Page 92 of Cole: Bloodlines
“Why?” Cole whispered, a strange feeling unfurling in his gut. His mouth went dry, heart stuttering against his ribs.
Jim Hunter stared at him, weathered face softening at the edges. The man's granite demeanor cracked as something raw and vulnerable shimmered through his gray eyes, turning them liquid silver. “You look like him,” he murmured, his voice dropping to a rough-edged whisper that rasped with emotion.
“Who?” Cole's question hung in the air between them, almost fragile.
“My brother. John,” the man whispered. “Your father.”
Cole's legs weakened beneath him as blood rushed from his head. “What...?”
“John was Mary's fiancé.” Jim's calloused fingers curled into fists that flexed at his sides. “She was pregnant with you when he was murdered.”
Cole's whole world tilted like a carnival ride gone wrong, the hospital room spinning in nauseating circles around him. He gripped Gabe's hand so hard his fingernails left imprints in the flesh—his lifeline in this storm of revelation. His pulse thundered in his ears, drowning out the steady beep of nearby monitors.
“You’re not Daniel Pruett’s son… you’re the son of John Hunter, a good and decent man… who couldn’t wait to be a father.” Jim Hunter swallowed as his breath came in shallow gasps, his voice roughened with the weight of three decades of carried grief. “You became his whole world the moment he learned Mary was pregnant.” Silver tears gathered in the corners of his gray eyes. “I promised John I would find you... if it took the rest of my life.”
Cole sank onto the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping beneath his weight as his trembling legs buckled. Hot tears streamed down his ashen face in glistening trails, dripping from his jaw to darken the thin hospital gown. His mind reeled through possibilities—a cruel joke, a vivid dream, a psychotic break triggered by the trauma of finding Ezra after all these years. But as he stared into Jim Hunter's weathered face, at the familiar shape of those eyes that somehow mirrored his own, a bone-deep certainty crystallized within him: Jim Hunter was telling the truth.
The Mangler—that grotesque nightmare who had haunted his childhood memories—wasn't his father. Byrne, with his cold, dead eyes and twisted smile, wasn't his brother. The monsterswho had trapped Ezra in hell for sixteen years, feeding on his terror and pain, shared no blood with him. Cole's veins ran clean, his genetic inheritance untouched by their madness. He felt it like a physical weight lifting from his chest, allowing him to breathe fully for the first time in his life. His hand trembled as he pressed it against his chest, feeling his heartbeat with new wonder.
“How did you find him?” Gabe asked in quiet shock when Cole's words failed him, his fingers still intertwined with Cole's trembling hand.
Jim Hunter's haggard face hardened as his jaw clenched tight, and his eyes turned to chips of winter ice. “By hunting the killers,” he said, each word dropping like a hammer on an anvil.
•••
Thirty Years Ago
She’ll remember you as a lying, cheating piece of shit who ran off and left her for some other whore.
John Hunter collapsed against the wooden beams, the nails tearing through his flesh as his weight shifted. Blood poured from his punctured wrists, running in hot rivers down his forearms. They'd made Mary believe he'd betrayed her—abandoned her and their unborn child for another woman. A guttural sob ripped from his throat, the emotional devastation eclipsed only by the white-hot agony searing through every nerve ending in his crucified body.
“Crybaby,” the boy hissed, his small tongue darting between teeth as he slid off the stool. The knife in his hand dripped crimson onto the concrete floor—tap, tap, tap.
John’s head lolled upward, neck muscles straining against his weight. The child’s face swam before him—angelic featurestwisted into something demonic. Blood and mucus streamed down John’s chin as he struggled to breathe through punctured lungs, his consciousness flickering like a dying flame. Blood vessels burst in his eyes as he wept, turning his world into a hellscape of red shadows.
“Please… don’t hurt Mary…” John gurgled, crimson foam spilling over his lips with each syllable, drowning his words. His pierced lungs screamed for air as he forced out, “I-I don’t care what you do to me… but please… don’t hurt her…” His voice broke into a wet, desperate sob. “… don’t hurt… my baby.”
The boy’s pupils dilated to black pools, his head jerking sideways like a predatory bird. “Baby?” he whispered, the knife trembling with excitement against John’s exposed throat.
John’s body convulsed against the nails pinning him, fresh blood erupting from his wrists as he strained forward, eyes bulging. “Mary… she’s pregnant… please don’t hurt them…”
The boy’s lips peeled back in a rictus grin that exposed small teeth stained pink with blood spatter. His pupils had swallowed his irises completely, black holes in a child’s face. Nine, maybe ten years old, yet John’s bowels turned liquid with a terror more primal than what he’d felt facing the man. A grown monster made sense in the natural order. But this? The knife trembled in the boy’s grip—not from fear or hesitation, but from barely contained ecstasy. When the child tilted his head, something cracked audibly in his neck, and John saw in those eyes a darkness so absolute it could devour stars.
In desperation, John had mentioned the baby, his oxygen-starved brain grasping at salvation. But his plea for his unborn child had backfired catastrophically.
“A baby,” he whispered, voice cracking with perverse delight. The knife’s edge pressed deeper against John’s throat, drawing a thin crimson line. “I’m gonna cut it out—and eat it.”
A tidal wave of pure, black terror crashed through John’s body, seizing his heart mid-beat as the terrible truth manifested: the boy wasn’t making empty threats—those soulless eyes promised atrocities beyond human comprehension.