My third-annual Halloween fic. Partially inspired by real-life unsolved mysteries and partially inspired by Stephen King's Misery. Please be advised the rating is for violence, gore, and generally disturbing topics, and practically all manners of abuse other than sexual.

Chapter One: Footprints

Yuri hopped off the Knight wagon with relief. Getting a ride to Halure was better than walking, but he always felt twitchy after sitting down for a few hours. He stretched his back, rotated his shoulders, and finished with, "Thanks for the lift, guys."

The knights waved goodbye and Yuri set off into town. He'd said goodbye to Flynn yesterday and then accepted his offer of joining the Knight caravan already going to Halure. He'd written to Estelle last week and confirmed she was in town today, but busy meeting with an editor for her book until evening. Yuri had said he might show up tonight, so he had the rest of the afternoon to find passage to Capua Nor - or even all the way to Dahngrest - before heading to her place. Fortune's Market was his best bet for a ride. They were always sending shipments between towns, and it was well-known that he was on friendly terms with their boss. They'd give him a good rate for hitching a ride with one of their wagons.

Yuri passed snow banks on his way to the main drag through town. There was always more snow up here than down in Zaphias. He'd seen the Quoi woods from a distance on his way here, and the snow glistening on bare branches had been like something off a post card. That couldn't be said of Halure's tree, though. Every winter it lots its foliage, but it still looked wrong to him. The beauty of the tree was one of his favourite things about Halure, but when the branches were barren they stood out against the pale grey sky like cracks in a mirror, and it just looked eerie.

The market area of Halure was bustling enough to break to creepiness of the tree, though. Any snow on the street had long been trampled into brown slush. He spotted the sign for Fortune's Market's stall, but someone stopped him before he could cross the crowd and reach it.

"Excuse me." A thin hand grabbed his bicep. "You're Yuri Lowell, aren't you?"

The person stopping him was a young woman. She was a few inches shorter than him, with wavy hair the colour of straw. It seemed like she'd tried to rein it into a ponytail, but large swaths of hair still settled on her shoulders. Her face was pale and thin, which could also be said of the rest of her body that could be seen outside her dark red skirt and frumpy sweater. What Yuri locked on were her eyes, which seemed to have been made for a face slightly bigger than the one she had. They were cold and grey like a rock in winter, but filled with desperation.

He nodded once. "I am. Who's asking?"

"My name is Clara Messer. You have to help me, please."

She still hadn't let go of his arm. Her fingers were frail and Yuri was certain he could pull out of her grip with little effort, but it was a tad annoying. "I'm away from my guild right now. If you need help, you can come to in Dahngrest and hire us."

"I can't make it that far. Please." She squeezed his arm. "I know you helped save the tree last year. And everyone says you helped the commandant defeat the Adephagos, too. I don't know if I can trust the Knights, but I need help… please."

"What exactly is the problem?"

"It's my family." Tears sprang up in the corners of her eyes. "They - they're all dead. I don't know who did it, and - and I'm scared they'll come back for me."

She was probably a few years older than him, but looked as pitiful as a child. It was obvious her fear was real and Yuri could feel his resolve weakening. "When did this happen?"

"Just this morning." She sniffled as her composure fractured. " I f-found them all dead. Someone broke into our house. I didn't know what to do. I walked to town but I'm afraid to go to the Knights. My father never got along with them and we don't actually live in town, so I'm afraid they'll brush me off. Please, could you just come look at the scene? You're friends with the commandant, so maybe if you start the investigation, the knights will have to help me."

He shouldn't. It wasn't his job to investigate murders and while he didn't think too highly of Knights in general, he was sure they wouldn't ignore a murder just because they weren't fond of the victim. At the very least, these days they knew Flynn would be livid if he found out. But, she looked so miserable. Her family had been murdered this very morning, and Yuri couldn't help but pity her.

He sighed. "Ok, I'll take a look. I'm only in town for today, though, so I'm just going to look around and report to the Knights."

"Thank you!" She threw herself at him in an embrace. "Come with me. We live outside of town."

'Outside of town' meant the very edge of the Quoi Woods. The farmhouse was small and made of old wood. It had a peaked roof decked in icicles like teeth and a barn so red it clashed with the subdued browns and whites of the land. The buildings were huddled together about a hundred feet from the Quoi Woods. "Boy, you guys sure don't like neighbours, huh?"

"We harvested Nia fruit." Clara lead the way to the farmhouse in depressed calm. "We use scent-based barriers to keep monsters at bay, and grow enough food that we're largely self-sufficient."

When they got closer to the front door, Yuri had to stop. Red footprints led away from the house.

Clara saw him looking and could only sigh heavily, her breath clouding the air. "I stepped in blood before running to town."

Something about the way she acted put Yuri on edge. He supposed everyone reacted to grief differently. Her family had been murdered only hours ago; she was still in shock. Perhaps her world had flipped so badly that she was drifting through a mindless calm. He couldn't blame her for her attitude, but it did creep him out.

