Page 126 of The Blood we Crave

I raise my hand to him. “Don’t. I understand your concern, but my friends are none of your business.”

He calls my name twice before the sound of my car pulling out of the parking lot drowns him out. My fingers tighten around the steering wheel, soft music on the radio failing to help me forget that entire conversation.

I want to make this entire town pay for what they did to him. I want to make his father pay for making his son into a killing machine who is so twisted on the inside he can barely stand to touch other people.

Thoughts of how I would torture Henry Pierson consumed me the entire drive, the short distance to Thatcher’s home eaten up by how I would bleed him out, suffocate him gradually, maybe even dabble in dismemberment.

He deserves to die twice.

One for my mother. And the other for Thatcher.

If I could kill him and bring him back just to kill him again, I swear I would.

The long driveway to the House that Haunts Pierson Point is decorated by the elements. Dark green western juniper trees coated with snow create a canopy of beauty above me.

Fall is now a memory as winter makes its mark. There’s always been something so beautiful about the cold. How it freezes moments in time and traps our seconds in snow globes.

Even as a child, I loved the warm fires that healed my cold fingers. The urge to stay outside in the snow for hours on end just to feel the fresh air on my skin.

When I reached the peak of the driveway, revealing the front of the house, all the joy sparked inside of me fizzles out and is replaced with panicked confusion.

All it takes is one second. Just one long second to turn joy into unbridled fear. One moment, your life is on a steady course, routine and comfortable, and in the blink of an eye, it all changes.

Everything you know, everything you believe in, it shifts.

Red and blue lights twinkle in front of the house, the hope of them being early Christmas decorations long forgotten. Police cars are packed into the front, surrounding the fountain and cobblestone drive.

One singular ambulance is nestled closer to the door. My chest tightens as I take it all in, seeing Alistair and Rook’s cars parked alongside Thatcher’s.

Suddenly, the cold is not beautiful. It burns my skin as I step outside of my vehicle. The harsh wind slaps against my sensitive skin. My hands shake at my sides, the snow crunching beneath my boots.

My world seems to move in slow motion. Even though I feel like I’m sprinting, I know I’m only taking narrow steps. I will my knees not to give out, to keep standing, to continue moving forward.

Two officers walk past me, seeing me moments after I spot them. Their hard stares do nothing to stop my slow walk until they approach with their hands held out.

“Ma’am, you can’t be here,” one of them tells me. “It’s best if you wait in your car.”

My eyebrows pull together. Why would I need to wait in my car? What happened? What is going on?

Questions without answers spin around a merry-go-round that I can’t stop. The static of a radio crackles in my ears before a patchy voice echoes in the winter air.

“DOA.” Static pause. “No sign of forced entry.”

The ground crumbles beneath my feet. The entire world cracks and shatters beneath me. There is nothing to hold on to. I’m simply spinning with no hope of stopping.

I’d heard once that the pain of loss comes as a witness, to bear testimony, to the realness of love.

This was not how I wanted my love to be proven in the havoc of death. In the mourning of a soul. I wanted my love to breathe and exist, to be felt for eons. But as I stand there, that hope falls away, crumbled to ashes and scattering in the wind.

The police are talking to me, but I can’t hear them. I am numb. The crushing loneliness has taken me over, body and soul. I don’t even feel like myself, as if my soul had detached from my body and was watching from above.

Tears slick my cheeks, and agony ripples across my chest. Footsteps emerge from the front door, familiar combat boots coming into view.

Alistair Caldwell’s hair is tousled, as if he’d run his hands through it too many times. His face is pale, and eyes rimmed with an angry red color.

I can feel myself cracking as I try to open my lungs, to call for him. Beg him to explain what’s happening, for him to tell me everything is fine.

That Thatcher is fine.