Our parents were sleeping soundly in their bed.
Titus wasted no time. He gently set his backpack on top of the dresser, unzipping it and pulling out a roll of duct tape. Ripping off a piece with his teeth, he handed it to me with an emotionless expression. “Cover your mother’s mouth. We can’t have the neighbors hearing her screams.”
Taking the piece of tape, I crossed over to my mother’s side of the bed and patted the tape over her mouth, being gentle enough not to wake her. Titus was beside me in the next breath, taking her wrists and carefully securing them above her to the headboard.
He didn’t bother tying up his father, or taping his mouth.
He had the knife unsheathed, and in the next second he was on the bed, crouched over his father with the blade pressed against his throat.
“Time to wake up, daddy.”
Ezra’s eyes flew open. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out as he discovered the razor-sharp blade pressed to his neck. He gulped, and the knife nicked his flesh. A drop of the reddest blood I’d ever seen slicked down his throat.
“I’ve been dreaming about this for a long time, Father. This isn’t how I pictured it. I wanted all of your flock to see the life drain from your eyes. I wanted your precious deity to see, and for you to watch as he did nothing to save you. That way you’d finally see just how few fucks he gives for you. I wanted to throw you into the fire and watch your body burn tonothing.”
When the shock melted from Ezra’s face, a smug look of arrogance he had no right to wear took over. “Then why don’t you, boy? Or are you destined to fail at everything, including my murder?”
Titus’s jaw clenched. “You’re a monster.”
“At least I know what I am, Titus. Unlike you, who will forever be caught in the middle. Never quite devil, never quite human.” Ezra’s attention flicked to me, and he let loose a husky laugh. “You think this bitch is loyal to you? She’s just doing what she can to escape. The little rabbit has seduced the wolf.”
“He’s wrong, Titus…”
Titus swallowed, his glare remaining focused on his father. “I know he’s wrong. I wonder, Father…” My half-devil spoke so calmly, I jumped when he slammed the blade into his father’s chest with all the force he could summon. One, two, three, four times. My mother woke up with a scream. She didn’t stop screaming as she realized what was happening—that her new husband was being stabbed to death in their own bed.
Titus stabbed him a dozen more times. On the seventeenth time, he left the blade sticking out of Ezra and climbed off the bed. He turned around, his face streaked in a startling hue of devil’s blood.
“What is it like being on that side of the blade, Father?”
Of course, there was no answer. Erza had breathed his last breath by the third or fourth stab of the knife. Titus looked down at my mother, the ghost of a smirk curling his mouth. “Someone will come for you, Gloria. Pray that they don’t feed you to the Jersey Devil. He’s still ravenous for a human offering.”
My mom whimpered, her silk gown turning red with Ezra’s blood. “Tabe her, nob me!”
My blood chilled. Her words were muffled by the tape, but I’d understood her. So had Titus, by the way the room’s energy grew dark and tense in the wake of his rage.
“Take her, not you?” He laughed, the sound as brittle as dry spaghetti. “You mean, as an offering to the Elder One?”
She nodded.
My stomach twisted into knots. To think I’d almost felt sorry for her.
“Don’t worry, Gloria. I am taking your daughter. But I’m taking her for myself. Her soul is to be mine, not the Jersey Devil’s.”
I took his outstretched hand and allowed him to lead me out of the room, not giving my mother so much as a second look over my shoulder. Instead, my attention was all on Titus, whose bloody grin was on me even as he addressed my mother as we left the room. “And I can promise you one thing, Gloria. I plan on keeping it. I plan on keeping it forever.”
The End
