King Solomon

**Chapter one of Disposable Heroe**


Blood. Beautiful, glorious blood. The crimson fluid stained his fluorescent skin red. The blood smeared into his formerly pale flesh formed red finger prints that wouldn’t disappear even after the blood was washed away. Hair, once blonde, had turned red months ago, matted against his cheeks. Kane liked the shine of blood when the light was forced against his remarkably pale skin, but the blood had darkened as it dried. He shivered. He knew what that meant, because Kane liked the glint of blood but the blood marring his skin had dulled severely in the last hour, even as the cuts remained throbbing.
         He could hear the footsteps and he blinked in the dark. He blinked again because he wasn’t sure if the sound was in his head or not. That sound was all he ever heard. That sound was what he heard in his dreams, when he could make himself forget long enough to fall asleep. The echo of Kane’s footsteps as the older man walked down the hall; the squeal of the door creaking open, always slow even though it didn’t have to be; the smile in Kane’s voice, always bright even in the pitch black of the room. He shivered again and curled tighter in on himself, trembling arms locking his legs hard against his chest, the pain dull just like his blood. He couldn’t escape Kane. He no longer tried. Instead, he remained lying on the battered mattress like a beat dog, waiting with bated breath for what he knew would always come next.
         “Nathaniel.” Just a purr as the hand reached for him, like the damaged dog he was, he shied away from the touch but he couldn’t ever move away enough to escape the stretching fingers.


Solomon jerked awake, the touch of those hands still heavy on his sweat slicked skin. He wasn’t supposed to be sleeping. He was supposed to be working vigorously to stop that mad man out there kidnapping children. He didn’t have time to sleep, especially when the dreams were growing annoyingly frequent. There were too many people working on the case with him, too many strangers, and Solomon would be a fool not to notice how on edge being surrounded by strangers made him. There were just too many people he knew he shouldn’t trust but had no other choice. He would just have to force himself to tell people what to do and pretend like he believed they would do exactly what he asked. He needed them and he knew they were each decent workers, masters of their own crafts. He wouldn’t have hired them if they weren’t, and yet the knowledge did nothing to diminish his unease.
         Solomon shook his head and ran a slender hand through his unkempt hair, grimacing when his fingers treaded through the multitude of knots curling his black mane. The hair fell back into his eyes when his hand fell away. He shifted uncomfortably in the chair he had fallen asleep in. His thighs were sore from supporting his weight for too long in one position but he didn’t attempt to alleviate the pressure. The inevitable need for sleep was beginning to wear on his nerves. His nondescript white t-shirt fell heavily against his chest, he could feel it move against the sweat gathering there with each labored breath. He could feel his jeans stretch against his knees and brush against his ankles. His toes curled in his black chucks.
         What had he been doing last night before it suddenly became too hard to stay awake? “Reading police reports,” he answered himself in his quiet monotone. Kane had been a serial killer, at large since the summer of 1998; ten years. Each distressed parent reported their child missing and along the road, Kane was accused of kidnapping every child. Thousands of reports labeled him as the culprit, but Solomon knew it was all false hope. By giving the bad guy a face, a name, the parents had happily given themselves a figure at which to direct their hatred; a figure they were sure was bound to get caught and brought to justice. Every desperate mother and blood thirsty father secretly wished Kane had kidnapped their child, until the bodies were found, and they realized exactly what Kane had been doing to all these children. The reports had declined severely after that, but they were still there. Solomon had forced it upon himself to weed through all the police reports for tell-tale signs of Kane. This was one particular task he couldn’t find it in himself to entrust to anyone else. He knew they would all be too incompetent and refused to risk it, even if it were to spare him time and stress. The task was simply too important to be fucked up.
         I don’t want to play anymore. The words were so much sharper inside his head. Solomon’s fingers twitched. He ignored the involuntary movement and reached for an untouched police report. The desk was littered with them, but there had always been an organization to the mess Solomon continually immersed himself in. At first glance, he knew Kane hadn’t committed the crime in the report. The child, sixteen, had disappeared after school, failing to return home. Kane refused to kidnap anyone older than thirteen. Solomon assumed it was because adults posed a threat to the madman, whereas children were still somewhat forever inferior to his mature strength. He only took children from their homes. His victims were white, male. The same as Kane. Quit it. Don’t fucking touch me!
