Chapter 35 #2
All I could hear was him yelling. Yelling and panting as he poured all of his effort and energy into trying to destroy me again.
I didn’t want him to succeed, but I was so tired.
So fucking tired. I didn’t have it in me to try to escape anymore.
I couldn’t think clearly. I was close to passing out. I’m sorry, my crescent moon.
What sounded like the front door swung open, its hinges squeaking as a new voice entered the room. Jude’s fist smacked against the side of my head, knocking me to the side.
“Get your fucking hands off my little brother!” Moon.
Jude screamed just before a loud thump echoed through the room, the pressure that was holding me down vanishing completely. I opened my eyes, blinking through blurry vision. Moon was on top of him, landing punch after punch, straight into Jude’s face, over and over and over.
Sarah stood, shocked for a moment. I thought she was going to come to me, to help me up like she had before.
My heart fluttered with hope, the butterflies there rising to my throat, only to plummet back down into my gut.
Dread sank deep, churning into something far more hopeless. “Oh my god, baby! Get away from him!”
“Watch out!” My throat was raw and hoarse, but it was enough to make Moon turn around.
“No, the fuck you don’t!” Sarah’s fingers had just gripped the back of his shirt when he rose to his feet and pushed her.
I tried to sit up. I tried to scoot backward, even, but I couldn’t. I was frozen, watching as Sarah fell. She fell hard, hitting her head on the bookshelf. The sharp, pointed part where all of its wooden pieces came together.
Her body slumped against it, contorting unnaturally.
She looked almost upside down from my point of view.
Her eyes fell shut, and they didn’t open back up.
I couldn’t look. Couldn’t see what was happening to her.
I didn’t think I could stomach it, knowing that not only was our friend’s body slumped and seemingly lifeless against our bookshelf, but also that she hadn’t come to help me.
“Fuck you, you fucking asshole!” Jude’s voice boomed and echoed through the room. “Sarah, baby! Can you hear me? Sarah!”
“Oh, shut up!”
I gently lifted my throbbing head to see better, using my palms to push myself out of the way. Baby. He called Sarah “baby.” I pushed myself to the nearest wall, dragging my back up against it. He’d rarely ever called me that, so why the fuck would he call her that?
Jude rushed Moon, wrapping his hands around his neck. Gasping hurt. It rattled all of my bones and made my wings ache to flutter open. If only I could take him away—take both of us away and fly us into the sky where none of this was happening. Where everything was okay.
The floor shook beneath me, the walls vibrating with the force of Moon throwing Jude to the floor.
Everything happened so fast. They both had their hands around each other’s necks, Moon kneeling over a beaten and bloody Jude.
They were both making awful, horrible sounds.
Choking sounds. I wanted to cover my ears and hide, like I used to do when Jude went on rampages around the house and broke shit.
A coward in hiding. A coward in the open. I didn’t want to be a coward anymore. I didn’t want to hide anymore.
Despite never thinking I’d have to again, I fought through the pounding pressure in my head to get onto my stomach and started to crawl. It fucking hurt. My body wasn’t used to hurting like this anymore. I dug my nails into the floor, listening to the whispers of the kind ghosts around me.
“You are strong.”
“You are capable.”
“You are worthy of a life with happiness.”
Some of them were repeating what Christina had been saying to me in our sessions.
Some of them were pushing images into my brain of the life Crescent and I had lived when we were kids, and the life we were going to live when we got to our new home.
That life didn’t have Jude in it, but it had to have Moon.
I crawled up beside Jude, ignoring the choked protests from Moon. I reached up, my arm shaking as I wrapped my hand around Jude’s wrist. And then I tugged. Hard. As hard as I could, slamming his hand to the floor and keeping it there.
He tried to toss and turn, bucking against Moon. When Moon fell forward, wrapping his hands tighter around Jude’s neck, I understood. I may not have been a coward, but I couldn’t watch it happen.
One of us wasn’t going to walk out of this alive, and I refused to traumatize myself by watching that happen.
Keeping my hold on Jude’s hand, I pressed my forehead against the floor. I heard some grunts and groans of pain from Moon. Maybe Jude was still fighting back. Maybe it hurt his hands to do what he was doing. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to know.
I closed my eyes and listened. As sirens started blaring outside the apartment, as Moon hissed through his teeth, as Jude gurgled nonsensical threats.
I listened as everything started to sound so much further away, my head starting to swim with chaos and unease.
I listened as Jude took his last breath, his exhale long and slow.
I listened as the living room was bathed in silence, and Moon began to cry.
I had never heard Moon cry like that before.
An army of footsteps reached our front door, with what seemed like a dozen hundred men yelling out orders. In the midst of it all, I only recognized one.
Crescent was here. Jude was gone. And my wings, after being bent and broken, after shedding almost all of their feathers, after having been torn from my back for nearly a decade, finally unfurled. I was fucking soaring into the dark pits of uncertainty.