and bring me close. His forehead pressed to mine, his breath soft and clove scented against my face.
I relaxed.
Against all odds, with a severed head secured under my desk by a crazy person and my friend bleeding beside me, I relaxed against Priest and let myself feel soothed by the presence of someone who was a monster to everyone, but a man for me.
When Lion, Bat, Dane, Boner, and Wrath appeared in the doorway, we didn’t move.
They gaped for a moment, struck dumb by the tenderness of Priest against me.
I saw Boner look from us to Eric. “At least there’s blood,” he said in a stage whisper to Bat. “Otherwise, I’d think somethin’ possessed the bastard.”
“I’m thinkin’ somethin’ has,” Bat murmured back, his black eyes thoughtful under furrowed brows.
“Enough with the PDA,” Wrath grunted as he finally shoved farther into the room. “The fuckin’ cavalry’s here. Let’s get to work.”
Priest pulled away, pushing me behind him as he seemed wont to do. “Take that one.” He jerked his head at Eric. “I’m thinkin’ he needs a little talkin’-to. Someone get to Mrs. Appleton and Catherine Prescott. We’re gettin’ answers about this fuck fest today.”
Priest
November was always a bitch. Howling winds raced over the ocean, collecting frigid water and speed before they dumped it all on the coastline, dousing us in fog, rain, and sometimes, pelting hail.
It was one of those nights. The sky was close-stitched with quilted iron-grey clouds, the air filled with needlepoint drops of icy rain. It was too cold, too wet for a man to spend the night outside essentially sleeping on the beach.
But I wasn’t just a man.
I sat under a huge umbrella I’d thrust into the thick carpet of wet sand, my back braced against a soggy log, the collar of my cut flipped up against my throat and my chin tucked into the throat of my hoodie. I was cold but mostly dry.
And I liked the sound of the rain pounding with fury against the thin nylon umbrella, and the glass-like shatter of the waves hurling themselves at the rocky shore. It was all violence and temper, all passion. It made me feel human to sit there in the middle of it all and let nature batter me into feeling something.
Before, a night like this would have made me remember how it felt to live inside my own body, which always led to more. It was the key in the lock of the door securing my humanity in its vault inside my chest. Feeling of any sort only led to more feeling. The cold of my hands linked to the cold of the blood in my veins, the wrinkling of my skin to the atrophied set of my heart. I remembered why I was like this, not just broken in the way I’d been bred and born, but in the way I’d grown.
I wore the names of the dead on each knuckle like rings I would never remove. They were the heirlooms of the worthy dead. Some I had killed myself and some at other hands. They said serial killers often had keepsakes, mementos of their kills.
A perversion, they called it.
I called it memory.
It was my refusal to forget those whose death touched me in ways both good and evil.
It was my way of adding worthy scars to the others that riddled my skin like nightmares of the flesh.
There was my mother and my father, so poor that when they died there was no money for a proper burial. I dug out the earth myself, dragged their bodies through dirt turned to mud with rain, happy that the wet made their transport slicker, and then tossed them into their ditches. I jumped down after them, landing in ankle deep mud that sucked at my boots like the hands of demons trying to persuade me after my parents. I jumped in so I might arrange them the way I’d seen at funerals before, their hands across their chests, lids forced closed. It seemed like the logical thing to do.
I said a few words in prayer that felt wrong in my mouth, but by the time I trekked home, thighs quivering from the fatigue of fighting the mud with each step, I'd forgotten tidily about their death and moved forward with my life.
It didn’t do to dwell on the dead.
I don’t know where I learned this or if it was a refrain born into my brain like salt in the sea.
It was good however I came