Chapter 44 #2
A slice of shadows severed a pinky from his hand just as I allowed light to rain down on him. The woman and Terrance watched in horror as the man grabbed his bleeding hand, wailing at where the pinky had been ripped clean off.
“Tell them what you did,” I commanded, my voice a deep and booming echo.
The man’s face crumbled as he sank to his knees and looked up. “God! Save me! God, help us!”
I threw back my head on a dark laugh, the very ground vibrating beneath our feet with the malicious rumble. “There is no god that can save you now.”
Another quick slash of shadows cut his hand completely off. He bellowed and curled in on himself while blood gushed from the wound. His wife and son could only stand in frozen terror, bound by my shadows and forced to endure the show of the crumbling man.
“Tell them what you fucking did, goddammit!” I roared, fire bursting up around him with my vitriol.
The flames threatened to consume him, but I managed to roll them back as he cried and stammered. “I-I was wrong! I’m a bad man! I’m sick! Please, have mercy!”
“Mercy for the likes of you? Mercy for a man who repeatedly molested his own daughter? Mercy for the man who locked her away to cover up his own disgusting acts? Mercy for the man who killed her?”
He sobbed. Snot, tears, and spit dripped down his face as he clutched the nub of his arm in agony. “Please! I know I’m a monster!”
“Say it!” I growled. “Say what you did!”
“It’s true! I admit it. I lusted after a little girl. I-I molested her. I had her diagnosed so that no one would believe her. I pushed her off the balcony to silence her!”
Snarling my fanged teeth, I pulled back my shadows and the illusion they’d created.
The three humans wobbled unsteadily before looking around the dimly lit room, provided only by the cracks in the curtains.
They continued to cry, but all signs of what had transpired had vanished.
The man’s hand and pinky were firmly in place, and he turned his hand over and over in disbelief.
Terrance had gone as white as a sheet as he stared at his father. “You—You what?”
The man looked up at his son and wife from where he remained on his knees. He clenched his fists before shoving them into his hair and pressing his face into the ground. “Forgive me, son.”
“Your father was just sick back then,” Mrs. Cartwright sobbed while simultaneously glaring at the man she tried defending. “If she hadn’t tempted him, he—”
“Tempted?” Terrance gasped in horror, stumbling away from his parents. “Tempted? She was a child! And your daughter! How—How could you—”
Unable to stomach any more, I stepped out of the shadows, revealing myself—horns, demonic eyes, claws, and all. Kendyll’s bloody corpse hung within my arms. Terrance screamed around a cry upon seeing his sister while the other two humans bellowed at the sight of me.
“So you knew, too,” I stated coldly, fixing my gaze on the woman.
“You knew what your husband was doing.” I nodded.
“So then two shall die today. I worried there would be no celebration after finding my world taken from this one, but I was wrong.” I smiled down at Kendyll’s forever frozen face.
“Do you hear that, Kendyll? Celebrate. Today, your abusers will suffer and meet the Devil. How exciting.”
I gently laid Kendyll on the couch beside me.
Terrance fell to his knees and crawled to his sister, clutching her limp hand between both of his and pressing it into his face as he sobbed uncontrollably.
I let the brother mourn her as he was the only one who cared for her back then.
He’d been the only goddamn one on her side while these two …
Growling, I began with Mrs. Cartwright. In the blink of an eye, I reached her where she was trying to flee the room.
I shoved my clawed fist right through her chest, her heart firmly clutched within my palm on the other side of her torso.
Blood splattered from her gaping mouth, and she jolted with a sickening wet pop as I yanked my arm out.
She collapsed into a heap on the floor, twitching and gasping as though struggling to stay alive.
Her eyes began to gloss over where she stared up at me.
I made sure to smile at her as I squeezed her slowing heart over her face, painting it red with the promise of her death.
“Marilynn!” the man screamed just as I shoved the crushed organ into the woman’s widened mouth for her to choke her final breath on.
I turned and fixed my fuming attention on the man who’d started it all. The man who’d stolen Kendyll’s innocence and ability to be a little girl. The man who’d robbed a child of any feeling of safety, wonder, love, or family. The man who’d taken the most beautiful fucking soul from this world.
Killing him wasn’t enough. I wanted to feel him writhe in pain. I wanted to feel every lick of fear as I took his life. I wanted to rejoice in the second his miserable life left his body.
Shooting forward faster than the eye could track, I entered his body.
The weak human couldn’t fight off my demonic possession, crumbling with the weight of my own being taking control of his physical one.
Every limb’s movement, every blink, every breath was controlled by me while his soul panicked and pleaded within.
He was unable to fight against my hold on both his body and his soul.
I closed his eyes and searched his mind.
I wanted to know everything this animal had done to Kendyll.
Despite how hard it was, I went through the memories of this husk, watching and hearing everything he’d fucking done to her.
Furious tears washed down his face, but those belonged to me.
My outrage only grew the longer I forced myself to witness the evils Kendyll had to endure and the horrors she was subjected to.
I let that acrimony and disgust build up like a gas tank filling to near bursting.
And then I dropped in the match.
My fury raged into a fire that melted the man from the inside out.
It was a slow process. The magma of Hell slowly melted away his veins, tendons, muscles, and bone.
The trapped soul screamed so loud within the confines of his own body that some of the sound even rushed past his lips while I continued to press them together.
While he was cooked alive from the inside, I plowed a fist into a neighboring mirror.
Glass shards pierced the man’s flesh, making him howl louder within.
I wielded a chunk of ragged glass and looked down at the man’s crotch, letting him piece together what was coming.
I laughed in the wave of his panic, and with manic wide eyes, I angrily stabbed, slashed, and mutilated the man’s genitals while his screams grew louder within this body.
I tossed away the bloody glass, some of which had splintered off and remained in the man’s limp, shredded, and now amputated penis.
The soul belonging to this body was a mess of agony and torment.
He pleaded silently for relief, but relief would never find him again, not with where he was headed to.
I forced the body to trek the same path Kendyll must’ve taken.
I let him watch through his own foul eyes as I pushed the balcony doors open to step into the evening air.
I let his pain and panic act as music to this macabre of a show.
I pulled his own face into a delirious grin while he wailed on the inside, unable to stop me as I stepped up to the stone railing only to tip forward and over.
I laughed on the way down to the bloody pavement while he screamed. Leaving the body, I felt alive while he went quiet in death. I stood on top while he fell down, down, down, straight to the Master who’d given me life.
“Did you see that, Kendyll?” I whispered, placing a hand over my chest where her soul hummed. “The scary man is gone. And Mr. Monster finally took you away.”