CHAPTER 10 BLOWING IN THE WIND #2
“No, baby!” The words ripped from Dane's throat like barbed wire, his voice shattering with his own escalating horror. “No!”
“Where is he?!” Angel's scream split the night, his neck tendons bulging as spittle flew from his contorted lips. His fingers clawed empty air, drawing blood from his own palms. “Where’s Maddy—where’s my brother?!”
Cole lurched toward Abel, his vision tunneling.
Devlin's fingers tore at the blood-slick ropes, skin shredding against the hemp.
The instant Abel's wrists broke free, he launched himself at Devlin with such force they nearly toppled, a desperate, guttural wail tearing from him, the sound so primal it barely registered as human.
His broken fingernails gouged trenches in his husband's flesh as he clung to Devlin, a desperate anchor as his nearly naked body, slick with sweat and blood, convulsed with the force of his hysterical cries.
Angel, with a final, animalistic shriek that clawed its way from the depths of his throat, tore free from Dane's grasp, his tendons straining beneath sweat-slicked skin.
He scrambled forward, a broken, stumbling figure driven by a primal need, his feet catching on frozen tufts of grass.
“Maddy—” he choked out, the name fragmenting on his tongue like shattered glass, his voice already dissolving into incoherent pleas that steamed in the frigid air.
His knees struck the frost-crusted ground with a sickening thud, the impact splintering through his femurs and up his spine as he collapsed, abruptly silent, frozen like a deer in headlights.
He knelt there, a statue carved from pure disbelief, his pupils dilated to black pools that swallowed his irises.
His head began to tremble, a slow, agonizing tremor that started at the base of his skull and rapidly escalated into violent, desperate shaking that sent droplets of sweat flying from his hair.
“No… no… no-no-NOOO!!” The sound that erupted from him was a guttural, soul-shattering scream that seemed to vibrate at a frequency that made the night itself shudder.
It sliced through Cole's eardrums like serrated metal, reverberating in the hollow of his chest until his ribs felt splintered, the sound crawling beneath his skin like insects burrowing into his marrow.
Angel pitched forward onto his hands and knees, fingernails splitting as they clawed at the frozen earth, his body a crumpled, convulsing mass of raw anguish.
Mucus and saliva hung in glistening strands from his contorted lips as he scrambled blindly through frost-tipped grass, each shriek tearing his throat until copper-tasting blood coated his tongue.
When Dane reached him, Angel's skin was ice-cold yet slick with sweat, his pulse a frantic butterfly beneath Dane's trembling fingers.
As Dane pulled him upward, Angel's spine arched in one last, futile burst of resistance, tendons standing out along his neck.
Then he collapsed against Dane's chest, his entire frame shuddering with each ragged inhalation, clinging with such desperate force that his knuckles blanched bloodless white.
His screams dissolved into hollow, gasping sobs that seemed to originate from some primordial place beneath his ribs, before escalating 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 with blood 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.