Chapter 1: January 4, 2022

He was tired. For a lot of reasons.

His insomnia had been especially bad lately. He would stare at the television until his eyes would start to burn. He couldn’t stop smoking. He couldn’t stop his consistent drug use.

He would stare at the ceiling until one in the morning. He would pick at the skin around his nails until they bled. He would try for a few hours until he started to feel nauseous, overwhelmed by anxiety, and light up three times in an hour just to curb his mental health back.

He could feel his skin start to stick to the white leather couch. 

He took a look at his old watch when he sat up, barely able to make out that it was nearly midnight now. God, he was tired.

***

The “e” of “Ace” on the name placard outside his front door was gathering rust, and he knew it would be a few weeks before he got around to doing anything about it. Bringing the collar of his coat closer to his face, Ace shut the apartment door as quietly as he could manage, keys still looped in his bare fingers. He locked the front door with a familiar click.

Had it really been seven years now since he left home? Despite the stinging-cold wind, it was the only thing on his mind. Seven years since then. He'd thrown what he had into the back of his car and drove north for two days until he hit the border, then turned around, drove for an hour, and decided to live in the town that treated him the kindest for the rest of his natural life.

His plan for the future? Work until he was six feet under. Maybe help his little sister out of his childhood home before the dying part. That is, if he ever saw her again; his life seemed to be on a dangerous crash course to certain doom. He hoped he would see her again, of course, but he wasn’t optimistic. He didn’t want to think about the alternatives to his predisposed plan, anyway.

The apartment building was quiet. It wasn’t a part of its own complex, just its own free-standing, privately-owned building by the gal living at the center of it all on the first floor. Though there was no sign to indicate it, everyone called it “Grey Castle”. And grey it was; the entire building was covered in iron ornamentations and dark grey brick. It was certainly no castle, but Miss Charlotte kept it in a working, acceptable order. 

Miss Charlotte. She was really something: baby-faced, with shoulder-length ginger hair and a beauty mark under the outer corner of her left eye. She was beautiful, selfless, headstrong, and probably a murderer if Ace had any right to guess. And no, he would never call her Charlotte no matter how many times she insisted. Even if it killed him, he would drown the person responsible for his free housing in nauseating amounts of respect.

For all the trouble she put herself through for him, Ace was always on his best behavior, minding himself whenever she was around. Admittedly, she could become belligerent in a matter of seconds. He descended the stone stairs from the second floor on the balls of his feet, cringing whenever anything so much as creaked. He felt sometimes like he was trying to sneak out of the house past his parents. It was easy to forget that the woman downstairs wasn’t his mom and probably couldn't hear a single noise from upstairs.

In the parking lot, snow had gathered up around the pavement and evergreens. The black-iron security gate was open like usual, its treads caked with powdered snow. It seemed no one had come or gone either on foot or by car since Ace had returned home for the night. It was really no surprise the place was so dead with only 14 apartments in the whole building. At least it was a cozy place to live: never too loud, always too quiet.

Mindful of the patches of ice, Ace made his way to the tiny park just a few yards south of the building. It was serene, especially at night surrounded by the North American pine forests. He came here constantly throughout the week, whether to smoke or relieve himself of boredom during his late nights.

Beneath the streetlamps, the small park was cast in a blue glow. The moon through the trees was full, lighting up the wide, cobbled paths still dusted with snow. Just a few miles away, the base of a small mountain dotted with trees began, a popular spot to fish and hike. Some parts of the forest were too dangerous and therefore unreachable, littered with narrow caves and a few infamous sinkholes. It was a minefield of a place.

Out of his coat pocket, Ace fished for his cigarettes and one of the many lighters he kept on-hand. He emptied a Camel into his numb, free hand. He swapped the pack for a lighter and cupped the dying flame, struggling to light the cigarette.

Nearby bushes and tree branches rustled in the winter night wind. Among the natural nightly sounds and thick cigarette smoke, a murmur reached Ace’s ears from yards away. Calmed by nicotine and fatigue but freezing up in the face of impending danger, Ace froze up, alerted by the sudden change in atmosphere.

As the wind stilled, he could hear the bizarre noises still, wild and low. They were louder than before, and panic was starting to set in. Twigs were broken audibly one by one.