         He tossed the file away and tiredly watched it skid across the table. It was a useless, hopeless search. These kids were dead, Solomon knew. What did it matter if Kane had killed them or not? That would not make them undead. The police reports were still growing but Solomon’s hope was rapidly diminishing. Ninety eight percent of the reports accused the wrong man, just to have a perpetrator. Following the wrong lead and inspecting the wrong victim wouldn’t help the case at all; it would only waste time and money he couldn’t afford.
         “What is it?” Solomon tilted his head slightly to the right. The footsteps outside of his room were muffled by the carpet of the hallway floor but they rang loud enough. The grunt of annoyance was louder than the footsteps.
         Samantha shoved open the door and begrudgingly entered. “It wouldn’t kill you to pretend like you don’t know it’s me for once,” she muttered, padding silently across the room. Despite her sour mood, she set a tray in front of Solomon. “Breakfast?” His gaze flickered from her frown to the bowl of cereal and pot of tea on the table. Samantha hadn’t ever taken a meal with him, but it was thoughtful of her to trouble herself anyway. The simplistic meal made him smile.
         “Thank you,” Solomon murmured. The perfect distraction, at best. At worst, Samantha was a prying nuisance insistently picking his brain for information she didn’t already know. That was her one childish attribute, she couldn’t find it in herself to mind her own business. “You are not in school. Why?”
         “Like it matters,” Samantha scoffed, taking a seat in the unnecessary and empty chair beside Solomon. He always worked in solitude, a compromise on both his part and that of his investigative team. “The vacant regurgitation of written prejudice lacks educational value for me.”
         “Another day in remembrance for those dead?” Solomon brought the provided cup of tea to his lips and inhaled the steam radiating from the beverage. The liquid was sweet and he savored it on his tongue before swallowing. Samantha made her tea in an unusual way Solomon hadn’t ever tasted before, an old recipe he knew she must have inherited from her mother. A human facet of Samantha’s being he had previously overlooked.
         “Yep,” Samantha murmured. Solomon nodded in empty acknowledgement. His eyes were foggy, distant and unseeing, but he still thought to look. The police reports were merging together in one big pool of gray. Once more, the realization that none of it mattered hit Solomon hard enough to leave him staggering for air he didn’t rightfully need. He felt tired, exhausted, but he couldn’t sleep. Not again. Not when that face….
         “Sir?”
         Solomon blinked and forced his blank gaze from the pool of files to find Samantha’s face. She looked concerned, but he saw what lay beneath the commercial emotion. Confusion. It was foreign on her face and he was sure he didn’t like it there. She was never confused. That just wouldn’t do. The way she called him sir always affected him more than the other men, because she didn’t have to. She didn’t work for him and he wasn’t paying her. Good company is what he should call her but never would.
         He took another sip of the tea. Her hair was darker, now that winter was in full swing, thicker as it fell in long curls against her cheeks. Her lips were full, the bottom often caught between her front teeth in deep contemplation. Her eyes, although bright blue, were often as dark as his. The eyes had always been some type of portal, a window in which he could see through. The depth of the eyes were the depth of the person and she held the deepest portals he had ever dared to look into. Samantha was such a contradiction to herself, Solomon couldn’t help but notice. Although smart, she adorned herself with faded blue jeans and satirical t-shirts that hid her feminine attributes. Her hair was always brushed but never improved upon, merely sitting against her shoulders, or leaning against her back, or pulled back hastily into a sloppy pony tail when it managed to irritate her. She never decorated herself with jewelry or make up. The black chucks on her feet were several years old and certainly in need of replacement. Although she hadn’t ever done it in his presence, he knew she smoked heavily. The thick cigarette smell clung to her like a specialized perfume. She didn’t appear as a beautiful girl and yet she didn’t look intelligent either. Her masks were torn and faded but held rigidly in place. She remained hidden in plain sight, for no apparent reason.
         “Sir?”
         “Yes?” Barely a whisper against the tea cup still pressed to his lips.
         “Your breakfast is getting cold,” Samantha murmured. Her voice was that of velvet, but she wasn’t utilizing her remarkable sound. She never utilized the sweet symphony that was her voice. Could it be that this was another thing she remained ignorant to? The concern directed toward the food she had personally prepared failed to hide her already rapidly fading confusion.
         “Is it not customary to eat cereal cold?” He asked, returning the tea cup to the tray, beside the bowl of coco puffs.
