Mortuus was sitting in his bed in the military bunker when he heard a bottle clinking across the marble as if someone's foot had hit it. He slowly made his way into the hallway and listened closely. He didn't want a repeat of the other day when he was attacked by a shadow.
"Hel... H-hello?" Mortuus called out nervously, the words nearly stuck in his throat. For being basically immortal, Mortuus still was quite fearful of the unknown.
Mortuus walked cautiously down the hallway and slowly turned into the main room. He could see some sort of shadowy figure standing in front of Kassandra's cryo tank. "The Shadow Man..." Mortuus whispered shakily under his breath.
He grabbed a bottle off the floor and gripped the neck tightly as he neared the shadow. Mortuus sighed in annoyance and dropped the bottle. As soon as he got close, he was able to make out who was in the room.
"What the hell are you doing here, Lamb?" Mortuus asked, quite annoyed that Officer Lamb had managed to scare him a little. Lamb jolted a bit and turned around, startled by Mortuus's sudden presence.
"Well, I was going to return your firearm, but..." he inhaled rather profoundly before gesturing to Kassandra. "Now I'm curious about your little friend here."
Mortuus sighed and nodded. "Yeah... I... I know... I should have killed her."
Officer Lamb put his hands on his belt, looping his thumbs under it. "That's not quite what I meant, Morty."
Mortuus groaned. "Oh, let me guess... Lock her up? Send her to the chair?" he stated in an accusatory tone.
Officer Lamb tried speaking, but Mortuus just talked over him, "You had your chance to help her, and instead, you turned your back on her. The only villain in her story is the society that damned her in the first place."
Officer Lamb fell silent and looked back at the tank. Its thermometer fluctuated between thirty-two and twenty-nine degrees Celsius. "Campbell killed a child, Mortuus."
Mortuus shook his head. "She had to watch that child struggle for a physically impossible life... That moment hurt more than you will ever understand."
Mortuus walked over to the tank and placed his bandaged hand on the glass; it was much colder to the touch than anyone would have expected, but to him, it was nothing. "Even angels can seem like demons in a particular light, Lamb," he said softly.
Officer Lamb pulled the necklace's chain around his neck and removed it from beneath his blue button-up shirt. He stared down at the silver cross that shone in the tank's ominous blue light. "Sometimes I wonder how much of this we understand..."
Officer Lamb turned and walked away, placing Mortuus's revolver on a table before he left. He looked back only once, and he seemed to want to say something but decided against it. Mortuus sat down at the table beside his revolver. He removed his flask from a pocket on his trenchcoat.
"Am I doing the right thing, Kassandra? Is this wrong?" He asked the frozen woman as he brought the flask to his lips and drank from it. "I don't want to hurt you more."
Mortuus took another sip, Death appearing beside him. "Perhaps 'tis prudent for thee to delve deeper into thy arcane Shadow Man." Mortuus looked over at Death. "Perhaps thou shall shut up," he uttered in annoyance.
However, Mortuus begrudgingly stood up and left the room with his flask and revolver. He made his way to the files room. If anyone knew something about a Shadow Man, it would most definitely be Mordecai Mallard, and if he knew, it would probably be in the files room.
Mortuus pushed open the door and looked at the filing cabinets. "Which one would he have put it in?" he asked himself. He made his way through the room but stopped dead in his tracks when he saw a cabinet hanging wide open.
In the corner of the room was a filing cabinet with the bottom drawer open, and beside it was an opened file on a subject. Mortuus knew he hadn't been in the room for a while, so this was definitely not him. He stepped closer and looked at it. There was hardly anything left in the file.
In fact, someone had gone out of their way to destroy this file and wrote all over it. A few of the papers were ripped. The main one was scribbled on, and there were a bunch of black marks on it. Mortuus looked at the file, "Subject E-5... Peter Morgan... Severe mutilation..." he read quietly to himself under his breath, skimming through the contents of the folder.
"Now, why would someone destroy my file out of all the files here?" Mortuus questioned aloud. Death stood behind him and leaned forward on his scythe. "More importantly, why is a folder missing, Mortuus? " Death asked as he pointed the tip of his scythe towards a different cabinet.
Mortuus looked at the open cabinet that Death was pointing to. A file was missing. Someone had stolen the file on Subject E-3, but why? Mortuus walked over and checked the files to look for anything of interest. Of all the subjects, why would this thief choose the one that Mordecai feared so much as to put the file in a different and wrong cabinet?
He looked through the many files, but the only ones that had been disturbed were his and Subject E-3. They even left the file on Subject E-4 alone, which was confusing since that was The Stitcher. "Did they maybe confuse them for a different subject?" Mortuus asked Death.
Death pondered the question for a moment. "Whoever did this was rather deliberate in their defiling of you... Do the actions fit with a mistaken identity?" Death asked, trying to make Mortuus think for himself rather than giving him the answer.
Mortuus sighed and shook his head. "You're right... They wouldn't have done all of that had they made a mistake."
Mortuus stood and walked out of the room; he went to his room and stopped in shock. Standing in the middle of Mortuus's room was the mysterious Shadow Man. He was standing there with his back turned to Mortuus while he seemed to be looking for something.
Mortuus quickly raised his weapon and spoke. "Who are you?"
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