found it odd, that Tennessee accent coming from a demon’s mouth. Of course, he’d said much the same about that hard look behind her human eyes. They were pretty alike, in that sense. Ruby was human for a demon, and she was demonic for a human. Maybe that was what made them a good team.

She nodded in response to his words. “I know,” she said. “I just wish we’d found him a lot sooner, that’s all.”

He nodded back, hooking his arm through hers with a playful smirk. “We’d better get back to our houses before we get our asses chewed out, huh?”

“It is a school night,” she acceded, then scowled a bit. “I am not ready for school to start back up.”

The two began walking. Ruby steered her in the direction of her home"because despite the fact that they were equal in physical strength, which had been proven multiple times, he was too chivalrous not to walk her home first. After the fifty-billionth time, she’d finally decided to be charmed by the gesture, and not annoyed.

“Sucks that we don’t get any classes together,” he said wistfully after a few minutes. “But at least we got lunch break. Same meetin’ place as last year, right?”

She nodded. She looked ahead to where her godparents’ house stood, the porch light on despite the hour. They left it on all day, and Jaelyn wondered if it was just a Utah thing or an all-over-the-place thing. Her parents had never left on the porch light, with the reasoning that it wasn’t worth the hike in utility cost.

Her parents had died only six years ago. Her brother had disappeared three years before that. While the circumstances were different"the car crash that had taken her parents’ lives had not been related to the dark night James had been stolen away"she’d still taken that night six years before as motivation.

She didn’t want to be alone in the world. Her family had been taken from her, but at least she had the chance to take one of them back. Six years of adamant training and research had been enough to gain her the title “Junior PITA” (or “Preternatural Investigational and Tactical Agent”, as they’d been quick to tell her) and find herself a partner, but she still had yet to find her twin brother.

But she knew it was a matter of time.

“Is Opal still…you know?” she asked, knowing Ruby knew what she was talking about. The two had never gotten along. They weren’t bad people, not to each other and not to others, but for some reason, their personalities clashed. Opal was particularly standoffish to her brother, though Ruby did his best not to stir the waters. It was also, probably, due in part to being raised by different sides of the family. Ruby had moved back to Hobble City a few years before from his small town in Tennessee"Jaelyn didn’t even remember the name of his hometown"when he’d found out it was easier to get into the PITF here. Upon his arrival, he and Jaelyn had become fast friends and an even better team, but her friend Opal wasn’t thrilled about his return.

From Ruby’s expression, Jaelyn could tell not much had changed. He sighed and scratched behind his neck, not meeting her eyes. “Yeah, she is,” he said with another sigh. “I’m hopin’ it’ll be better this year, but she did give me the cold shoulder all summer.”

Jaelyn sighed. They stopped at the beginning of the path leading to the front door of her house.

“I’ll try talking to her,” she promised. “Me and Carol. If we’re all going to be training for the same line of work together, we need there to not be bad blood between us.”

“Thanks,” he said in some relief, then playfully nudged her toward the house. “But you need to be gettin’ inside now, darlin’. I don’t want Mr. Samson to kneecap me for gettin’ you home too late.”

She laughed. “See you tomorrow, Ruby. Don’t stay up too late with…whatever it is you Southern kids do.”

She waved as he walked off, then trudged to the front door. She headed inside and cleaned up for dinner, mentally going over what she would need to get ready for the impending school day.

She looked into the mirror, her green eyes following a hairline crack in the glass up to the reflection of her face. She gave the reflection a cursory glance"trying to find what it was that made people think she was a demon upon first glance. No matter how hard she looked, she didn’t see the hardness everyone else saw. Her brow was very subtly furrowed, but it was always like that, wasn’t it?

Oh, well. She’d just have to avoid looking at anyone during class tomorrow.

She flicked off the light and headed downstairs for dinner.

Reviews

[Coyote Poetry]

You are a amazing writer. You made the story and the characters come alive with strong description. I tell the young writers. Must describe the who, what, where, why and how of every situation in the story. You did. You create interesting story line and made the reader want to read more. Thank you for sharing the excellent Prologue.
Coyote