Chapter 28
Noah
I desperately tried to free myself from my restraints. But after being poisoned, beating and dragged into the half daylight there was little I could do. And the people that broke in knew that. I had to push past my pain or I was going to lose Haley. She needed me more than ever.
Haley was fighting for her life as she tried to outmaneuver the revenant.
“Haley, get up —” My frantic cry was cut off by a sharp jab into my ribs from the human man who held me.
After the pain subsided a bit and I looked up at Haley again, any withering shred of relief I felt at the sight of her was quickly squandered. The revenant gripped her head in a chokehold, and began to squeeze. I saw her eyes widen as the desperate yelp of fear she let out was cut off as the revenants arm threatened her airway, slowly crushing any possibility of breath, and eventually life.
I almost couldn’t see through the wave of red rage that swallowed my vision before I broke free from the chains that helding me.
I elbowed the man's temple as hard as I could, ensuring he would be knocked out cold, and maybe worse, and watched the blood spray in what seemed like slow motion as I moved forward to save my wife. I punched the revenant strangling Haley in the face as fast and hard and awful as I could, aiming to break its nose. My endowed strength made it so I not only broke it, but that his head caved in with the impact, and revenant flew backwards a few feet.
Haley had been thrown a decent distance away, and so I continued to hit the revenant before me, now slumped against our wine room wall, blood spilling from the crater in his broken face. I picked him up by the collar of his shirt, slamming him against the wall over and over and over again. His shirt reddened with dark blood by the second, and his head became crushed until nothing but broken fragments of skull and bloody tissue made up his face, and he was left completely unrecognizable.
Haley would not die today.
I didn’t see the scared expression on her face or hear her terrified screams until after I was done mutilating the revenant who had tried to kill her moments ago. I had ripped his throat out, removed what organs and bloody insides it had left. My hands and chest were covered in dead warm blood, and I breathed heavily, my fangs fully bared in my rage. My eyes which were reddened with the power I wielded started to turn back to their normal color, the boiling fury that had taken over me finally starting to subside.
I turned to Haley, who had backed herself into a corner at the opposite edge of the room. She clutched herself tightly, shivering and shaking as she stared at me, frozen in place. I could see the red marks on her neck and had to concentrate all my focus to calm down even further before approaching her.
When I did take a few steps forward, slowly, still holding her gaze, I was stopped in my tracks by a frightful shake of Haley’s head.
“Haley?” I asked in the softest voice I could muster, still hoarse from the deep, angered wailing I did moments prior while slaughtering the man who held my wife captive.
“Haley, it’s just me, it’s Noah,” I tried to reason with her, holding up my bloodied palms as if that would convey my intentions.
I slowly began to realize, that something had happened between us. I did something, something wrong, something —
I killed a man in front of her.
The epiphany hit me like a solid brick to my skull, and I felt hot tears in my eyes as I began to back away from her.
“No, Haley, no, I’m not —”
A sob cut me off. I was a monster, I was cruel, evil. How could I do this? How could I show her this side of me, this slaughter, this horror. We couldn’t go on like this. Not really.
I didn’t know what to say to her, how to comfort her. She was panicking because I brutally killed a man in front of her, the man who tried to take her from me but still, she had every right to be frightened of a murderer. That’s what I was to her then, what I became in that moment — a cold blooded murderer.
She crouched in the corner, burying her head between her knees, her hair covering what little I could glimpse of her sobbing, tear stained face. Not only was she frightened, she was broken. I broke her.
What would I do? What could I do for someone who was just broken by the man she was supposed to trust with her life, when I just took someone else’s before her eyes in under a minute?
I didn’t know. So instead, I left her there, the woman I loved the most, to deal with the fresh wound I’d given her, her husband who was also a monster.
