The Royal Series 0 - A Royal Archive

Chapter 6

† Braddock †

Once Eryk led them to the death site, he explained the circumstances of the discovery. "I have not touched the scene since I discovered it," he confessed, as he walked around the scene.

Yalena crouched by the two young girls, examining their bodies first, as she was aware that they fit the previous victim profile. The male, however, would be left for last, once they knew what they were dealing with.

"I rode past the entrance to the forest, on our planned route, but my horse began reacting strangely and entered the trees," Eryk continued, sounding calm though he wrung his hands as he spoke. "I dismounted and allowed the horse to lead me to the bodies. As he had been trained to recognise the scent of blood, I assumed what I may find ahead. But, I must admit, that I was quite shocked by the discovery."

Braddock nodded in understanding, as that was often the way these victims were found, in the past few weeks.

"When I saw the boy," Eryk rubbed his face with one hand. "I knew this event was different to the others. I hope, as you do, that this is a mistake that will lead us to the monster, once and for all." He sighed and made a face of uncertainty, harbouring the same niggling doubts that hovered in the back of Braddock's mind.

He could not explain the doubts, only that the monster had remained one step ahead of them thus far and seemed not only violent and unpredictable, but careful. They were either extremely clever or unnaturally lucky to have escaped so far. Or, perhaps, it was the unpredictability that kept them out of their cross-hares.

Yalena sucked in her breath, capturing their attention, before turning to the young squire, who stood back with the horses. "Amil, please bring the magnifying glass," she asked, holding her hand out as she returned to examining the second young girl.

"What have you found?" Braddock wondered, surprised that their first clue came from one of the girls and not the young boy.

"These attacks are not the same as before, but I believe," She stopped and the tip of her tongue appeared between her teeth as she accepted the magnifying glass and leaned in close to the girl's ear. "that we may have two attackers."

"What?"

"Yes." Yalena's voice took on that curious tone as she lifted a long, thin strand of something from the girl's ear. "This is a hair, that somehow got stuck in her ear. And from the colour, it is not my attacker. If there was one thing I remember clearly about that monster, it was the darkness that surrounded them. This hair is as golden as my own, yet it is the wrong shade to be a contamination of the scene, from my presence," she announced.

Braddock bit the left side of his bottom lip and squinted as he looked around the clearing curiously. So they had a blonde attacker, working with the monster or at least cleaning up after them. "We must do chemical tests. I had not wanted to violate our victims any more than was already done to them by the monster, but we must have definitive answers," he admitted.

Yalena nodded and carefully placed the hair into a handkerchief and tucked it into the pocket of her trousers. "I concur. But, this would make sense," she said, looking up at him for a moment. "Every victim has been physically assaulted so far, yet that was not the aim of the monster who attacked me. They had ample opportunity and I was so incapacitated that I would not have been able to fight back. Yet it showed no interest in anything but making me bleed," she recalled, with a gory kind of fascination that made his stomach flip.

"You believe that the assault is committed by one person and the mortal wounds caused by their monster?" Braddock checked, turning the thought over in consideration.