Through a dream darkly, a soul twisted and turned, covered in nightmare’s sweat. Pale cheeks glinted with tears that ran down them like glass marbles. Goth hair coiled and curled, seeking to strangle their owner in their slumbering restlessness. Wracked by soundless cries, Trian startled awake. Flailing, she tumbled from her bed and crashed painfully to the carpeted floor that smelled strangely of mildew.
Lying on the ground, panting, Trian stared blankly up at her shadowed ceiling. Another sleepless night. Another interrupted rest.
It’d been a week since Autumn had disappeared. A week since her foster-sister had vanished without a trace from the very room that Trian lay within now, cowering pitifully on the floor. Where had she gone? Trian had been in the bathroom brushing her teeth before bed when the power went out, and when she returned to their shared bedroom, Autumn had been nowhere to be seen.
At first, she’d thought the other girl had just stepped out for a drink or to help calm their younger foster-sisters as the girls had been scared by the thunder and the power going out. However, JP – Jean-Paul, their foster-father – hadn’t seen her. He’d been in the younger girls’ room, comforting the pair.
When they couldn’t find Autumn by morning, JP had called the police.
Initially, the police had thought Autumn had run away. Trian denied it. While she’d been sad and lonely, Autumn hadn’t been the type of person to do that, and it’d been a stormy night. If Autumn had left, then the rain would’ve flooded the house, which it hadn’t, which meant Autumn hadn’t left. They’d searched the house top-to-bottom, yet they could find neither hide nor hair of her foster-sister.
Someone, or something, had taken Autumn.
The revelation hurt like a knife to the chest.
Every time Trian breathed, she wanted to scream. To rage at the world and all its injustices. Yet all she could manage for her fury and Autumn’s fate were saddened tears and sulking tantrums. She hadn’t eaten much all week. Just enough to keep going. Even the songs she’d once loved failed to unburden her soul.
The police had been asking strange questions lately, as if they believed Autumn had been killed, likely by one of them. Their eyes had turned mainly to her foster parents, although she herself hadn’t escaped their probing questions. Which was absurd! JP and Yvonne – her foster-mother – weren’t like that! But even if they were, she would’ve heard something!
…right?
But that begged the question – where did Autumn go?
Even if she could’ve somehow left the house during the night and braved the thunderstorm, it wasn’t like Autumn had many friends to go to. Autumn only had one friend, and she hadn’t seen her either. In fact, she’d been extremely distressed to hear that her foster-sister was missing.
That was then, and it was Sunday now. She’d been pulled out of school for all of last week by her foster parents, stating a family emergency. Unfortunately, she had to go back tomorrow.
Trian picked her tired body up off the floor and staggered out of her bedroom, heading toward the bathroom she shared with six…five other people, not including her foster parents who had a master bathroom to themselves. One positive thing about waking up early was getting to shower first.
Grabbing a clean, fluffy towel from the linen cupboard, she wandered into the bathroom, locking the door behind her. Her sweatsoaked clothes went into the hamper – which Yvonne constantly baggered them to use – before she stepped into the steaming shower.
The hot water cascaded over Trian’s pale body, washing away her troublesome night.
Trian had turned sixteen this year. Two years younger than Autumn, and two years older than her oldest foster-brother, Tommy, who’d just turned fourteen. She had two other foster brothers, Justin, who was eleven, and Peter, who was ten, and two younger foster sisters, Maybell, who was eight, and Willow, who had just turned four.
Maybell and Willow were actually blood-related. Their parents had died just last year, and as they had no other living relatives, they’d been left at the mercy of the foster system. Luckily, they’d managed to stay together.
She’d never known her own birth parents. They’d left her at an orphanage when she was a baby, and she’d been bounced around foster homes ever since. Trian had long since given up on hope of being adopted. Or so she told herself. At least she’d ended up in a decent foster house with adults that actually cared.
Steam quickly fogged up the bathroom.
As she was magnanimous, she didn’t use up all the hot water. She cut her shower short and quickly dried herself before wiping down the foggy mirror to examine her exhausted self.
Trian had matured early, gaining a bust before the other girls in her class. It’d made her popular with the boys, along with a small handful of girls. She had hazel eyes, dyed-black hair, and a slim build for her average height. Currently, her pale face was adorned by a raccoon-like mask of deep bags under her tired eyes. Thankfully, the stress hadn’t caused her to have an outbreak.