"In here."

The front door swung inward and the stench of blood whacked Yuri in the face. Clara entered the building and Yuri stopped in the doorway. After the brightness of the sun shining on the snow outside, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the relative dimness indoors. Once they did, part of him wanted to go back to not seeing.

He saw Mr. Messer first. The body was slumped over the table in the middle of the room, eggs smeared on his face. There was even more of a mess on his back, where Yuri couldn't count the stab wounds from all the blood. There were some in his neck and some in his back, and it was impossible to say which one killed him. Yuri hoped it was one of the first ones.

Mrs. Messer wasn't in any better shape. She was on the ground, slumped against the staircase, and covered in knife wounds. One hand lay on her lap, the two fingers nearly severed, presumably from trying to block the knife.

Yuri was used to dead bodies. He never enjoyed the sight, but he could handle it without losing his lunch. He paced into the room, careful to avoid the drying blood covering the floor and Clara's footprints leading to the door. The third body was at the foot of the stairs, and this was the one that really gave him pause. Killing kids was just a higher level of evil that he would never understand. The boy was probably around ten and just as covered in blood as the rest of his family.

Yuri let out a long breath. "Is there anyone else?"

"No," Clara murmured, eyes locked on the corpse of the woman.

Yuri turned away from the boy. "This is your mother and father?"

"Yes…." She pulled her eyes up. "My mother, Rosa. And my father, Garrick. And… my brother, Jonas." She lifted a hand to her eyes and rubbed them.

Yuri left the stairs and approached the back door. "Tell me what you know."

"I went to the forest last night. Our rappigs escaped, so I went looking for them and came home this morning, and…. and I found this."

Yuri opened the back door. A single track of footprints led from the woods to the back door. "When's the last time it snowed?"

"Overnight. Why?"

"Hm…." The footprints were small and unassuming. Clara's, obviously, returning from the forest. The away journey had already been covered by last night's snow. The rest of the space between the farm and the forest was filled with an unmarred field of white. He turned back and closed the door. "Why did you go to the forest by yourself? That seems pretty dangerous."

"The rappigs were my responsibility. I must not have closed the door to the barn properly, so they got out. It was my fault, so my father said I had to fix it on my own. I didn't find them, though. I was scared about coming home and telling Father I had failed, but…."

Standing at the back door, Yuri had a good view of the back of Garrick Messer's body. He counted five puncture wounds, but surely one or two would have done the trick. Why keep stabbing him? "So you spent the night in the woods looking for the rappigs, came home, found them dead, and then ran to town to find help?"

"Yes."

Garrick's face was crushed into his eggs. Yuri had eaten a quick lunch with the knights just before arriving in Halure. How long was Clara in Halure before she stopped him? Unless she hung around the house for a few hours before rushing to town for help? For… whatever reason.

Yuri returned to the front door and looked out at another barren field of snow interrupted only by three footprint trails. Clara's bloody ones leading away as the snow washed the dried blood off her shoes, and then his and hers coming back. Yuri put his hand on the doorway and spoke with his eyes locked on the footsteps. "Say… why do you suppose there are only four total sets of footprints around the house?"

"Huh?"

"At the back, yours coming home. At the front, yours leaving and then ours arriving. The murderer came in through the back, though, because they struck your father from behind before he'd even stood up and realized something was wrong. That's weird, too. If a stranger burst in through my back door, I sure as hell wouldn't keep calmly eating my eggs." Yuri's hand went to his sword. "I'm no expert, but it kind of suggests the killer was someone he knew."

He spun around, but Clara was already there. Yuri's sword was halfway out of its sheath when the plank of wood struck him across the head.

Yuri felt something tighten around his ankles as he came to. Ugh… what in the world…. He started to move his feet, but they met resistance. Pain throbbed through his head but an attempt to lift his arm to rub it met similar resistance. A groan slipped through his lips and then a cold hand stroked the side of his face.

"Sh… it's ok."

His eyes blinked open, but that didn't reveal much. He saw a dark wall, a concrete floor and a staircase heading up off to his right. Another tug of his hands and feet confirmed they were tied to a wooden chair: his wrists behind his back with another rope around his chest, and his ankles to a bar between the chair legs.

"What… the hell?" His head throbbed. A lump was forming along his hairline over his left eye. He tried yanking his feet, but the knots were too tight. The chair creaked, but held him still.

"I'm sorry." Clara rounded the chair and stood before him with an oil lamp in one hand. Its yellow-orange light glowed through the glass and filled the otherwise unlit basement with soft, warm light. "I had no choice, you see. You were starting to think I did it."

"If you wanted to convince me you're innocent," he tugged at his wrists again, still searching for a weakness, "this isn't the way to do it."

