It wasn’t like I thought I was some all-powerful being. Just like she’d said, I was but a man. However, I was a man who knew what I was capable of. Everyone else never lived up to their potential. I was helping them.
That seemed to not be something she understood.
She claimed to be like me, almost claimed to know me, and yet she was so oblivious to everything I did. She did not know me. I’d realized recently if I wanted to get her attention, it would have to be something big.
What bigger way than calling out to her inner animal? What bigger way than exciting the beast dwelling within her? If she was like me, she needed a wakeup call. Stella Wilson would get one, and I hoped it would be what she wanted.
She wanted blood? She wanted death and destruction? Then she’d get it.
I was so fucking tired of being unseen. So over the whole invisible to everyone else thing. I wanted everyone to see me as who I was, not who I pretended to be. I wanted to step into the limelight—and I wanted her to be with me.
She should be with me. I would make her see the light, see the truth of the matter. She was mine, she just didn’t know it.
I thought it ironic she published this post today. Ironic because I had another person, ready to go. She was still alive, but she wouldn’t be for long. I had a place set up, and prior to this, I actually had a plan that involved Stella. Everything would have to move up on my timeline, but I could make it work. I had to.
How many times had she seen me? How many times had we been in the same fucking place, and she had no idea who she was looking at? I was tired of being a stranger in my own skin. This was not the life I wanted to live. I needed change, and tonight I would get it. Soon enough, she would see.
Tonight, everything would change.
Tonight, Stella would realize that she’d always been mine.
Chapter Twenty-Six - Stella
Callie and I went to bed around two in the morning. Late, considering what we’d both been up to the night before. I dragged her to bed before plopping down in my own, too tired to crawl beneath the sheets and get cuddly. I just wanted the sweet release of dreamless sleep.
And I almost had it too. I dozed off for fifteen minutes before I heard something in the front of the house.
Did Callie get up? She had no alcohol tonight, so there was no way she was drunk, but I had to make sure she didn’t try baking chocolate chip cookies at five hundred degrees again. Yeah, our first month of renting this house had been super fun, since Callie was still stuck in the partying mindset of her college days.
Just to be safe—because I didn’t feel like paying for damages to our landlord again—I got myself out of bed and shuffled down the hall. I peeked through the crack of Callie’s door, finding she was still asleep in her bed.
Hmm. Maybe I hadn’t heard anything after all.
Still, just to be safe, I carried onward to check it out. My feet drew me into the living room, where I immediately saw something wasn’t right. Namely the front door. It hung wide open, inviting any stranger inside wordlessly.
My brows went together, and as I went to close it, I couldn’t help but think something was wrong. I knew the door had been closed when we went to bed not fifteen minutes ago, and doors didn’t just open on their own. They always needed someone’s help, especially when they were locked.
Hand flat against the door, I was second from fully shutting it when an arm snaked around my neck, pressing tightly against my throat, ripping me away from the door. An intruder, and it was too late for me to fight back. I hadn’t seen him, and now that I knew he was here, it was too late. He had me in a compromising position instantly.
Stronger than me, taller than me too—though nowhere near as tall as Edward and Lincoln, so I knew it wasn’t them. I knew Lincoln hadn’t changed his mind about me. This was someone else.
My breath caught in my throat, partly because I was being restrained with an arm that lifted me off my feet and didn’t let me breathe, and partly because I was shocked. Stunned. Surprised.
Was this man the Angel Maker? Was he here for me? My article had to have done this.
Wait. What about Callie?
If I had anything to compare Lincoln’s loyalty to Edward to, it was mine to Callie. Callie didn’t deserve to die at the hands of the Angel Maker. She was meant for so much more. She was my only friend.
So I fought.
I fought and I struggled and I kicked out my legs, but I couldn’t touch him, couldn’t get his arm away from my neck. My vision started to blur, and before I knew what was happening, unconsciousness took over, pulling me into a painful, blackened sleep.
