Jegudiel (Deadly Virtues 2)

Then he heard the scream again, and he flew into the kitchen.

The sight that greeted him was a horror scene. A woman lay on the cracked and moldy tiles. Her eyes were open, and blood gushed from a hole in her head. She wasn’t breathing.

She wasn’t alive.

But it wasn’t the woman on the ground that made him lose the battle with his raging anger. It was the man in a dirtied white tank and age-faded jeans holding a gun to the head of the girl he had pushed over the countertop that broke him. A port-wine birthmark covered half of the young girl’s face, and one eye was blind, the milky pupil a mismatch to the striking sapphire-blue eye on her seeing, unmarked side.

“Let her go,” he threatened the man. The man whipped his head to him. And laughed. The man stank of body odor, alcohol and cigarettes.

He smelled of imminent death.

The man smiled at him, a cold, vindictive smile. Half his teeth were missing, and the ones that remained were rotting, yellow and black. He pressed the gun to the girl’s head, his fist wrapped around her long dark hair, which was matted and dirty.

The boy edged closer, feeling along the countertop for something to grab. He hated this prick. He’d hated him for years. Hated him almost as much as he did the woman already dead on the floor, who the man had finally snapped and killed. The boy’s finger stumbled across something cold and long. A quick glance down saw a carving knife in his hand, discarded from where someone had tried to make some kind of food.

Victory pulsed in his veins. As the man glanced away, the girl still thrashing under his hold, the boy swiped the knife off the countertop and hid it behind his back. The minute the weapon was in his hand, he felt something within him stir to life, a beast awakening from a forced hibernation. A feeling that was becoming addictive to him, a feeling laced with delicious darkness that he craved more and more each day.

It was a little voice that whispered in his ear nightly, telling him to destroy those who hurt him and the girl. It was an invisible hand that guided him toward weaponry, guided him to practice in secret in the woods behind his house. Taught him how to wield knives and chains and guns to destroy people, how to strike a human target clear and true.

How to kill.

Right now, whatever it was that lived inside him encouraged him to lean into those dark thoughts; it wrapped around him in an obsidian embrace. “Let her go,” he said again, stepping even closer to the man, the knife’s handle held tightly behind his back.

The fear in the girl’s eyes was all the kindling the boy needed, but the sardonic laugh from the man he hated most of all, paired with his releasing of the safety on the gun at the girl’s head, was the spark.

In a split second, the boy launched forward and drove the long blade straight into the man’s throat. The sound of flesh splitting apart was a symphony to his ears. He met the man’s eyes and smiled, making sure to stare directly at the prick as his mouth dropped open in shock. The man began to gurgle on the blood clawing up his throat. But the boy didn’t relent. He pulled out the knife, then struck again and again, following the directives of the voice in his head that told him to take more, take more and more and more …

Diel gasped, eyes opening as he bolted upright in his bed. His skin was drenched in sweat, and his heart was an exploding grenade in his chest. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe. The girl’s face was there, before him, like she was real. He reached out into thin air, tried to hold on to the image. He searched his brain to discover who she might be, but the nightmare quickly began to fade and so did the girl’s face, until her features disappeared from memory and Diel was left with only an X-ray of what she looked like, questioning if he even saw her in his nightmare at all.

But something in his gut told him he did, told him that the repeated nightmares were important somehow. They were growing more and more frequent over the eight weeks since Noa had removed his collar, and with every single one he grew more and more frustrated as they disappeared into vapor just minutes after he awoke.

Something inside him told him he had to delve deeper. What did they mean? Who were the people in them? And why did Diel keep dreaming of them? Of death? It was fucking with his head. It was a hundred daggers plunged into his brain at once, the sharp steel telling him to think, to make sense of it all. But he couldn’t. His thoughts were scrambled; they were mush.