"I didn't do it!" She set her lamp on a small, spindly-legged table that was the only other furniture in the room. "My family was murdered! Why would I kill my family? That would make me a terrible daughter." Her hands cupped the sides of his face and tilted his head upward. "I would never. I couldn't have. I was in the forest chasing the rappigs all night, right? How could I have killed them if I wasn't even here! Ha!" She giggled with a wide grin. "So it can't have been me, see?"

Yuri shook his head and pulled away from her grip. "Oh, yeah? Explain the footprints, then. I guess you weren't planning on it to snow last night when you released them to give yourself an alibi, but the footprints are pretty clear that no one else approached this house."

The strength of her slap surprised him. Her hand was cold and bony and left a sting radiating through his cheek. "But it wasn't me! It wasn't, I didn't kill them, I didn't. The footprints don't mean anything, because he doesn't leave footprints when he walks so maybe other people don't either!."

"Who?"

"But, see, even you don't believe me and you're Yuri Lowell. So knights would be silly and think I did it, too! But you can help me."

The pounding in Yuri's skull made it difficult to follow her rapid gushes of words.

"All you have to do is figure out who did kill my family, and then we can go to the Knights together and everything will be ok!"

Yuri sneered at her. "Why should I help someone who knocked me out and tied me up?"

The second slap made his head spin and doubled the ache in his skull. "I won't tolerate disobedience." Her hand approached him again and Yuri instinctively flinched, but instead she gently brushed his hair away from the bump on his head, leaned forward, and pressed her lips to it. "Don't be scared. I'll take good care of you while you solve this."

It took a long time for Clara to summarize everything Yuri needed to know to solve the case. Every detail was sandwiched between explanations for why it proved she hadn't done it, how she loved her family so much and would never, ever slaughter them like rappigs, and how Yuri had saved Halure and saved the world so obviously he could save her, too, right?

By the time she'd gotten through it all, Yuri's bump on the head and morphed into an all-encompassing headache that throbbed through his skull. It made it difficult to concentrate, but he managed to strain the pertinent details about the case out of her mess of words.

What he knew was this: Garrick had been the first to die. The killer entered the house through the back door and stabbed him in the neck and back while he ate breakfast. Rosa was the second. Most likely she'd witnessed the first murder, screamed, tried to run to the stairs to reach her son and then failed to defend herself when the killer came after her next. The last was Jonas, who was nine years old and had come running downstairs when he heard his parents scream. The killer had stabbed him at the foot of the stairs.

All three victims had more wounds than necessary to cause death. Nothing from the house had been stolen, and they weren't rich, anyway. This suggested it had been a crime of passion, and the killer was either a deranged lunatic akin to Zagi or else had a personal reason for killing them. Since there was no sign of anyone else approaching the house, if there was a murderous lunatic, it was apparently a ghost.

"So, what do you think?" Clara grinned in his face. "You can figure it out, right?"

Yuri sighed; damn, his head really hurt. "You don't want to know what I think." It would take her a long time to find all the marbles she was missing.

"But I do, I do." She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pressed her face into the crook of his neck. Her chest pressed against his while Yuri craned his neck away from her embrace with a scowl. "I trust you, Yuri. You're the only one that can help me. I just know it."

Yuri was not an overly affectionate person, so her prolonged hug quickly made him squirm for an escape. The rope around his wrists was tight and the more he pulled, the tighter it got.

Pain blasted through his shin after she kicked him. "You don't even want to help me, do you?" She pulled back and now her fingers dug into his shoulders like claws.

Yuri met her gaze. "Not particularly."

"You bastard," she hissed.

Clara raised her hand and Yuri braced himself.

The assault probably lasted about five minutes, but it was hard to tell in the dark basement. The last time her hand came to his face, it landed on his head, instead, and playfully ruffled his hair. A new swelling under his eye would join the lump on his head, his shins stung from growing bruises, and his torso ached.

"You're going to be a good boy, right?"

Yuri spat blood. "Go fuck yourself."

Clara frowned at him and her hand reached for his face. Yuri flinched, but instead she gently patted it. "I don't approve of that kind of language."

He pressed his head against the back of the chair and closed his eyes. "I aim to disappoint."

Clara stepped away from him and he couldn't help feeling relief at that. "I have to go. There's a little bit of a mess upstairs I need to deal with. You'll have solved the murder when I come back, right?"

His eyes opened again. She was holding the lamp again, smiling at him serenely, shadow stretching behind her to join the rest of the room's darkness, but something was… not right. It was like looking at a painting where the artist had made a mistake big enough that your brain registered the scene was slightly off, but too small to notice without intense scrutiny.

Whatever it was, she moved the lamp, patted him on the head, and walked away. The illusion disappeared and she returned upstairs. When the door slammed shut, Yuri was left in darkness so thick he couldn't tell if his eyes were closed or not.

He tried once again to pull out of the ropes, but had no luck. Sore and furious, he muttered, "What a bitch."