Elementalist

A strange occurence

It was the next day. The trauma from the events of the day before were long gone. I was on my way to work when I got a weird text from Tracy.

'Alessa there's something wrong with me. I was walking through my driveway and there were some dead leaves on the ground. I saw something misty.Orange gold mist. I turned around but the leaves were not dead anymore. I think I'm seeing things. Please come over later today I have no clue what's going on.'

By the time I had finished reading the message, I had already reached work. I made a mental note to visit Tracy that day.
"Morning Nettle," I said to the guard at the front desk. "Morning" he mumbled over a large mouthful of a sandwich. He was the only person at work whom I had socialised with and would ever socialise with. I work at a  police station as a criminal sketch artist, drawing and sketching images of wanted criminals and occasionally, missing people. Today I had been called in to work on quite a mysterious case.
As I strode up to my desk, I saw a woman weeping and struggling to speak as she tried to explain the issue to another policeman, Dale. That would be my case I thought. Dale often handed me my cases. He was polite enough but seemed like quite an introvert. We never talked much. The I got seated as Dale introduced me to the woman, Mrs. Sanders. I was told that I had to draw two sketches. One of Mrs. Sanders' son and one of the accused culprit. Dale explained the case to me.

Mrs. Sanders' son, James had just come to visit her. He was young and had recently moved out.She had noticed that he was behaving slightly uneasy and distracted. After he left, out of habit, she had looked out of the window to watch him leave. She saw a person, a man, appear around the corner and approach him. At first it didn't seem too suspicious but then the man thrust out his hand, enveloping them in smoke. After a few seconds, he disappeared. Mrs. Sanders rushed out to James, who was standing as still as a statue. She tried to talk to him but he wasn't able to respond coherently. He wasn't comprehending her words and just walked away. Mrs.Sanders wasn't able to stop him. He disappeared after that. Nobody has seen him.

Obviously, nobody at the police station even remotely believed her account, but they were sure her son was missing and suspected this man to be the cause. So I, being used to the crazy stories that people would come up with, got down to work sketching the victim and culprit and was done in about thirty minutes.

Looking over the drawings, James was a sturdy looking man of about my age with a mop of sand coloured hair, tan coloured skin and piercing blue eyes.
On the other hand, the other man had pale white skin and dark hair . He seemed older and shockingly familiar to me. But his eyes were black and hostile like all the humanity had been drained from them leaving a dark empty void.