Ace’s feet felt like lead. He wanted to run away, but his primal instinct was to stay there unmoving, watching in fear from a distance. From atop the bush, a nest of white hair peeked out. It was tangled, matted, and kinky, but he couldn’t tell if it was human or animal. At this point, he wasn’t sure if it mattered.

A small hand came to rest on the frozen soil beneath the bushes, the pale skin around its fingers having turned a deep purple. He could see how dirty this newly-discovered person’s nails were even before they dug into the dirt, anchoring into the ground. The branches were quiet now, but the person beyond the bush emitted a small groan.

It was a feminine noise. Just identifying the gender of this person was enough to change his perspective on the situation entirely; he was not being hunted. This wasn’t some dangerous pursuer, this was someone being pursued by something else.

Stepping forward against his better judgement, he kept his body language open, hunching over somewhat to meet the face of this girl (assuming by her size, what else could she have been?). He found red, lidded eyes between the leaves. They were doll-like, beady, and somehow as tired as his.

What was this?

A delicate, dirt-caked hand reached towards him suddenly, and Ace leaned back somewhat. Before she could touch him, she stopped, waiting for him to take her hand. Her mouth was ajar. Her lips were terribly chapped and bleeding. She said nothing to him, hand trembling and waiting for something to take hold. Overlooking the dirt entirely, he took her hand, too tired to make a better judgement on her wellness. He batted away the bush branches, and it was the girl’s turn to flinch away from his swatting. Perhaps he should have known better, but this whole situation was so strange to him that the danger he was in had become the least of his worries.

She collapsed into a mound of snow beneath the bush. Ace recoiled.

The side of her head and a good part of her hair were caked with blood. With her face in the snow, he couldn’t see what wound the blood was coming from, only that it was there and bleeding into the snow surrounding it. She had been dressed in a hospital gown, and it had been so violently torn in so many place that she may as well have been wearing nothing at all. Her skin was so pale, Ace would have thought she’d never been outside in her life.

He looked around frantically before scooping the girl up into his arms. She was small and lifeless. Blood oozed from multiple scratches on her arms and legs and dripped onto his clothes.

It was completely, unquestionably gross, but the absurdity of the moment alone left him too stunned to even think about something so small. He’d never seen this girl in his life. She was cold. He could have been holding a corpse at this point, judging by the magnitude of her injuries.

Realizing the danger she was in having been stranded in the cold, Ace turned on his heels and started to run, boots crunching against the snow. He couldn’t think. He was cold and confused and speechless beyond belief. Where was he supposed to go from here? What was he supposed to do with the body if this girl was dead?

He only had Miss Charlotte’s apartment on his mind as he returned to the apartment courtyard, breathing hard against the wind. No one could have possibly been awake or even noticed him, but he remained paranoid of the idea of anyone watching as he carried this bloodied stranger in his arms. He was a bigger guy, definitely built. If someone didn’t know any better, he could have done this himself. Everything about this was a bad idea.

Frantically, he banged against Charlotte’s door with his foot. Light streamed into the alley as a lively, perturbed Charlotte answered the door, completely unsure of why she was receiving such noisy company so late in the evening.

Her confusion quickly melted into fear as she assessed the pair. “Holy s**t, Ace--” She looked over him for bystanders before beckoning him in hurriedly, eyes wide with panic. “What are you doing?! Who is this?!” She slammed the door behind them, hands covering her mouth.

Ace ran past her wordlessly, setting the girl in his arms down gently on Charlotte’s burgundy loveseat. A couple bloodstains probably wouldn’t hurt this thing too much.

“Jesus Christ, Ace, answer me!” She cried, tugging at the back of his shirt in a blind fervor.

“Miss Charlotte, I really don’t know--”

“What do you mean you don’t know?!” She guffawed, pushing him to the side as if to reach out to the girl before immediately changing her mind and shuffling away towards the kitchen. “Where is my first aid--” Her head snapped up. “Did you do this, Ace?!”

He recoiled. “What?! No! I--!”

“I swear to God, if this is some kind of joke…” Charlotte presented a pink box from one of her kitchen cabinets, closing the cabinet with the bump of her hip. The girl on the couch was out cold, bleeding out onto the cushions. Charlotte fumbled with the box as she grew closer. “I’m too tired for this, Ace, really...”

“I just found her like this while I was walking!” Ace assured her, still watching the girl. Although blood had glued half of her hair to her cheek, the rest of her curly hair concealed most of her face. Leaves and twigs had tangled themselves in multiple sections of her unruly white hair.

