The Irangel | Prequel Story |

Chapter 37 ~ Tori's Death

Tori had fallen unconscious from the electricity torture and was laying on the cot while Justin and Cole waited for her to wake up. At the same time Eamon was flying back to the glass building with the curvy woman in tow, Tori awoke as if realizing something was amiss.

Justin and Cole, noticing the experimentation would only make her pass out, decided now was the time to kill her. "She got enough torture anyway," Cole reasoned. Justin agreed and said, "Let's end the torture she inflicted on us." They took her off the cot, Tori thrashing and struggling for her life.

A cart with various medical equipment on it was nearby. When she was within reach, Tori seized a dagger from the cart and frantically slashed at Cole, cutting up his hoodie. He kept avoiding getting hit in the flesh until he was able to pry the weapon from her.

Justin kept Tori down on the floor as Cole moved over to her wings and started cutting them with the same dagger Tori tried to defend herself with. He handed Justin another dagger from the cart as Tori kept fighting. She cried out in pain as Cole began slicing her wings into ribbons; it was the equivalent of skin being sliced.

Tori desperately grabbed at Justin's tank top, ripping it as she struggled against him. All of Justin's pent-up emotions poured out in the act of stabbing, each motion deliberate with a certain memory behind it. Sounds echoed in Justin's mind, sounds of screaming, pain, anger, frustration, torture, agony, and dismay. Flashbacks of various moments replayed over and over, each stab driven by the force of it all.

Cole's slashed hoodie was out of Tori's line of vision as he kept slicing at her wings, tearing wing feathers off and shredding them to ribbons. Justin's ripped tank top appeared in her line of vision as he stabbed at her. Tori's screams panged some corner of Justin's heart, but he kept releasing the built-up emotions, ignoring his feelings for her. Cole was all about hate and vengeance, vowing revenge for Millian's death and for all the pain and agony she had put the irangels through. And now Tori was feeling all the pain and agony.

Tori had always been afraid of dying. She had always been petrified by the sheer thought of her own deadline, hence her fierce search for immortality. But as she lay dying on the hard floor, she felt a sudden calm run over her. It was the end, but somehow, she wasn't afraid. It felt almost like a beginning.

Time seemed to freeze, the events in the room faraway as Tori began to remember flashes of her past. Her drawings of spaceships and angel wings on notebooks in middle school. The costume wings she wore at her high school prom. Her persistent fascination with the unknown. The way she always looked up to the skies ever since she was a child, the skies that held all her hopes and dreams from afar.

The secret file she found of an alien planet that was already discovered thirty years ago. All the reckless, murderous things she did just to steal a spaceship and fly to Iredescent. Her first communication with the sparkly lifeforms. The two Iredescents she killed, now the Adam and Eve of the irangel race. Her passion turning into obsession as she searched high and low for a way to become an Iredescent. Her joy of finding it. Her transformation, her awakening. Her clandestine dreams. Her cosmic wishes. Her desires and longings. All becoming true. All becoming real.

But her good intentions were tainted. She had become a villain, stealing human lives from strangers who never asked to become alien and needlessly torturing them. Tori knew she had gone past forgiveness for a lot of her actions, but that didn't mean she still wanted forgiveness for all the harm she'd done and all the people she'd killed in pursuit of ambition gone too far.

The men kept slicing her wings into ribbons, but she felt somewhat detached, as if knowing there was a worse pain than this intense pain, and that each stab was drawing her nearer and nearer to it. She found she was more terrified of that pain than this pain. The repetitive pain grew to the point where it was almost comforting in a strange way. The end was coming for her, and Tori was ready now.

Tori closed her eyes, whispered, "God, please forgive me," and let out her last breath as the knife plunged deep into her heart.