Page 28 of Cole: Bloodlines
His screams dissolved into hollow, gasping sobs that seemed to originate from some primordial place beneath his ribs, beforeescalating again into keening wails that vibrated through both their bodies. His fingers, curled into rigid claws, dug through Dane's sweat-soaked shirt, tearing not just fabric but gouging furrows in his husband's flesh deep enough to well with beads of crimson that soaked into the shredded cotton.
“Maddy… Maddy!!”The name was a broken whisper—then a shrill scream that shredded the night.
Cole took a stumbling, involuntary step back, his heel catching on a frozen root, nearly sending him sprawling. His breath hitched mid-inhale, crystallizing in his lungs like shards of glass while a silent scream built behind his clenched teeth. His gaze, drawn upward by some primal, horrific magnetism he couldn't fight, lifted in jerking increments to the oak's gnarled limb. There, suspended above, swaying with a macabre, almost hypnotic rhythm in the midnight breeze, hung two teenage figures—a boy and a girl. Naked. Their skin, ghostly pale in the faint light. Their flesh flayed, their torsos ripped open, exposing a grotesque display of disemboweled organs.
But it was their lower halves that truly curdled the blood: thighs bruised, private parts horribly exposed, a mangled, bloody ruin—testament to a final, brutal defilement that had stolen their last breath and desecrated their very essence. The raw, glistening wounds gaped like mouths screaming silent horrors, smeared with a sticky, dark crimson that seemed to pulse with the echo of their final agony. The air itself grew thick, choked with the metallic tang of fresh blood and the sickening, cloying scent of exposed viscera. The ropes, thick and unforgiving, were cinched brutally tight around their throats, their dead faces obscured, hidden beneath crude, suffocating cloth bags.
Remnants of a T-shirt clung to the young woman's torso, viciously shredded into jagged ribbons that fluttered in the night breeze. The once-bubblegum pink fabric was now saturated withblood that had congealed into rusty patches, leaving only small triangles of the original color visible like islands in a crimson sea. A glittery cartoon unicorn, partially intact on what remained of the shirt's front, stared back with one cheerful eye, the other half of its face obliterated by a dark stain that had dried to the color of old pennies.
No... no...The thought screamed through Cole's mind, a desperate, futile denial that ricocheted against the walls of his skull. Something fundamental inside him—the bedrock assumption that the universe contained order, that certain horrors simply couldn't exist—fractured along invisible fault lines, spreading like ice breaking across a frozen lake until the entire foundation shattered into a thousand irreparable pieces, leaving him drowning in the frigid waters of a reality too horrific to process.
The only sound now—somehow dwarfing the screams shattering the bitter winter night—was the eerie creak-and-groan of strained oak wood and taut rope as the bodies swayed in the midnight breeze. The noise seemed to rise and fall like a demented music box, each hollow note carrying across the frost-crusted clearing, a horrific lullaby drifting on the frozen air.
PART THREE: INTO THE VOID
“The loneliest moment in someone’s life
is when they are watching their whole world fall apart
and all they can do is stare blankly.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
CHAPTER 11: TO BE OR NOT TO BE
Abel barely noticed the jacketDevlin wrapped around him. A chill ran through his body, sinking into his bones. He vaguely remembered being placed in the car by Devlin, the engine starting, and the heater turning on. Yet, the heat from the air failed to warm him. The cold penetrated beyond the physical, leaving his soul a frozen wasteland.
His eyes stared blankly through the front windshield as police cruisers pulled up to the park, lights flashing, bathing the grounds in a strobe of red and blue. An ambulance arrived with the cops, and moments later, the car door opened, and paramedics began checking his vitals. They spoke to him, asked questions, but their voices were muffled and distorted as if they were speaking underwater.
Devlin’s voice seemed to drift in from a distant, answering their questions to the best of his ability. Abel’s stare slowly focused on the two bodies hanging from the tree limb. Bodies that had bled on him while he sat tied to the tree trunk, unable to move, or even scream.
She’s dead… my little sister is dead…
The condition of her body was an image of horror permanently etched in his mind.
He raped her… I couldn’t protect her…
Abel didn’t know where Angel was, but he could hear his wailing cries—the one sound that wasn’t muffled or distorted. Or maybe they were his own wails and screams, still resounding inside his head, ricocheting around his skull like a metal ball in a pinball machine.
Where he’d kept his head ducked, refusing to look up at the bodies while he was tied to the tree… he now couldn’t lookaway. He tried, but his eyes remained fixed, cataloging every detail he could make out from where he sat, his mind storing it away as fodder for his nightmares when he finally succumbed to exhaustion; The pink T-shirt that Savannah had bought just days ago because Maddy said she looked cute in pink… now soaked in blood and ripped to shreds; the bruises on her thighs and the blood from—
Abel twitched, and his stare broke, allowing him to look away. When he lowered his head, the tears returned—or perhaps they had never stopped—warm droplets rolling down his chilled, dirty face, bruised from throwing himself against the cage bars when the madman was… when hethoughthe was…
His memory of it now placed his little sister back in that cage, because the horrific nightmare of that moment had become reality.
The screaming wails suddenly stopped, as if cut off by a switch. Angel went silent as something inside him broke. He sat in the open passenger door of Dane’s car, feet on the ground, his body limp against the back of the seat. Tears streamed down his face despite the silence that suddenly consumed him. He didn’t feelhere.He didn’t feelanywhere.Had he screamed himself todeath?Was that why it stopped?
Let me be dead… please let me be dead…
If he weren’t dead, then… the worst nightmare of his life—even worse than the horror he endured with Wade—had come to life. He couldn’t live in that nightmare, couldn’t survive it day after day. The tears streamed faster when he sensed Dane nearby.
I’m sorry, baby… but I can’t be here anymore… just let me go… let me die… please… please…
Hands touched him, folding around his chilled hands, squeezing, comforting. Angel didn’t respond,couldn’trespond. He couldn’t move, couldn’t see, though he was aware of hazy figures moving around him, voices too muffled and distant to understand, as if the earthly plane around him was slowly receding into the ether… or maybe he was the one fading away, disappearing. He didn’t fight it. Angel wanted to go, to dissolve into nothing,benothing, just… stop existing.
Dane functioned on autopilot, answering questions he barely knew the answers to, trying to decide within his fractured mind how much information to give the police. Cole spoke with the same “auto” responses, and Dane left it to him to determine what to tell them. Cole looked like he might collapse at any moment, the unfathomable horror that was suddenly barreling down on them, draining his life force.
It was draining Dane as well, but somehow he stayed upright, keeping his wits about him as best he could—maybe because if he went down, there would be no one to anchor Angel to this life. Perhaps he wasn’t enough to anchor him anymore… not now.
