Blame

Burnt

"...once I find my journal."

"I really think that y-you should take care of y-your arm first."

"I'm fine," Charlie reiterated. "Listen up,"

She grabbed onto the front of Elizabeth's jacket unexpectedly and pulled, forcing her to bend over a bit.

Their faces were extremely close and the eye contact made Elizabeth really uncomfortable.

"I've lost somebody to a demon. I don't want the same to happen to you so I'm going to help you, regardless of whether or not I'm bleeding or about to drop dead."

"O-okay... One q-question, though."

Charlie released Elizabeth's jacket. "Yeah?"

"Did the d-d-demon attack y-you?"

"Uh...I'm not sure. From what I could make out, the individual wasn't very," she made a vague gesture with her hands, "demon shaped. But they can change forms sometimes. I did say that I thought they were wearing a mask, but maybe it was just their actual face? Maybe it was some sort of demon follower... I've seen that before. Either way, I wouldn't be too surprised if this happened because I was trying to help you."

There was a slight stab of guilt in Elizabeth's chest.

"And if it did happen because of that, well... it didn't actually manage to deter me, so back to what I was doing: finding my journal." Charlie began to search through her mess of a living room.

Elizabeth accidentally kicked an empty bottle and looked down, noticing a burnt spot on the carpet and some bits of paper, which were all browned and uneven on the edges.

"Um...I th-think I found it," she mumbled.

Charlie walked over and followed the redhead's gaze, her eyes widening.

She crouched down and picked up a bit of paper, which still had writing visible on it.

"Yeah, you did find it..." Her voice cracked slightly.

She picked up the bottle and turned it over, revealing that it was lighter fluid.

"If it was your demon that came in here, then it definitely isn't a stupid demon. It couldn't kill me, so it burned the thing I kept my notes, records, and evidence in."

"S-sorry..."

"Why're you apologizing? You didn't burn my journal." Charlie stood back up, pushing down on the record button of her tape recorder once again. "Okay, September sixteenth, nineteen ninety-four. 10:35 p.m update. Turns out I won't be able to help Elizabeth right away because whoever broke in decided to burn my journal.

"Can't lie, I'm a bit sad. I've spent years filling that thing out and unfortunately, I don't know all of what I put into it off the top of my head. But fortunately, I still have other photos and papers lying around somewhere...

"I also have all of my cassettes from this tape recorder, as well as the things I managed to capture on my camcorder. I'll have to go through them all and write down everything again." She stopped the recording. "Did you get all of your info together, Elizabeth?"

"Uh, y-yeah. I wrote it down for y-you." Elizabeth pulled the napkins out of her pocket and handed them to Charlie.

"Alright. Good. This will take me a lot longer than I want it to. I have a lot of cassettes, photos, and papers to go through to find the information I need, and as you can see, I'm kinda unorganized. I'll go as fast as I can, but it will probably take me until sometime during the next day to get through everything."

"O-okay."

"Drop by again tomorrow. Come by at late hours, but not before 10:00 p.m because I'll be at work. Though, if you want to come before then I guess you could drop by my work, which is," Charlie located something to write with and a sticky note, scribbling down the address, "here."

Elizabeth awkwardly accepted the sticky note. "Before I go, is th-there anyway that I could borrow th-the tape you recorded last night?"

"Sure! I think I left it on the coffee table."

Charlie headed back over to the coffee table. When she didn't see the tape on top of it, she kneeled down to look underneath it.

"Oh, what?" She picked the tape up, which had been broken into two halves. "Uh...I guess you could still borrow it if you want, but I don't know what you'd do with it."

Of course it was broken.

Well, it looked like Elizabeth and Jesse were going to have to find a way to warn everybody without mentioning that the attacker was a demon.