A series of annoyed, rushed knocks thundered on the locked bathroom door, interrupting her inspection. “Hurry up in there!” a young boy’s voice yelled from beyond the door. “I need to piss!”
Gross! “Ugh, keep your shirt on, I’m almost done!” Trian yelled back at Justin, for it was his squeaky voice she heard. After making sure her towel was properly wrapped around herself, she made her way out of the bathroom, brushing past her foster-brother as he rushed into the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind himself. “Boys.”
Suddenly, a woman’s voice echoed up the stairs. “Don’t slam the doors!” Yvonne yelled. Her voice bore a heavy tone of tired stress. Trian’s latest, and longest-lasting, foster-mother worked long hours as a game developer at a local company. Autumn’s disappearance had come at an inopportune time as her company had been on a time-crunch for the last month, and it’d just piled more stress on the already stressed-out woman.
“It was Justin!” Trian snitched.
“I don’t care who it was! Just stop slamming the damn doors and get ready for church!”
Rather than get into an argument, again, Trian did the mature thing and just rolled her eyes before heading into her shared bedroom to change. Her side was covered in band posters while Autumn’s was practically bare. Tearing her eyes away from Autumn’s bed, she made her way over to her side of the closet and opened it up to find her church clothes.
Her side was almost completely dominated by the color black. Her jeans were black. Her tops and t-shirts were black. She had black skirts, black pants, black socks, and black boots. Even her underwear was black. The only splashes of color to be seen within her style were owed to the various band prints on her black tees.
Reaching in, she quickly grabbed her nicest clothes she’d brought to impress a boy. It hadn’t worked out. Turns out, he’d not been interested in the fairer sex at all! As in, he was gay. Not that there was a problem with that, but she’d bawled her eyes out over being rejected. In the privacy of her room, of course.
Trian shook off the bitter memories and dressed herself in her Sunday outfit consisting of a knee-length skirt and leggings, a button up blouse and zip-up jacket, and combat boots. Naturally, all of it was black. For makeup, she kept it light, just enough to mask the bags under her eyes.
Taking a deep breath, she summoned her courage and left her room to brave the day.
Entering the kitchen after coming down the stairs, Trian made her way around the chipped island in the middle, navigating past a half-asleep Yvonne who looked like she was about to drown in her coffee, to fetch a clean bowl to pour her cornflakes and milk into. On the island was a stack of missing person posters. Autumn’s sour face stared up at her a hundredfold.
Turning her eyes away, she mumbled a greeting to her foster-mother around a spoonful of milk and cereal. “Morning.”
Yvonne blinked at her, her mind taking a moment to kick into gear. She frowned at what Trian was wearing, but looked too tired to start up the familiar argument again. At least she hadn’t worn anything with devil iconography or skulls on it this time! “Mornin’” her foster-mother yawned. “Coffee?”
“Eww, no, gross!” Trian had only tried coffee once, and that’d been enough.
“Your loss,” Yvonne said, taking a long sip on her gross beanwater. “What are your plans for today after church? I could use a hand wrangling the other kids.”
Trian silently chewed her breakfast a moment before speaking. “Me and Lily were going to put up some more posters around town.”
Her foster-mother hummed. A sad look entered her eyes. “Lily? Uh, was that Autumn’s friend, Lilianna?”
“She is Autumn’s friend, and yeah.”
“Okay,” Yvonne sighed. “Just make sure to text me where you’re going, and be home before six. Call if anything happens.”
Trian held back her grumbling at being treated like a baby. She understood. She really did. “Sure. I’ll call.”
As she was eating, her foster siblings were bustling into the kitchen to get their breakfasts by frazzled JP. Trying to get them to change into good clothes first before eating was a disaster that she doubted foster parents were going to forget any time soon after the catastrophe that’d happened the first time around.
Once they were all fed and dressed, they all piled into a rattling van before being ferried to their local church.
As she was about to alight from the van in the church’s carpark, JP stopped her, pushing her cross pendant she’d ‘accidentally’ forgotten at home into her hands. “Here. Just wear it, please. I’m too tired to argue with you today.” And he did look it. Deep bags hung under his eyes. In his hands he held a bundle of Autumn’s missing posters.
