DYING MOURNINGS, original

ten : the old room

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𝐓𝐄𝐍 : 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐎𝐋𝐃 𝐑𝐎𝐎𝐌

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When we finally left the car and went inside, it felt empty. Even with Pandora and Ace at my sides, it still felt lonely.

It would never be the same without her.

Her constant come and go personality, her smile, the smell of a home cooked meal or fresh coffee. Instead, she was about to start rotting in a coffin that a stranger and murderer would pick out for me.

They killed her and you'll kill them, seems fitting, doesn't it? An eye for an eye?

Taint yourself for revenge, ruin yourself for her.

I didn't quite understand the true severity of my little mission, I didn't know how I was going to stop Crow and his little group of so-called killers. But he had to be stopped, or at least be put in jail. Either of the two would make it easier for me to sleep at night.

But will you sleep when you know she's dead? That your life has been built upon lies and secrets and an unfathomable darkness?

No, I thought to myself. I won't be able to sleep at all.

Inside, I had the urge to plop down on the couch and let myself sink into the cushions, but the goo still clung to me, stiff and cool. It was hard to explain how it felt, sticking to me like a sickness, like something rotten. You are not the one rotting. Not yet. How easily it had been for me to be dunked into the warmth, as if I was just merely jumping into a pool. A warm, sticky, red pool.

"Take a shower," Pandora murmured from next to me, one hand on my elbow to reassure me she was going to be here when I was done. "I'll heat up pizza for us, okay?"

I nodded and looked past her shoulder and at Ace, who stood out of place in the kitchen. It seemed weird, that everything he had told me was slowly becoming true. I knew he had a bigger part to play and I wasn't quite sure what, but it wasn't just because his family had sought out help from the wrong people. It was something much more than that, or at least it seemed that way.

He was right about something living inside the church, an evil that lived and breathed and had a taste for killing. 

"We'll be here when you come back down," Pandora told me before leaving my side and wandering into the kitchen.

Heading up to my room, I took hesitant steps over where the trap door had been found, wondering where my familiar ghost was tonight. It was so strange, how quickly my life had changed from one so mundane to one suddenly filled with evil and death.

And how it was so normal. 

I knew it would only get worse as I clung to the small bag of my mother's belongings. The last few minutes of her life were inside this bag and the idea of it made me feel sick that I didn't spend much time going inside her room to put her jewelry back where I knew she liked it. I took her small cross necklace into my hands, the cross was small, simple.

I undid the clasp and slide the cool metal chain around my neck before fastening it in the front. I moved the cross against the chain until it rested against my chest, right below my neck. Silver against red. Metal against blood. Delicacy against angry flesh.