*all rights to the original author*
I didn’t give Mr. E. a chance to plead his case. Before he could even blink, he was flying across the room. Yeah, I know that revenge is generally frowned upon and that my parents got a little mad when I roughed up Carter, but, hey, I can’t be expected to master my power and my temper all in one day. Mr. E. went soaring and crashed into a bunch of desks. He groaned a nice painful-sounding groan for a second, but not nearly long enough if you ask me.
"Camila, wait," he immediately began. "Let’s be reasonable. You don’t—"
"Reasonable!" I shrieked. "Reasonable?" I picked him up again and threw him into the blackboard.
"You almost killed my girlfriend! You tortured her! Don’t you dare tell me to be reasonable!" Mr. E. opened his mouth to say something, but I didn’t want to hear it. I grabbed his hand and sent a current into him that forced him to scream out in pain. "Is this what it was like for Lauren?" I kicked up the power a notch, making Mr. E.’s body go so stiff that he could no longer scream. "Tell me, what’s worse, the electrocution or the suffocation?"
I let go of his hand and let him fall limp to the ground. As soon as he could, he croaked, "Please, Camila. I’m sorry. I didn’t want it to be like this."
His pathetic apology set me off again. The anger inside me only grew worse from the violence.
"You’re sorry? Sorry for what you did to Lauren? Or just sorry that your stupid plan didn’t work?" With that, my rage clouded out the world around me, and I grabbed him again. This time electrocuting him didn’t seem like enough. It didn’t seem deadly enough, so I slipped my fingers around his neck and began to squeeze. His face was a dark shade of blue when a voice yelled, "Camila, stop!" I was so blinded by my emotion that I never heard Carter enter the room. He’d surprised me, but not enough to make me let go of Mr. E. "He was going to kill her!"
"Camila," Carter said again, his voice calm and commanding. "Let him go." I looked into the face that was starting to lose consciousness, and I was filled with a hate that I’d never dreamed to be capable of. Vero, Carter, Zayn… None of them even came close to making me feel the way I felt right now. That hate made it impossible for me to stop. "I’m not going to let him hurt anyone I love ever again!"
I felt a hand come down on my shoulder. "You’re not a murderer, Camila," Carter said.
Those words had been said to me a hundred times before. My parents had said them. Lauren had said them. Even Carter had let the phrase slip before. I looked at Mr. E. again, and this time I saw the terror in his eyes. The same terror I saw in Vero’s face as she died. Then, suddenly, Mr. Edwards was gone. I could only see Vero lying there beneath my grip, barely able to struggle anymore, and I realized exactly what I was doing.
Carter was right. I wasn’t a murderer. The conflict in me finally surfaced, and I collapsed to the floor, breaking into violent sobs as I released Mr. Edwards. Carter let me cry for a moment and then said, "You’ll thank me for that someday, Camila."
Again, Carter was right. I was already grateful he’d pulled me from whatever temporary insanity I was suffering from. But I couldn’t let Carter see how relieved I suddenly was, and I definitely couldn’t let him see that I was in any way thankful for what he’d just done. Dave Carter is just not the kind of guy I need thinking I owe him one, even if maybe I do.
Carter is dangerous, and he’s still a scumbag. I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could throw him. Actually, I could probably chuck him a lot farther than I trust him. In fact, it really unsettled me that he’d just helped me. It scared me even. It was just so… un-Carter-like. What could he possibly have to gain from Edwards staying alive? Edwards was as much a threat to his precious story as he was to the safety of my family.