I couldn’t say whether I was alive or dead, and I couldn’t tell how much time had passed. I did know it was still dark when I slowly regained consciousness, struggling to open my eyes. My lids felt like stone, and my body felt weak, tired. What being strangled would do to you, apparently.
Something hard and rough sat beneath me, cold. The wind blew against my back, alerting me to the fact I was outside somewhere, maybe on concrete. Based on the temperature against my skin, I’d say it was still nighttime, which would mean I didn’t lose much time. Still—any amount of time lost was too much.
Callie.
My hands were unbound, as were my legs, and I struggled to get up, to open my eyes. My whole body didn’t want to listen. It wanted to fall over and sleep the night away. Every time I swallowed, my throat was bruised, and I would bet anything my voice would be raspy.
I had one thing on my mind: Callie. I had to make sure she was okay, had to make sure he didn’t go after her, too. What would I do if I lost Callie? If I woke up and found my one and only friend dead in front of me? Would my mind even survive something like that? I would never be whole again, not that I was too whole as I was right now. I might’ve been broken, I might’ve been weird, but at least I wasn’t alone.
When I sat up and opened my eyes, I found I was alone, in the middle of a department store parking lot, with nothing but the moon shining above me. I got to my feet, staring at the distance between me and the department store’s doors. A hundred feet, maybe.
It was a surreal thing, being in a gigantic parking lot so late, with no cars near me. My body felt like iron, my knees not wanting to cooperate. It was almost like I wasn’t inside my own body, like I watched from afar, as this thing happened to someone else.
If that was the Angel Maker, why was I still alive? Why was I here, alone? What pieces of the puzzle wasn’t I seeing?
Then the wind caressed my back, and almost on cue, lights flashed on behind me, powered by tiny generators. So bright, before I turned around, I knew what they were: spotlights. Meaning, of course, I wasn’t alone. Meaning there was something behind me he wanted me to see.
I felt my eyes grow teary. It couldn’t be Callie. It wouldn’t be. It had to be someone else.
Repeating this mantra to myself, I slowly turned around. I felt almost naked in my shorts and my loose shirt, my nighttime clothes. My pajamas. My hair was wild and down, whipping in my face with the wind when I turned, tendrils getting into my mouth. But I didn’t pull them out, because I was too awe-struck at the scene before me.
The first thing my mind thought: it’s not Callie. The second thing: it’s someone else I know.
Standing before me with her hands held together was Sandy. Her body was free of all clothing, allowing me to see the wrinkles and the cellulite that came along with middle age. Her hands were tied together by a stained zip tie, her fingers pointing toward the sky. Her head was bent back, her mouth hanging open slightly. Her eyes were open and glassy, glazed over with an expression only a dead woman would wear. With the spotlights beside her, I could see the flies buzzing around her, but she didn’t smell yet.
Meaning she was fresh.
Sandy was held up, kept standing by makeshift poles jutting through her flesh. Two through her knees, one impaling her chest. All of them leaned against the concrete parking lot below, keeping her upright. Keeping
her praying. Her back was eerily black, almost like no lights were shining there purposefully.
I also didn’t see any blood on her body, which meant the Angel Maker was adapting, becoming cleaner in his kills. The only bits of blood I saw were around the poles sticking out of her skin, and even that was hardly enough to note. Sandy had been dead long before the poles were stuck through her body, her heart already stopped. Once the heart was stopped, you didn’t bleed nearly as much, because there was nothing pumping it.
I took a step closer to her and I gazed up at her frozen face. I wasn’t a huge fan of Sandy, but it wasn’t like I wanted her dead. She could take Killian off my hands. I had Edward and Lincoln now. She…she didn’t show up to work Thursday or Friday. We all had thought it was weird, because she never took off, even when massively hung over or sick.
Here she’d been caught by the Angel Maker, held captive until her body could be useful.
I knew if she was killed Friday or even Thursday night, there would be a much more rancid taste in the air, more coppery. This was fresh. This had happened today…because of my article?
