TRIGGER WARNING: self harm. like, not explicitly, but just very heavy content within this chapter so... proceed with caution yeah?
CHAPTER FIVE pray for the wicked
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SOME TIME DURING THE night she begins to dream.
In her dreams, she is hazy and the shapes are all wrong, stretched too thin, stretched too wide, and nothing is consistent. But the scene is always the same. There is a parking lot and it is night time, the full moon less like a godless entity and more like a boil that ought to be lanced—the limp heart of her most vicious nightmares. There is Luka, laughing at a thirteen year old Violet, words that don't quite reach her ears, words that don't make sense until she realises that she's watching the entire thing unfold from an omnipresent perspective. Present trapped in a past, watching the destruction of her future through the cracks in time.
Tonight, she dreams she is back in that parking lot, back four years ago, back when Luka was alive and they were standing in the garish fluorescent light, standing and waiting and waiting and waiting. It always begins the way she remembers it. Smiles on their faces, unaware of what's to come, they're talking but the words don't sound like words. They're not watching the darkness beyond the edge of the parking lot where the light doesn't reach and the moonlight fades into shadows. Something in the air shifts. Something lurks at the edge of the darkness, watching, picking their movements apart, waiting for the right moment to strike. They should've been watching the darkness.
And then she sees it. The first flicker of movement in periphery.
In her dream, Violet screams, "look out!"
But neither Luka nor thirteen-year-old Violet hears. They continue playing, continue making a ruckus with their skateboards.
She tries to run to them, but her feet are stuck in the tar, lead blocks unable to move forward or back and she can do nothing but watch in horror as Luka falls, and the skin of his elbow tears open. Blood, red and pulsing, spills onto the tarmac. It spreads and spreads, pooling like a lake, and running like a river towards the darkness. And then, all too suddenly, a shape made of silhouettes springs from the dark and slams into Luka and sends thirteen-year-old Violet skidding to the ground. Both Violets scream, this horrible, throat-ripping, chest-quaking sound that tears the night apart. But no one else hears a thing.
The monster is a woman. A flurry of wild red curls and skin as white as pearls and clawed hands that clamp down hard on Luka's shoulders, pinning him to the ground, and teeth that sink into flesh. Luka shouts: RUN, VIOLET, RUN! But his voice is cut off by the woman who throws her fist into his throat and he chokes on his own blood. So much blood. A river that churns into the raging ocean. What sixteen-year-old boy bleeds this much?