“You’re not the only one,” she huffed. Although she grumbled, Trian did loop the necklace over her head, letting the cross rest against her breast. The silver stood out against her black clothing.
Before she could say anything more, a girl’s voice called out across the carpark. “Trian!” Looking over to the call, she saw a green-haired, green-eyed girl hurriedly approaching.
“Hey, Lily.”
Lily, Lilianna Hill, was Autumn’s best, or perhaps only friend. Unlike Trian, who’d dressed like she was going to a funeral, Lily looked the picture of a good Catholic girl. Her dyed-green hair was done up in a neat high-ponytail while her petite body was clothed in a white blouse, light-blue cardigan, and a cream circle-skirt that went down to her ankles. A pair of black flats covered her stocking-clad feet.
Like Trian, she wore a silver cross on her chest, only she wore it sincerely rather than being forced to wear it.
The other girl stopped before her, twisting her fingers together anxiously. She, like the rest of them, didn’t look to have gotten much sleep lately. “Hey, are we still on for later?”
“Hmm,” Trian nodded. “Should be. JP brought the posters.”
Lilianna jumped, having just noticed JP, Yvonne, and the rest of the brat pack standing around the van. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there Mr Calder, Mrs Calder."
Yvonne kindly waved her off. “You can just call me Yvonne and this lug JP. All the rest of these brats do.”
“I couldn’t!”
Before the other girl could fall over herself apologizing, Tommy pointed at a car idling across the street. “Hey! Isn’t that those cops from before?” There were a pair of indistinct figures just sitting inside the car. One vaguely male, the other female. Occasionally, the glow of a cigarette briefly illuminated the interior from between the male’s fingers as he took a drag on it.
They were watching them.
JP frowned. “Come on boys, girls, let's not stand out here in the cold,” he said, ushering the group into the church.
Trian glared at the cops. They were supposed to be out there looking for Autumn! Not stalking them!
“Come on,” Lilianna said lowly, pulling on Trian’s sleeve. “They’ll leave eventually.”
“I know, but it’s just so frustrating!” Walking into the church, they passed by the elderly local priest who was genially handing out pocket bibles to those who entered. He smiled at them as they entered the place of God. “They think we had something to do with Autumn’s disappearance, Lily," she hissed, quiet as to not let her voice echo.
Lilianna bit her lip. “They’re wrong.”
“Of course they’re wrong! But nobody has a clue what happened!”
“Shh,” Lilianna quietly hushed her. They were drawing attention to themselves. Looking around, they quickly followed behind the rest of Trian’s foster family and took a seat at a pew in front of a strange girl dressed all in red. Once they were huddled together, Lilianna picked the conversation back up. “I still think it was fairies.”
Trian groaned quietly, ignoring the warning look from Yvonne. “Not this again.”
“I know it sounds silly, but what else is there? You said you found mushrooms in her room!”
“I said I found mushrooms out in the garden,” Trian shook her head. And she had. They’d been bright red things that JP called fly agaric. He’d quickly disposed of them, given that they were poisonous, and that they had young children in the house that liked to put anything in their mouths whether or not it was edible. “That’s not the same thing.”
Lilianna was looking ready to jump her. “Isn’t it? You said that she didn’t leave the room.”
Trian had said a lot of things. “Look, I don’t know! I thought she didn’t, but I was stressed out at the time. Maybe I missed something. She could’ve slipped out through the window. The room smells of mildew now, so maybe some rain got in?” She was trying to convince herself as much as she was trying to convince the other girl. The alternatives were too strange or too grim to contemplate.
“From the second floor?”
“Autumn is athletic. She could do it,” she said. Seeing that the other girl was about to cry, she added. “Look, I’m just saying she might still be out there. She might come back.”
Lilianna hung her head. “It’s been a week. If she was going to come back, she’d have done it by now, right? The police have given up. What’s that statistic? They give up looking for a person after forty-eight hours and start looking for a body?”
“Don’t say that!” Trian hissed, as if speaking the words would make it true. She had to quieten down as the elderly priest had started his Sunday sermon and her foster parents were starting to glare at her now. “She’s still alive. I know it….she has to be.”