The girl came to suddenly as Charlotte pressed an antiseptic-drenched piece of gauze to an injured section of her arm, causing her to eyes to snap open. She cried out in pain with an agonized groan. Charlotte hushed her with a small apology, using a dry piece of gauze to wipe the residue away before going back over it. “I’m not going to ask about the clothes, since I’m assuming you don’t know either,” she commented. “She’s not going to die from any of this. She’s going to need a heavy bath and a few dressings, though.”

Tears had welled up in the girl’s eyes, but nothing indicated that she knew what was going on. If anything, it was only the pain that was getting her to react so violently.

“Do you need me to bring her into the bathroom?” Ace asked, moving to pick the girl up. Charlotte only nodded, turning and shutting the first aid kit to move throughout the apartment.

Charlotte followed closely behind, and the girl continued to groan, utterly exhausted by the overstimulation and pressure on her wounds. Ace managed to shimmy her into the bathtub, where her blood stained the edges of the bleached porcelain.

“Run cold water, Ace,” Charlotte advised him, sitting at the edge of the tub. She propped her kit up on the toilet seat next to her, pressing the back of her hand to an unbloodied part of the girl’s skin. “She’s freezing.”

He followed her orders, testing the temperature with his hand before dropping the plug into the drain. Charlotte reached over the edge of the tub towards the girl, tugging the remains of her clothes off of her torso. Tossing them into a corner of the bathroom, she took no time to reach for a bottle of peroxide at hand, pouring it into the cold bathwater. The girl protested, resting her head against the wall along the tub.

“I wish I knew what I was doing,” Charlotte confessed. She turned to Ace, who could only watch from the side. “Do you have any idea how this happened?”

“Not a clue,” he admitted.

Nodding solemnly, Charlotte returned to her work. The smell of blood had all but filled the air. The girl’s outbursts had stopped for the most part, but her cheeks were smeared with tears and dried blood.

“Ace, go into the kitchen and warm up a glass of milk,” Charlotte advised. “Just pour some into a mug and throw it in the microwave for a few seconds. I don’t care. She’s going into shock, I think...”

Ace darted out into the living room, running past the now-stained couch into the kitchenette.

From out in the kitchen, he could hear Charlotte cooing reassuring words to the girl he’d brought in. Somehow, it was comforting to know how maternal she was being even when he was out of the room. Ace threw the mug into the microwave as ordered. The milk was lukewarm when he pulled it from the microwave; splashing a pinch onto the back of his hand, he knew it was good enough.

“... you’re doing good. Stay awake…” Charlotte murmured to her as Ace returned with the mug, offering it to Charlotte. She thanked him in passing as she handled the drink for the girl, tipping back the mug for her to drink. Her eyelids were heavy, but she managed to take a few sips. She was too exhausted to handle the cup herself. Milk began to dribble from the corners of her lips.

“Warm up the water, Ace.” He did as Charlotte asked, draining some of the cold water out of the tub. The bathwater had turned a bright pink already. He took it upon himself to replace the peroxide. He could see the appreciation on Charlotte’s face, but her expression quickly turned sour.

“That was wrong. We’re getting there.” She looked up. “Tell me what happened,” Charlotte asked.

He stared at the girl’s skin, pale to the point of translucency. The violet tint in her fingers was finally starting to dissipate. “I went out to smoke and this girl was in the bushes,” Ace explained. “I was walking through the park and heard a noise. And when I went to check, she was there.” He pulled a washcloth down from Charlotte’s towel rack and ran it under the faucet; by then, the pink color of the bathwater had grown more vibrant. It was hard to ignore how bad it looked. “So I just… picked her up and brought her here. Should we drain this?”

“Yeah,” she agreed, releasing the drain plug. Warm water had finally reached the pipes. Ace pressed the washcloth to a gash in the girl’s shoulder. At the pressure, the girl cried out in pain, so sudden and piercing that both Ace and Charlotte flinched. Charlotte reached for her uninjured shoulder after the initial shock, trying to soothe her with a few strokes of her hand along her bare skin. “Oh, gosh, honey…”

“Help,” the girl groaned, the volume of her voice escaping her after her initial cries. Her voice was small, dry, and distant. There was no indication that she was cognizant anymore, especially when the final shreds of consciousness were being swept behind her lids. Her eyes were watering. Ace reached for her hand, limp by her side, and squeezed it.

