Page 112 of Veil of Death and Shadow

There was a soft cry to my right, and I found Cheryl there, standing in her bedroom doorway, her eyes wide with horror, frozen like her brain refused to process the scene in real time.

Blake yanked the blade from Rina’s stomach, and I ran over to her, blinking back tears as I held my hands against the wound. I tried to stem the bleeding like I always saw them do on TV, but there was so much blood. More than I’d ever seen. Her shirt and the floor beneath were coated in it, and when I looked down, I found that my arms and knees were too.

Panicked, Blake pressed his ear to her chest, then started yelling over and over to his mother that she was dead.

“Gone,” he’d yelled, “gone, gone, gone.” Like he was a petulant child who’d lost his favorite toy.

My ears rang, and I remembered feeling like I was there, but also not. Like I was watching the scene from outside of my body. I couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t make myself believe what had happened.

Sora crawled over to us, her scream reverberating through the hall, but it seemed so far away, like it was outside somehow.

I remembered thinking at the time that that was good, that maybe the neighbors would hear her and come, that maybe they’d help Rina—since Cheryl was absolutely useless. But Blake’s words kept circling my thoughts on repeat—she was gone, she was gone, she was gone.

Panicking, Blake grabbed Sora by the hair and tugged, his eyes wide with fear. He started mumbling about how he had to kill us all too, because we saw what he’d done.

Cheryl had tears running down her cheeks, her eyes locked on her son—but she didn’t move.

She was just going to stand there and let him do it again.

Anger, deep and relentless and unlike anything I’d ever felt before seared through me, iron hot. I ran over to him, punching and clawing at his face, fighting desperately to get Sora out of his grip, to turn his vengeance away from her.

He tried to fight me off with his free hand, the one still clutching his knife. The blade sliced along my arm, but it didn’t hurt. I couldn’t feel anything in that moment, only all-consuming fury. I didn’t think, I just acted. In one fluid movement I placed my hand over his, wrestling for control until I twisted the blade in the direction I wanted it to be planted.

Shocked, his grip freed Sora. His eyes locked on mine as he screamed, his rancid breath hot on my face. He wrapped his now-empty hand around my throat, his fingers tight and unrelenting while I fought to peel them away. As my vision clouded, I abandoned the attempt, instead driving the knife deeper into his stomach, until he finally let go.

From his mother’s perspective, my back to hers, we probably looked like we’d frozen—locked in an embrace, a temporary truce. Like he’d just lost his footing and stumbled down the stairs, the knife sinking into his stomach in the process, a twisted mirror to Rina’s wound.

I fell to my knees, my fingers tracing the remnants of his grip, my throat sore and scratchy as I sucked down air.

When I turned back to Cheryl, her mouth was gaping open, like she wanted to scream but no sound would come out.

To this day, I still wasn’t completely sure whether she’d seen everything, whether she knew the truth—that I was the onewho’d slid that knife through his skin as if it was nothing more than butter. That I’d do it again and again without another thought.

Most likely not. Something told me that if she knew what I’d done, she wouldn’t have let us leave as easily as she had.

After a long, panicked moment she fumbled her way over to her son, shaking and silent as she checked for a pulse. Only when she heard a car turning up the driveway did she stir back to life. Face pale, eyes bloodshot, she turned back to us looking more haunted and broken than anything I’d ever seen.

She mouthed the word, “run,” and Sora and I only hesitated long enough to glance at Rina’s lifeless body, still and bloody on the floor, an image to gut us in our nightmares for years to come. But then we never looked back.

“One night, he attacked us,” I said, editing the night down, skipping over the parts I could never put words to.

That he’d attacked us far more than once.

That I’d fought back that night.

That Blake’s death was ultimately ruled a tragic accident—nothing more than an after-school special about the dangers of underaged drinking and drugs.

That there was never any mention of Rina’s death at all—a final attempt on Cheryl and Joe’s part to cover up for their son one last time. Why tarnish his name with murder, too, right?

That no one came looking for us. Either because no one noticed that we were missing in the chaos, or maybe they did but they didn’t want to use expensive resources trying to hunt us down, or because Cheryl and Joe hid our tracks for us. It was the only shard of protection they had left to offer after failing so miserably all those times we’d begged them to listen—after pretending for months not to see the bruises or cuts, the lost looks in our eyes.

That before that night, I’d spent weeks lying awake in their home, wishing for Blake’s death, for the death curse to be real, just this once—only for it to be granted two minutes too late.

That powerful people could get away with anything, could warp the world to fit whatever reality benefited them most. While the rest of us paid the price.

That Rina paid a price steeper than any of us.

Joe had even won his election, the town’s pity from his son’s death no doubt lifting him up in the polls. Last I’d read, he and Cheryl had started a church—no doubt to cleanse their hands of guilt. Rina would still be alive if they’d taken their son’s actions more seriously.

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