AllFreeNovel
Share Us
As the white mist began to melt into blackness, I drove my nails into my temples, wanting,needingto claw out the pain, the insanity, the memories, and I screamed with all the endless agony my soul had ever known.
----
I awoke staring up into a grimy, polluted night sky, ice cold and soaked to the bone. Around me, people were talking in panicked tones. Someone was bandaging my head and I was lying on a stretcher, a heavy blanket over me.
Frost.
I quickly sat up, trying to ignore the spinning alley. Janie put a hand on my shoulder and held me down. “Hang on, Poe. Don’t move. You’re very badly hurt; you need to be taken to the hospital. Let them help you.”
“No,” I mumbled, slightly incoherent from the dizziness. I shook it off and met Janie’s worried gaze. “No, Frost is in trouble. I have to go.”
“Poe, what are you…?”
I pushed myself up again, but was this time shoved back down to the stretcher by both Janie and the EMT. I struggled beneath their hands and began to scream. “No! No, let me go! I have to get to Frost! Let me go! She’s going to kill him!”
Someone broke through the crowd and Justin’s onyx eyes were suspended above me. “Frost? What happened, Poe?”
“There’s no time!” I screamed at him. “I have to get to Frost! He thinks I’m dead!”
Justin shoved back my coworkers and asked the EMT, “Is she stable?”
“She’s badly concussed and lost a lot of blood,” he answered. “There could be very serious damage.”
I wrenched myself free of the EMT and launched myself off the stretcher, nearly falling to my knees as soon as I was on my feet. Justin caught me and steadied me as EMTs cursed and grabbed at me, trying to calm me down. “If you try to take me to a hospital right now, I’llfucking kill you!” I screamed at them.
Justin wrapped his arms around me from behind to restrain me and asked the EMT in a panic, “I need to help this man and she will not allow you to help her. Let me take her with me so she can see that he’s alright and I’ll drive her to the hospital myself.”
The EMT frowned and began to shake his head. I fought against Justin, trying to escape his grasp, and my fight seemed to convince the EMT. If nothing else, he didn’t want to deal with me. He nodded his assent.
----
Frost was crouched on the hardwood floor, the phone smashed nearby, his face contorted in a grief that was physically painful, unendurable.
Someone from the restaurant had called, one of her coworkers. She was dead. She’d been murdered in an alley.
How dare they?! How dare they lay a hand on her?! Not in any twisted world didshedeserve to die in a cold, black alley! Who could do something like that toherof all people?!
Frost stood abruptly, crying out in fury. He grabbed the nearest lamp and threw it against a wall, smashing it into a million pieces. Even as it shattered, he turned and flipped over the couch, then flung one of the dining chairs through the TV. It wasn’t enough and he turned on the full-length mirror in the corner to smash it with his fist. The glasscrunchedand splintered but remained intact and the shattered reflection of his grief stared back at him. Hot tears began to run down his face and he collapsed on his scarred knees then, sobbing uncontrollably as it sunk in.
Poe. She was all he had. His family was dead. Now her too? She was the only thing holding him together, the only thing keeping him sane. There was Justin, but Justin had grown cold and broken and he didn’t know Frost like Poe did. She was the one who got him out of the house when he’d been ready to stay and burn with Trina, poor Trina, the one who knew it was his mother and brother in the harbor and had kept him back. She was the one who’d held the pieces of him together during the funeral, the one who’d held his sanity in the palm of her hand the past month, the one who’d been hurt so many times and in so many ways and yet remained so much stronger than him.
And after all she’d lived through, all she’d done. She had lost her family tragically, then endured years of neglect and abuse by her foster-father. She’d finally confessed everything about Lex to him. Somehow, she had survived him and when she’d told Frost what he’d done to her, he could see it in her eyes that someday, somehow, she was going to find Lex again and kill him herself. The girl he pulled out of the pool when she had nearly drowned, who had been so hurt when he didn’t believe it was an accident. She was the strongest person he had ever met, the kind of person who got through everything.
This was Poe. Poe who he had saved and tried to fix so many times, who had saved him so many times.
Poe.Dead.
He could feel his heart and soul ripping themselves to shreds inside him as what remained in his world died with her. The pain was just as bad, if not worse than when he’d found out about his mother and brother. It was as bad as when he’d held his little sister’s burning hand as she died, listened as her agonized screams faded to silence. This was easily as bad as that, maybe as bad as all those things combined. Yes. It was. She was all he was living for anymore. And now…she was gone.
He curled in on himself on the hardwood floor beside the kitchen counter. He tried unsuccessfully to hold himself together the way Poe always had. And he let all the pain he’d ever felt crash down on him like a tidal wave. He could hear Anastasia screaming his name, ‘Caleb!’ He could feel the heat of the flames eating away at him, feel the searing pain of that tiny ballerina being scarred onto his palm. He could smell the filthy Baltimore Harbor where they’d found his mother and little brother. And now, he could feel his soul shattering into a million tiny fragments as the only thing left holding it together died.
----
“What the fuck?!” Justin exclaimed as we sped towards Frost’s apartment in his police cruiser, the sirens above wailing.
“She’s a sociopath,” I said. “She’s completely insane. She and Mr. Aaron were probably perfect for each other. What time is it?”
“Quarter to twelve. They must not have found you until nearly eleven.” He dialed Frost’s number with one hand for the fourth time and for the fourth time, it went immediately to voicemail.
