The Shadow Knight Begins: Part One: Dark Origin

Chapter 5: Shattered Lives

Rachel as I would soon find out was hiding her own pain, the rape had left her so scarred that she would never again ever be able to bear children. Her dream of having a child was taken from her, and I could tell she was hiding that pain to be brave for me, being a fellow survivor of near death.

Mariko was dead, and as we soon found out was that that extra voice I heard that night mocking me and Mariko's dead body was actually Derek Stevenson. Forensics had found semen in Mariko's womb belonging to that perverted sicko; he had raped Mariko when she was dead. He had done so before Jeremy came to our rescue.

Not that anything could be done about that sicko, two days later while I was in my coma, a wrecked car was fished from under the Huxley Bridge...the corpse inside was that of Derek Stevenson.

Me on the other hand, I came out unscathed...or so everyone thought.

I didn't come out of that attack with no marks, my marks; my injuries were in my psyche, my mind...my belief in humanity.

I had come out of this a changed man, a man who had a hatred of everything negative...and himself for being so stupid, careless, selfish, and cowardly.

And I knew who had done this top our family.

The brain of crime.

Turns out during my coma the brain sent a tape to my father, telling him that this was just a warning, if he kept on sponsoring the "movement for right" in lunar city he and his family would get worse. Then another tape asking, no, demanding my father to do little favors for him if he wanted his family safe from harm.

My father, feeling guilt and fearing for his family's safety obliged.

He pulled out from the movement, but his friend now newly elected district attorney Salvador hardy refused, he said the line had been drawn, and people like the brain are going to get what's coming to them.

My father wouldn't say it to me, but I knew he still thought I blamed him for what happened...but he was wrong.

It didn't matter how many times I told him, that's what he thought...but I didn't blame him for what had happened...I blamed myself.

I also found out who the other woman was in the room that day.

Her name was Alicia Silverstone, her daughter Alice was one of the black alley cat killers victims, my mother knew her because she was one of the founders of a type of M.A.D.D type organization that provided relief for serial killing, murder or victims of other criminal related tragedies.

My mother joined them, galvanized by what had happened with her babies.

Ignoring my father's pleas out of fear of the brain retaliating my mother kept supporting the program.

My father was no coward, if you the reader think so you are dead wrong... he was just a sane man doing what he thought was right, and now he was doing what he thought was the right thing to do to save his family...by being blackmailed.

Needless to say, none of this helped me.

I was on a four months sabbatical

If not for my friends Darcy, Mr.'s Darby and Marty... I would say I had no friends. But I was so angry at the weakling I believed myself to be, that I began working out most days in Mariko's now vacant favorite spot in the mansion, crying...mourning, trying to make sense out of why I had these powers that saved me and why I had even been saved in the first place.

But I remember that day I finally broke down, all of my guilt of surviving came lose after a crisis of conscious and being occurred.

The first out of three times I saw the avatars of my love for my family...and my want to punish criminals.