Hellbound - 001/Henry Creel/Peter Ballard

027

Henry Creel

Before I can tell her how much I love her and that this won't change anything between us, she's ripped out of my arms, disappears into thin air and has me questioning if this was ever even real in the first place. 

I come on her bedsheets, but I don't feel an inkling of pleasure as I do, just cold, bitter pain and confusion as to where she went. She was beneath me mere moments ago, and we were sharing something so sacred, something so holy, that was stolen from us brutally before we could properly process what happened here. 

"Eve?" I whisper in disbelief. 

Where is she? 

There is only one place that she could be at, only one place that she could transfer to so fast and without a trace. 

The suspicions roll in my head soon enough, they whisper of a cursed red-skied place with unknown interest at the other side of the world. I fear to listen to them, not wanting to believe that I'll have to pull Eve out of the blood-thirsty hounds of that place. 

I get dressed as quickly as possible and rush out to the garden, our garden, and once again she is nowhere to be seen. I search every room of our house, running along the creaking wooden floor like a madman, desperate to be proved wrong, desperate to believe that I am just insane and we never shared the previous moments, that it was just a cruel dream, a machination of my mind to tear me down. 

I'd rather believe that I have lost my mind than accept that I might have lost her. 

I reach out with my powers, trying to locate her deep in the woods, but I know deep in my gut that it's impossible for her to be there, there is only one place she could probably be, and I already know where it is. Hell, our version of hell. 

Perhaps this is my penance for what I have done, for all the lives I have taken, this is my torture, this is my hell, not hers. 

I scream my throat raw once all the thoughts click in place like puzzles fitting right into each other, creating a pattern. There is no way for me to reach Eve, I cannot help her, I cannot be at her side, and I have to wait for her to return home, but the macabre thoughts circling my head as bloodthirsty sharks whisper at me I might not ever see that dazzling smile of hers again, touch her ivory soft skin, gaze upon the eyes that I have grown to call home. 

I refuse to believe that, for my sake and hers. I have to save her, I have to be the one to bring her home, whether it is clawing and scraping at the very essence of the universe, whether I die in the process of doing it, I must do it. I must sacrifice everything I have to lose to bring back the only person that truly matters in this wretched world, my love. 

I scrape my mind, I try to find information, anything that Eve has told me in the past that can connect together and give me the solution. I need to do it fast, and successfully. 

I don't know how I teleported there that time and found her just at the right time before she drew her last breath. I don't know how I managed to create a pulse of power strong enough to travel through parallel universes and land exactly where she was. 

I look up at the sky and hope that this time I'll manage it, that I'll unlock the formula of shifting between worlds and be there for her in time before she's a corpse in my hands. 

Last time those cursed hounds had nearly eaten her alive, there was barely enough of her left when I arrived, they were about to kill her, and they would have if I was a second too late. Now I agonize if those same hounds are torturing her again, if they're chasing her down, trying to claim their next meal. 

I push my hands forward and strain, trying to move the whole sky, the whole earth beneath me. I let out a roar of pain as the power gets wrenched out of me, as I pour it all out as an offering, as a plea to let me transcend worlds.