Was this the Angel Maker’s answer to my questions?
I was drawn to her body, like a moth to the flame. I didn’t look around me, didn’t hear the sirens wailing in the distance. I took another step nearer. I must’ve tripped something, a tiny, thin wire so small the eyes could not see, for suddenly Sandy’s body jerked forward.
Or, should I say, her back jerked.
New lights flashed on, lights situated behind her, illuminating a piece of the puzzle I couldn’t see in the darkness before.
I stumbled, falling to my knees before her. She was…she was beautiful. I’d never seen anything like her before. She was so perfect she hurt my eyes, the blindingly bright spotlights aside.
Sandy wasn’t just held up by poles inside her body. She wasn’t only praying to the sky, caught in a wide-eyed expression. Her back was cut, her skin carefully sawed-off and attached to thin wires. Two poles stood behind her body, not impaling her, but peeling her back skin off and holding it there.
Thin, flimsy flesh, I could see through the layer that was carved off, though parts of it looked like they were still attached to her back at the base…almost like wings. Like gory, fleshy wings made of the stuff of nightmares. I knew her back was a red mess, having its skin shorn off like that. Peeled off like a banana, only redder and bloodier, held apart by the poles and thin wires.
Sandy was a true angel. Sandy had met the end the others should have.
This was what the Angel Maker was about. This is what he wanted everyone to see.
And he wanted me to be the first one to see it.
The sirens were coming closer, and still I could not move myself away from the body. I knelt less than five feet from her, and yet I felt worlds below her, worlds less than her. How could I ever amount to such perfection?
This was…it was a memory that would be burned into my head, vivid and bright, assailing and violent, until the day I died. I would never forget this. I would dream of this, even though I’d never dreamt before.
Multiple police cars turned into the large parking lot, circling around Sandy and I, their lights assaulting my senses, their sirens just a bit too loud. They gave me a headache. I could barely hear them as they got out of their cars, cracked open their doors and pointed their guns at me, telling me to slowly raise my hands, place them on the back of my head and lay on my stomach.
Did they believe me to be the culprit? Did they think I was the one who killed Sandy and fashioned her into an angel with her very own wings of flesh?
An ambulance was on its way too, and though Sandy demanded my attention, I had enough of myself to realize it I had to listen to the police’s orders or get shot, possibly killed. I let out a sigh as I sluggishly lifted my hands and wove my fingers together, placing them on the back of my head.
If only Lincoln was a cop in this town. He wouldn’t shoot me. Maybe he’d let me stare at her for a while longer…
I got onto my stomach, my head bent at an almost unnatural angle so I could keep watch over Sandy. This was more than I’d asked for with my blog post. This was simultaneously too much and not enough at all. Now that I had a taste for what the Angel Maker could do, it wasn’t enough. This wasn’t nearly enough.
I needed more.
I lost myself in a daze as one of the cops came to me, setting a knee on my back as he cuffed my hands. I could hardly feel her, or him, or whatever he was, because I was so intently focused on Sandy and her glorious fleshy wings.
The cop dragged me to my feet, taking me to the backseat of his car while the other cops were measured in moving closer to Sandy. Some of them looked like they were going to be sick; others held a frown on their faces, as if they were disgusted at the violence, at the death. I couldn’t understand them—why weren’t they as amazed at her as I was? Why couldn’t they see how flawless she was?
Sandy was the Angel Maker’s first true victim. The others had been for show, to get my attention. Sandy was the first…and I’d been here to see it.
I felt my lips curling into a grin as the cop slammed the door in my face. He didn’t read me my rights, so I wasn’t sure whether I was getting arrested or not. I didn’t care. My forehead was glued to the window, my eyes lingering on Sandy’s body, at her pale, fleshy wings.
This was the start of a new chapter.
This was only the beginning.
