AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The confession tumbles out easily now, no resistance. No guilt. Maybe because I was primed, or maybe because it’s simply the truth. When I made the connection to who Percy Wellington was that night—right in that blink of a moment—I swung that tire iron with one intentional outcome.
To end his life.
“That fury in you needed to punish, and it would have eventually, in the most destructive way to destroy you,” he says, his tone of voice somber now. “So I gave you a killer to chase, a villain you could punish. I created the darkness that you needed to feast on, sweetness.”
The Harbinger.
The serial killer spawned from my pain, Kallum brought into existence. Resurrected like a shadow monster from the darkest abyss.
And I didn’t just chase that darkness, I immersed myself in it. My obsession with catching the Harbinger became my reason to bathe, to get dressed, to eat.Breathe.
Until my wreck.
Kallum doesn’t need to voice what transpired afterword. I barely lived through it. Who was behind the wheel that night—me or my shadow? No matter what the accident report cited, I was the one driving. I was responsible. My guilt tore through me, annihilating. I might have never resurfaced.
The only thing that awoke me from my catatonic state was the Harbinger’s next murder.
“I had to keep you alive.” Kallum’s clashing gaze searches mine. “Three murders, three crime scenes. Designed for you. On the anniversary, I was giving you what you needed, letting you catch their killer. Even if you never made the association to Wellington, you would feel the totality. I had it all planned out?—”
“But then I showed up at the college.” Disrupting the course and opening Pandora’s fucking box.
“It wasn’t all you.” A mild dejection touches his expression. “I was supposed to trust the course, no matter where it led. Selfishly, I made demands.” He traces a finger over the scarred sigil in his pectoral. “I just craved you too badly.”
The blanket slips from my shoulder as Kallum takes my hand in his. The pad of his thumb caresses the scar on my palm. “The design was flawless,” he says. “After you caught your Harbinger, I’d approach you like I should have that first time, and the goddamn planets would align. If they didn’t, then I was prepared to leave this world in a blaze of glory and escape to the next, where maybe—just fucking maybe—I wouldn’t fuck it up that time.”
“Kallum—”
He pushes forward and captures my face between his palms. “But my design wasn’t flawless. It was your design. Always yours. When I saw you in that moment, a goddess of the moon harnessing all your dark fury… Goddamn, you were utterly breathtaking. You delivered your violent retribution and brilliantly scapegoated the murder.”
Yes, I scapegoated it right onto Kallum. But then he evaded the murder charge with a plea of insanity.
A testament to his genius—or the proof of his psychosis.
The twisted irony of accusing the Harbinger of the murder I committed is a paradox that threatens to shatter any rational mind I have left.
“I can’t be a muse,” I say to him, shaking my head against his hold. “Muses aren’t supposed to inspire death.”
He sweeps the tangle of white strands behind my ear affectionately. “Muse, goddess, huntress. From every fracted angle of light to the depth of your darkness, I’m inspired by all of you, Halen St. James.”
I feel the atoms in the room charge. The night Kallum found me, I became his muse, his inspiration for the darkest acts of violence. That truth still remains, just on a longer timeline.
What frightened one man, the dark stirring of my soul, the thread of violence woven just beneath my surface, enraptures another.
His execution of the Harbinger was, in fact, flawless. The design skillful dark artistry, the synchronicity that’s intwined into every intricate facet of us eloquent genius.
Kallum is frenzy. Kallum is mania. Divine madness and sanity cannot coexist in the same mind.
The price is too high.
A self-sacrifice that’s cost him his soundness of mind.
Without a tether, with no counterbalance, he will be lost to his tortured mind, to his abyss. He will eventually be caught.
As his captivating gaze sears into mine, I’m standing on the precipice of the void.
Claw to the surface—or sink further.
My hand trembles as I gingerly touch the crescent sigil I sliced into his flesh, my desire for Kallum and I to have met before my life spiraled. I know he feels what I’m feeling, how badly I wish I could take us back to that moment.