“If you don’t think fairies took her, or someone else, and that she didn’t run away, then what?” Lilianna asked quietly. “What happened to Autumn then?”
“It could’ve been a devil.”
Both girls blinked as they realized neither of them had said that. The voice had come from behind them. Turning, they both glanced at the girl sitting in the pew behind them.
The girl was rather short, shorter even than the petite Lilianna, and dressed entirely in red. She wore a red shirt, red pants, and a red hooded cloak with tattered hems that swallowed her tiny frame almost completely, leaving only a pretty smile visible on her face. The hood covered her eyes in a shadow so deep light couldn’t breach it. Her feet were unclad and covered in ash. When the girl tilted her head to the side, amused at their reactions, bright red hair slipped free of her hood into the light.
For some reason, the sight of her sent chills down Trian’s spine, making her want to clutch her cross tightly.
Beside her, Lilianna gulped. “Um, don’t you mean a demon took her? There’s only one Devil. And, uh, you are you? And why did you say that?”
Autumn’s friend was braver than she was.
“You can call me Red,” the red-clad girl chuckled quietly. “And you’re wrong, there are many devils, and each one is just as cruel as the one you know. Demons, on the other hand, can be just as kind or cruel as humans. Angels too for that matter. The heavens call them their warriors for a reason.”
“This is all well and good, but this has nothing to do with what we were talking about,” Trian said. “Unless you’re suggesting the Devil took Autumn, or God?”
Red chuckled. “Oh, I don’t know about the gods, or your God, but devils take people all the time, and not just those foolish enough to make a deal with them.”
“Are you suggesting that Autumn,” Lilianna paused, making the sign of the cross, to the amusement of the other girl, before continuing in a whisper, “made a deal with the Devil?”
“Her? No,” Red chuckled. “But someone else might’ve done so with something just as dangerous with her paying the price.”
Trian was growing annoyed with the stranger. Balling her fists, she glared. “I don’t know what your deal is, or what you’re selling, but we’re not buying.”
“Not even if I could tell you where your friend is?”
The world seemed to freeze, as too did Trian’s heart. Lilianna gasped. Nobody else seemed to be able to hear their conversation. Churchgoers listened intently to the elderly priest as he spoke from his pulpit. Although, looking closer at him, he seemed put off by something. Sweat glistened on his brow as he swept his eyes over his congregation, searching out what was amiss.
Red didn’t pay the old preacher any mind. She sang softly and low into the shocked silence as she waited out their shocked bewilderment. “Is it heaven up there? Because it's hell down here~”
“That’s…!” Trian knew that song!
“Hmm. There are some good bards in this realm,” she said.
“Do you really know where Autumn is?!” Lilianna asked, desperation filling her voice and eyes. Trian wasn’t stupid. She knew that Lily had a crush on Autumn, and that she was going to ask her foster-sister to the prom. It was cute how oblivious Autumn could be sometimes. “The police said she ran away or that she’d been…that she’d been…killed.”
“Killed? Almost, but no, surprisingly. An old man asked me to look in on her from time to time,” Red chuckled. “Who knew he had a soft spot for silly humans.”
Trian’s head was doing itself in with all the cryptic bullshit. “Who?”
“Someone you don’t need to worry about…at least, not yet. Give it a few years.”
“Stop talking bullshit!” Trian yelled, standing up aggressively. Nobody paid her any attention. “If you know where Autumn is, then tell us, or else!”
Red snorted. “I will, I will,” she said before pulling an odd pair of bibles out from beneath her robes and holding them both out to the pair of girls. They weren’t like normal bibles. These ones had covers as red as Red’s cloak, and rather than a latin cross, they had a pair of broken horns embossed upon them. “I just need you two to do a few favors for me first. Don’t worry, you’ll keep your souls.” Red chuckled at her private jokes.
Up at the pulpit, the priest sweated. His heart raced. Yet his God didn’t speak a word of warning, for what sat within his church came with Heaven’s blessing.
The two girls, one of black hair, the other green, looked towards one another. Their hands stretched out for the Hell Bibles.
…
Outside, within the cop car, a radio squawked:
“Target sighted. Move in to engage. Go.”
Two pairs of dress shoes hit the pavement.