Chomp
Chapter 24: Red

Blood oozed down from every surface in the basement, landing on the floor with soft splorts. I stepped over a piece of the dead soldier, my heartrate far calmer than it had been in ages. It would have been easy to have killed him quickly, to squish him like the bug he was. But I hadn’t wanted it to be easy for him; he didn’t deserve it.

Make them pay…

The voice’s tone was filled with an odd mixture of hate and pleasure, almost mirroring my own emotions.

“Who are you?” I called out to it, looking in the direction of the storage locker. I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded as though it originated from there. I took a cautious step toward it.

Come closer, Adrian…

I stopped dead in my tracks. Whoever it was, he knew my name. I couldn’t be sure it really was a ‘he’, but the deep timbre had me fairly convinced that whatever the voice was, it belonged to a man. But male or not, the fact that he knew my actual name was unnerving.

“Who are you?” I demanded more harshly. “You’ve seen what I’m capable of. Tell me your name, or I’ll—”

What you’re capable of? The voice laughed. You’re a Cainist who’s hardly come to power at all. We should have taught you when we had the chance...

I listened to the voice trail off. His hatred had transitioned to sounding less intense and more along the lines of annoyance. He really knew who I was; was it one of Yacob’s lackeys? It seemed to be the only logical option.

“You have my attention,” I replied finally, taking another step toward the storage locker. “What do you want?”

Release me.

Peering into the storage locker, it seemed as though a random slew of items had been tossed together; some firecrackers, what looked like a chipped baseball bat, a violet Halloween scythe, cherry bombs, and a box filled with guns hardly seemed to be the lost-and-found. There didn’t seem to be anybody inside the locker, and very few places they could have hidden.

I smelled the air, not caring if I was giving any visual cues of doing so. There didn’t seem to be any particular smell that stuck out; the smell of dust was by far the strongest, but it mingled with the scent of people, no doubt the smell clinging to their various objects.

Release me the voice insisted again.

“How can I if I can’t see you?” I snapped, placing my hands against the cold steel of the storage locker. The hair on my arms stood on end; this whole situation made me feel uncomfortable.

I cannot move, Adrian. Please... I have been here for far too long.

The sound of that name still made me feel uneasy, more so that a stranger knew it. I looked down at the handle of the locker door. It was chained shut, as if to prevent any hooligan kids from breaking in and stealing back their guns. God, American teens were violent.

I snapped the chain apart before the lock, letting gravity uncoil it and sending it floor-bound. It clanked when it hit the ground. “Can’t move?” I whispered, more to myself than anything.

I spared that bastard’s child to be fair, and this is how he repaid me.

Stepping into the locker, I tried to better triangulate where the voice was coming from by closing my eyes to concentrate. Because it was such a small, hollow-metal place, it was difficult to do, but I strained my ears nevertheless.

“What bastard?” I asked, closing my eyes. Keep him talking; it’s the best way to help him. “What did he do to you?”

I was a beast before I met her, but Martha didn’t deserve what happened to her. None of you did.

My eyes snapped open and my heart jumped into my throat. I must have misheard him; he couldn’t know without some sort of influence from Yacob. I didn’t care what the man thought he was playing at, this was insulting.

“What could you possibly know about Martha?” I snapped. “How dare you even—”

She was a kind woman, above all else.

I paused, midway through spewing an insult.

Always thoughtful. Refused to see the bad in people, though sometimes I believe she should have. That’s what brought her into this mess in the first place. If anyone deserved to be blooded, to be hunted down for something they could not control, it was certainly not your mother. She was barely a woman when I met her.

Something wasn’t sitting right with this. My blood ran cold as I continued to listen to his story, still trying to find the source of the voice.

I would like to have lied and said that blooding her was an accident—that I was a vicious animal with no control over my urges.

But that wasn’t the case. I knew exactly what I was doing, but I was far too pigheaded to care. In those days, it was all a game, all it had ever been. I became what society expected me to be, the creature who descends upon you in the middle of the night, gorging themselves on blood they don’t truly need.

Martha was no exception.

I attacked her not because I was hungry, but because I was bored. What else did one do when wandering through small villages, after all? I could have sucked her dry if I wanted to, save for her reaction to it all. ’Take what you need, sir.’ At the time, I had no idea why those words resonated in me as much as they had. She didn’t fight me, didn’t kick or scream.

I believe it was out of guilt that I changed her. Yet despite going through the wicked change and knowing who and what caused it, she still didn’t treat me like the vengeful dog I was.

Maybe it was because she had such an innocent outlook on life—some daughter of a wheat farmer in Saskatchewan, raised with nothing. She refused to see me as anything but a man who was lonely. At first, I could only laugh about it. I was thousands upon thousands years old; loneliness was beyond creatures like me.

I still miss her touch, the way she always thought someone needed to be fed when they came through the door, the way she pronounced certain words, the way she would always greet anyone like they had been gone for months, the way she twirled her hair around her finger when she was deep in thought, the way the room lit up whenever she walked in, the way she could look into your eyes and truly see what was inside, not out.

The way she made proving your worth to her an adventure rather than a task.

I loved her, Adrian. Countless years of being alone, loveless, and I had finally found the one woman that I truly needed in my life.

And they took her from me. They took you, her, Samuel, and Francis from me.

Sullenly, my eyes fell upon the violet-coloured scythe that lay rested against the far wall. It took me a moment to connect the two, but it sunk in quickly once the idea formed.

Agnes’ scythe had been confiscated the first day we were at school.

Toulouse—my father—had been just out of reach the whole time.

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