Tears quickly dripped from the corners of her eyes. Charlotte’s voice was straining, finally starting to sound desperate. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

The girl whimpered. “Please help me…”

“Honey, please tell us your name.” Charlotte watched her eyes closely. Her shows of concern were plain as day, even as she blocked the drain back up while she spoke. “I need you to stay awake--”

“I don’t know…” The pain overwhelmed her. “I don’t know…” Her head lulled, and Ace reached closer to hold her cheek. Her head seemed to lean into his hand. The residue of tears on her cheeks were hot, but her dewy skin remained cold. He could feel each individual tear as it hit his palm. Every muscle in her body relaxed and gave way all at once.

“F**k me-- check her pulse,” a frantic Charlotte demanded, springing to action. Pouring a generous amount of peroxide into the tub, she stood and ran out the door.

“It’s slow, ma’am,” he called into the hallway, panicked. To think she had seemed so confident about the girl’s survival before... He could hear Charlotte’s footsteps in the carpeted living room. A distant door creaked open.

“Start drying her off! Drain the tub!” Her voice was far when she called to him, but Ace could make out every word. In one huge, swift movement, he yanked out the plug and stopped the faucet.

He was sweating like mad as he yanked down Charlotte’s only two towels from the towel rack, throwing one over the girl’s head. Her hair was thick, curly, and matted; he wasn’t sure how long it would take to untangle and dry her hair, only that it would definitely be an involved and time-consuming effort. He pulled the still-dry towel across her shoulders.

“Keep an eye on her pulse, please!”

Ace reached for her neck. “Still there,” he called back, draping the second towel along the girl’s torso. He patted her skin down dry, noticing how the light returned to the girl’s eyes and she blinked back to life, if only for a moment.

“Bring her into my room. I’m turning the heater up as high as I can,” she informed him; her voice traveled through the apartment from beyond the bathroom door.

Reaching around her back, Ace pulled her up, trying to hoist both her body and his own from the floor. It wasn’t much work for him, just a hassle trying to keep her from knocking into anything along the edge of the tub and making her already-fragile state worse. He couldn’t deal with reopening any wound now or hearing the girl scream again. His full understanding of how small she actually was was realized when he had her in his arms a second time, damp hair pressed against her skin. It made him more nervous; she wasn’t malnourished, but her frame was… almost childlike, and horribly thin.

He rounded the corner with the girl in his arms, swaddled in towels. Her bare legs dangled over his arm. She was awake now, but strangely silent. Her eyes were still wet with tears; from what, he wasn’t sure.

“I’m going to worry about getting her warm first before I look her over completely for scrapes and fractures or whatever else she might have,” Charlotte informed him as she entered the dark bedroom, wielding a steaming glass of milk in her right hand and her (now-closed) first-aid kit in the other. She set the hot drink down on a conveniently-placed coaster on her nightstand.

Ace turned back to the girl for a moment; she was blinking, but her gaze was different. He was silent, unsure if speaking to her or bothering her with questions would make the precarious situation worse than it already was. Luckily, he didn’t have to think for long; Charlotte took care of that for him.

“Sweetie, can you tell us your name, please?” Charlotte asked as she approached her desk, pulling her chair out and away to sit at the bedside.

Suddenly self-aware of his height and build, Ace attempted to make himself smaller by sitting on the edge of the bed, joining Charlotte in another attempt to relax.

“I don’t know,” she repeated again. It sounded more genuine than her previous dismissals. Ace froze up.

Charlotte pondered her response. “You don’t know…” she raked over the answer in her brain for a moment. “What do you know? Where did you come from?”

The girl was silent. She made no indication that she planned on answering, only that she was living in her own mind for as long as she could manage to ignore the people around her. Her brows furrowed as she narrowed her vision, but her neutral expression returned after a few seconds once she grew tired of thinking.

She really didn’t know. Within a few seconds, it became clear to everyone.

“Ace,” Charlotte said, finally breaking the silence in a hushed voice, “it’s one in the morning, so here’s what I think.” She stood to approach the side of the bed and began piling the blankets she’d prepared on top of the girl, removing the damp towels. “We’ll give her an hour or two to warm back up before I get her dressed in some of my old clothes. After that, I’ll walk her up to your apartment, and… we’ll go from there.”

“That sounds good to me,” he agreed.