Upside Down (COMPLETE) Inside Out, Book 2 [BoyxBoy]

Parker

It was winter everywhere in his head.

Ice-cold. Everything froze up inside of him, and he feared closing his own eyes when the boy's lips touched his.

Lord, didn't he just experience a few short seconds in heaven just now. The lips had not yet touched his own when everything made sense in his head. Pair, he thought. I have been paired to him.

Soulmate.

But the winter didn't leave his head. Just as he pressed himself further into the bed, the world was a frozen land again, just like when it had been two decades ago.

He and a lover had been tied up on a peak of a hill, naked and restless, showered with the cruel heavy snowfall and blanketed with the icy wind, surrounded with what seemed the villagers of the whole kingdom.

"Stop!" he had cried as another agonizing whip slashed the skin of his buttock open. He begged and pled but it only made him receive the lashings faster and faster. "Stop! Have mercy—"

"Die, you fucking queer!" a voice said, and it came alongside a hard kick that could crack his spine. His own father, he recalled, the leader of the town, owning a rank very respectable among the magicians in the village. "You're a disgrace, Bradley Parker," he had said again. "I should've killed you since the day you were born—"

"No!" cried a lady next, one who had also been forced in place because her will hadn't been strong to witness her dear son to be tortured in the cold like that. "Please have mercy on him, Pervis! Please ... I beg you!"

"He tainted my face, Mona!" Pervis had retorted in rage, screaming so much his spit flew and turned to ice in the harsh air. "Did you see him and the boy? Body-to-body, all over each other in the holy place where I work? How could you talk about mercy, Mona?"

The whipping continued—Parker remembered every bit of pain in his skin now as he drowned in the dark—and his lover screamed next to him, not of the pain but Parker knew he could not bear to witness his own lover going through a deathly torture himself. He roared so hard his throat could bleed, and there was a hint of rebellion in the way the lover thrashed in his place. Adrian, please do not hurt yourself. Parker remembered his name now, and the pain in his chest grew.

The look of defiance fulfilled the hunger of some of the villagers there; he remembered his brother, Percy, growing a dark grin in his face as he poured gasoline all over Adrian's naked figure, torch on the ready in his other hand. One of the village people there forced Adrian's mouth open to hold the oil starting from there, filled full until it flowed down to his whole chest.

Parker was still receiving lashes when he opened his eyes to Percy already throwing the torch right on Adrian's figure.

He screamed. He cried and shouted in the cold and felt his knees buckled. Suddenly the whips hadn't had any effect on him anymore. Lord, please destroy this land, he remembered praying. Lord, have mercy on this cruelty. Lord, my weak self could no longer hold this test any longer—

It was as if the sky heard his cries, and the bloodbath started.

The vampires might have smelled the group of magicians from afar. It was already brewing that a clan of bloodsuckers who had always been on bad terms with the magicians thirsting for their blood. The wizards carried magic flowing in their veins, and it'd grant the bloodsuckers a longevity and strength of a strong metal when consume. The voices in the air also said the wizards had always taste better in the tongues of the vampires; the scent was strong, and it fulfilled their hunger like nothing else could.

They landed with invisible wings right from the sky. It was a feast day of the winter to them, and this was when Parker knew his prayers had been answered. As he saw his father's flesh being chewed down and his mother dropped dead and drained, he couldn't help see it as a blessing.

The night had felt like a long hell in his life. His system was on fire, burning him with agony farther than a real flame could've eaten him alive that day like it had to Adrian. The venom of the bloodsucker had made its way to run inside his bloodstream. He remembered crying in pain all night long under the moonlight, wishing for death's visit. But none of it came.

Maybe he did die that night, only to be resurrected by the stinging venom running inside his system. His heart seemed to stop. He did lose his human senses.

Parker Sebastian was comfortable being empty and soulless, free from all the emotions that had caused him torture from the years before. Not until the kiss.

The kiss that had not only brought his soul back, but completed him as a whole.

And now he wept. Hard, of sadness and hurt that he had to feel again for this.

But he yearned the boy now. He wanted him so badly—he was blood to his vampire thirst now.

Then, Parker Sebastian realized at that time that the kisses of Vutoir's wands had planted deception in his head. His mind was hacked, and it didn't take long for him to figure out why.

The universe had not changed, and it still yearned for Parker's ultimate defeat. Being the powerful immortal that he was, he knew magicians like Vutoir would like his life to end if he refused to pick sides. It was a choice of whether Parker was made their weapon or a dead man, and surely the former was never considered by a lone ranger like him.

So they chose the other alternative, and killing his pair would kill him too.

But the kiss broke it. The taste of the boy's mouth—soft, silky and smelled of innocence and his young days—had unwounded the tangled strings covering Parker's sanity all along that was spelled onto him. He could see the reason why.

Shortly, his heart was set ablaze knowing he had almost mistaken his true pair with an enemy under the spell.

The fury came wild into him, and it felt familiar like the fire setting him up to hell during the days of his Change. His chest could explode out in anger.

Before the rage could destroy him, he gathered the remaining of his energy to form a door in the wall with his wand to portal straight to where Vutoir and his clan were at.