AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But that’s not what’s going to work right now, I’m forced to remind myself.
I need to focus, and seeing her chest rise repeatedly as her hard nipples push through her thin night shirt does nothing to help.
Forcing myself to leave the room, I stalk out of the bedroom and down the hall to Abel’s room. The door is standing open so that one of us can get to him quickly if he should happen to cry.
Which isn’t often now that he’s come to live with his true father.
Watching over him, I wonder at the miracle that his body represents to this world. He’s fully unaware of what he and his mother have saved me from.
Boredom and aimless wandering.
The family pulled me into the city, but eventually I would have been pushed back out into the world.
Back to being a nameless void that sucked the life from wherever I was sent. Quite literally at points, I think.
Not that I minded the work I was sent on. It’s kept me moving and alive for the last fifteen years.
It’s what allowed me to keep a tenuous grasp on reality. The voices have always been a part of me. In my mind, always there, always demanding more. More blood and carnage, to never stay put, to move with the winds.
Lucifer found me fifteen years ago, wandering the cemetery at the end of his father’s funeral. I had stopped to watch the men and women there. Some were crying, but most were stoically standing like statues.
I got the feeling the ones shedding tears were performing, as if to say, ‘see, look how much I loved the person being buried’.
Lucifer spotted me leaning against one of the massive yew trees, the bark digging into my suit jacket not too uncomfortably. Back then, I needed discomfort in my life. I needed to feel something beyond the hollow existence I felt at every turn.
He watched me carefully from his spot front and center of the coffin as it was lowered into the ground. He didn’t weep or even show a particularly strong emotion to whoever was being buried. To me, it looked as if he was quite bored of the whole affair, like he was just going through the motions.
He had a mask on, I realized. One that was there to keep up appearances. I knew masks well. I’d wore my own since my parents died six months earlier in a plane crash.
It was a mask of normalcy, of everything is just fine. That I was accepting and adjusting to my new circumstances.
We all wear masks in our lives.
Everyone does.
It’s just a matter of what’s behind them that determines what type of person you are.
I was a killer then, as I am now.
Not as skilled or professional. I was unrefined, untrained in the ways to ensure my deeds did not catch up with me. I was careful enough, though, I suppose, since those crimes never came back to haunt me.
Three days after my parents died, I could no longer ignore the voices inside my brain screaming to be heard. Like nails to a chalkboard, they demanded my attention.
My first was a pimp in a darkened alley. He was beating on an old, tired prostitute. I didn’t end his life out of some sense of duty to protect her. He was simply an expedient way to sate my cravings. That the lowlife bastard would hardly be missed or looked after made him an easy target.
An easy first choice.
The drugged up, concussed prostitute never even saw who slid the blade into the man’s neck.
She only noticed when the hot, sticky blood started to hit her face.
And that was when I finally heard my first scream of terror.
I felt almost…human. The voices quieted, feeding off the raw fear and death.
More deaths followed under Lucifer’s black wings.
But they’ve never felt as true as that first stab of the blade. That first feeling of cleansing my soul.