Chapter Twenty-Seven - Lincoln
Ed had surprised me earlier, when he’d told me his plan, and I would be the first one to admit, I still wasn’t certain whether Stella should be included in our little duo. But she was an odd one, and there was something about her that drew me in, just like she drew Ed in. She was our brand of crazy…I just wasn’t sure if her crazy would jive permanently with ours.
Inviting someone into our lives, a permanent position at our sides, it wasn’t an easy or a simple thing. It wasn’t like we went around telling everyone Come on over, come join the fun. There’s orgies, good food, and murder. What’s not to like?
Yeah, we might attract the wrong crowd with a line like that.
Ed had called me during his first break with an idea I was hesitant of. He was so gung-ho about Stella, and after last night, I supposed it was pointless of me to deny the fact I felt something for her, too.
I could promise you, the number of times I went to kill someone and didn’t actually kill them…well, I could count them on one hand. One single finger. Stella was just fucking special like that, I guess.
I would not be the one to tell Ed no, not again—not so soon after my attempted murder of Stella, anyways—so I told him I would take care of it. By the time he got home, I would have it all ready to go, and the only part we’d be missing would be Stella herself.
After this…we’d really know whether or not she was one of us. We’d know beyond a shadow of a doubt whether she was meant to be with us or just someone we had over for fun.
I drove through the bad parts of town, knowing exactly where they were because I was often called over there when shootings happened, when there were overdoses. Because of my frequenting of the area, I knew where there were cameras, and which street corners to pass by in search of someone who piqued my interest.
Luckily for Ed, and unluckily for her, I had someone in mind already. Someone who’d been into the station on prostitution charges more than once, and drug charges quite a few times in between. Her pimp always had the money to get her out, and she never narked on him, never snitched.
Oh, yes. Destiny would meet her destiny tonight. Or maybe tomorrow. Whenever the hell Ed decided to get Stella back to our house and show her the basement.
The basement was not an area of our house that we let anyone into, unless they were going to meet their death soon after. Our basement was our secret place, with chains and sterile walls, a constant smell of bleach. It was also soundproof; we’d made sure of that. It was our, for lack of a better word, playr
oom. Where Ed and I unleashed our inner psychos.
Stella thought I was mad for strangling a girl in my bed? She thought Ed was a little rough during sex? She had no idea what cruelty we were both capable of. With hearts as cruel and as black as ours, there was no limit to what we could do. To what we would do.
The night was dark as I pulled up to the street corner where I saw two women standing, wearing the littlest, flimsiest clothing they could while still covering all the important bits. They were two gorgeous women, with curves and tits to match. A redhead and a blonde. It was the blonde that caught my eye.
Unfortunately, it was the redhead who approached my open window, leaning down with a supple smile on her face. She checked me out, probably wondering what a guy like me was doing here. Couldn’t I get laid like any other handsome guy? I’d seen her before, but she was never brought into the station.
And I looked very different out of my uniform, so I didn’t blame her for not recognizing me.
“Hey there, baby. What’s on the menu for tonight?” the redhead asked, pressing her arms closer to her tits, making her breasts pop out more. They were nice, but not what I was here for.
I gave her a charming smile—something I loathed doing. I wasn’t the charming one. Ed was. “I was actually hoping to get Destiny tonight. Tell her I’ll pay double her usual rate.” My wallet sat in my car’s cup holder, and I reached inside and pulled out a fifty, handing it to her once I noticed her pouting, annoying face. “For getting your hopes up.”
She took the money and sauntered off, shouting for Destiny.
Destiny didn’t even look before she got in the car. She adjusted her skirt, showing the strings on her thong, before she even looked at me. By the time her eyes met mine, I’d already driven down the road and locked the door.
“You…” She sputtered, recognition dawning on her face. It would’ve been pretty, if it wasn’t caked in so much makeup you couldn’t tell what she looked like underneath. I’d seen her mugshot. I knew what she looked like under all that powder. Not half bad. “What the hell, I didn’t—”
Cruel Black Hearts: A Dark Reverse Harem Romance Page 18