         The blush tinged Samantha’s generally pale cheeks red but she ignored the unwanted heat enveloping her face. “Does the case consume you so much as to haunt you in your sleep?”
         Solomon’s hand twitched ever so slightly against the table. His face could remain stoic regardless of what Samantha said, despite what she thought she knew. It was his body that he could not control; it was the instinctive ticks that tore at him that had nothing to do with logical process. “I don’t sleep. You know that.”
         “Insomnia is the difficulty to sleep, not inability,” Samantha said coolly. Her face returned to the blank mask she only tested out on him. The concern and confusion were both shoved roughly back into the recesses of her mind. “You said his name in your sleep. An hour ago.”
         “It is not polite to spy.” Solomon’s voice remained monotonous, but Samantha knew he was very angry. She, alone, knew he had the ability to experience emotions, the same as everybody else. Solomon was human after all, even if his investigative team insistently viewed him as some sort of enigma. She knew he wasn’t special or different, he wasn’t some sort of unicorn or flying monkey. He was a human, with skin and bones and blood. He needed oxygen just as much as the next person. She was sure he needed more than oxygen too, even if she hadn’t ever seen him utilize anything else. She had faith in his invisible normality.
         “Says the man who has his entire life to hide,” Samantha countered. Her fingers worked nimbly against her pant leg, plucking at the worn threads in an attempt to physically busy herself with something else, something other than engaging in a staring contest with the remarkably young detective. She never seemed to win those. “Who do you see when you sleep? I’m sure Kane is not alone in your dreams.” What kind of sadistic murderer would he really be, if he were always by himself?
         “I see his victims,” Solomon murmured. He looked away from Samantha and turned his attention back to the reports he hadn’t yet read, a pile that grew every day. His fingers, long and slender, curled around the closest report and he dragged it across the desk until it lay in front of him. A frown turned his pale lips down, as with one swift flick of his wrist he opened the report.
         “Victims?” Samantha repeated. “You’ve never seen Kane’s face before. Half of his victims are claimed as so based on assumptions. Who exactly do you see?” Solomon was quiet for a moment, his dark eyes trained on the report, even after he was sure Kane wasn’t the assailant. The victim was black. Samantha knew he wasn’t going to answer her, because if he were he wouldn’t have hesitated. Solomon’s thought process had always been instantaneous. He did not hesitate. “When you dream, do you take up a direct role or omniscient? When are you not omniscient?” She chuckled but her laughter was dry and humorless.
         “I am never omniscient,” Solomon chided disdainfully.
         Samantha smiled brightly at him because that was an answer in and of itself. “That’s an odd disposition for you, isn’t it? Perhaps your subconscious is showing you something you consciously ignore. What are you hiding, sir?”
         The title transformed more each time she used it. The mockery was more evident than before, but Solomon had always been aware of its presence. The question hadn’t even made the attempt to hide her underlying and utterly spontaneous sadism. That was a special fact about Samantha that only he had taken notice of. She had always been passive, but her questions were sharpened, aimed to make him pause and grimace even for the fleetest of moments. She was coaxing a response from him, coyly planting seeds within his head. The seeds bloomed all on their own and gnawed viciously at whatever self control he attempted to maintain. She did something no one else had ever tried before. She made him remember, even when she remained ignorant of his memories. She made him remember just for that brief response, not the knowledge still lodged somewhere inside of him.
         “King?” The mockery was soft, almost nonexistent, but still present. It was still there; it was always there. “What are you thinking about?” A rare question for Samantha, but rare for anyone else too. To even consider what others might be thinking was a rare signature that made her different from herself and from others as well.
         “Your thinking process,” Solomon drawled, but he wasn’t. He was thinking about what he knew she wanted him to, even when he tried not to. He closed the police report and tossed it away. The report missed the edge of the table and fell onto a growing pile of unwanted reports on the other side of the table. “It confuses me,” he murmured, his gaze flickering up to meet hers.
         “I can’t control that,” Samantha admitted.
         “I know.” He frowned and looked away again. “I’m only hiding something because you seek a secret. Without the search, the secret isn’t hidden. It doesn’t exist.” His eyes, darker still, narrowed in speculation, but they were no longer directed at her. He knew she was still searching him for something. Even when she remained momentarily silent. Her gaze was still probing him and it made him uncomfortable. He knew it was a dangerous game that he was engaged in with her. She was only seventeen and yet he trusted the fact that some day soon she would find exactly what she was looking for inside of him. It was only a matter of time before she unraveled his entire being and found out for herself exactly why he was the way he was. “Quit creating secrets in me.”
         Samantha shook her head, a coy smile flushing her face. For a child so adept at maintaining a childish appearance, in this one moment she appeared decades older, elusive and sinister. His quiet insistence wouldn’t ever be enough to make her back off, because Samantha hated her own ignorance just as much as he hated his. She needed to know the answers, even if she wasn’t sure what the questions were. “You are the secret.”
         “Absurd,” Solomon muttered. Absurd but painfully close. If not secret, what else could he be? Certainly not open, certainly unknown. His life was his and nobody else’s. His life was his to have and to cherish and to keep safe; safe from her and everybody else. Solomon understood safety meant secrecy. Only in solitude could one ever truly be free of danger.
         “Absurd: ludicrous, ridiculous because of being irrational, incongruous or illogical.” He scoffed at her dictionary reference but he was already too familiar with it. She only spoke this way around him and he knew it. It was the fact that she needed to seem intelligent. It was her eyes that made her look intelligent, even when she failed to speak. He knew there was something more to her actions around him. He just couldn’t understand her past those vague assumptions. “Maybe you used the wrong word,” Samantha continued. “Maybe you meant ’excellent interpretation of a person no one seems to understand, not even myself’.” The cheeky smile looked weird, but oddly at home, on her face.
         “I don’t think that’s what I meant,” Solomon murmured. Another reaction, for his voice was no longer monotonous but stony. His eyes narrowed at the police reports because he didn’t want to look at her anymore. He didn’t want to see her stupid triumphant smile. He didn’t want her to see anymore reactions, any more reflections of his shattered inner workings. She just didn’t seem to get it. By treading into the darkened attic that was his mind, she was walking over his conscious being, the heel of her boots grinding into the shattered remains. She was ruining the remains he couldn’t quite manage to glue back together again and she didn’t even realize it. She couldn’t hear his shouts of agony; she refused to see his eyes pleading with her in their own vacant way, pleading for her to just go away and leave him alone. Leave him alone to continue piecing together the broken, jagged shards that was all he had left of himself. By seeking him, she was destroying him.
         “Whatever.” The word fell from her smirking lips in a childishly casual way. “You’re being absurd. And I want to know why. You can tell me why. But I know you won’t. It doesn’t matter. Blank canvas or not, I’m still fucking Picasso and I will paint the shit out of you.”
         The threat was unveiled and yet Solomon was too angry to feel anything toward it. Samantha would surely resurface victorious because it was impossible for such a canvas to remain blank, with one like her persistently throwing paint at it, not even hoping for a picture, just a result. It was impossible for her to miss quite so often, and still he felt nothing toward the promise. He could, however, feel those remains, weak and yet sharp as glass, stabbing into the soft, unprotected flesh of his entire being. He could feel his face contort in unfamiliar grimaces as the glass broke and shattered all over again, embedding themselves inside of him, lost forever and yet never really gone. His stony glare diminished and he flickered blank eyes up to meet Samantha’s still smirking gaze. “Have at thee, then.”




He hated the pain, but what he hated most was what always followed the pain. He didn’t know if it was because Kane had a conscience, desperately clawing at the back of his head, trying to escape before violently being shoved back down, but he doubted it. When he laid on the mattress dazed and disconnected, the hunger, exhaustion and pain seemingly gone for the moment, Kane would always come back. The older man would always crawl into the bed beside Nathan and carefully pull the boy up against his chest and just hold him there. There Kane would fall asleep, and Nathan would be too terrified to ever try for escape. He knew if he woke Kane, the pain would be worst. He knew he should be grateful and enjoy whatever it was that resembled comfort. But this comfort was broken, because it made him feel dirty.
         He hated it most, even as his eyelids grew too heavy, until they obscured his vision completely. He hated the warmth that radiated from Kane’s bigger body, and he hated how he instinctively leaned into it, how the arms wound around his diminishing frame and shielded him from the naturally cold room. He hated how he liked the soft touch of Kane’s arm around his waist, holding him securely against the unyielding chest, or the hand flat against his back, the idle fingers that twitched against the dirtied, bloody hair at the base of his neck. He hated how soothing Kane’s breathing was, how his chest rocked the smaller body until he fell asleep.
         But even worst than that, secretly he hated waking up alone, cold and empty.