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Tears. Screams. Violence. Rebellion. Anger. Hate. Love. Passion.
Welcome to the other side of existence. The dark side that turns everyday people into killers. What makes an average person decide it’s okay to take a life? Or it’s okay to avenge the dead?
I’ve learned a lot about those urges, those feelings that awaken the darkest primal side of us. It’s where humanity dies and the animal takes over. I hated that side, and yet here I was embracing it. I didn’t know why. I just do, act, react to the thing that compels me. To me, it was justice of the highest order. A calling.
Of course there’s always that one person who unwittingly gets in the way of the hero. Their intentions are good, but it puts everyone at risk. Such people must learn to butt out. Such people must be culled.
Why? Why must some people push, push, push?
I’d been following Ari Wilburn to learn more about her, only to discover her mocking me with an endless quest for answers. Why couldn’t she just accept things and let it go? As she threaded together the details of what happened with Scott, with Kat, with Jackson—she was climbing a rope that would lead to me. That same rope would eventually hang me.
She was a rebel like me, and while I respected her for that, it also would end up getting someone killed. She was putting herself in the line of fire, and I didn’t know how many warning shots it would take to get her to back off.
It didn’t help that people like Ari Wilburn and me—the bruised, broken souls raised on pain and self-sufficiency—didn’t care enough about life to worry about losing it. So my threats would likely prove fruitless.
Unless ... unless I threatened someone she loved. There weren’t many people in that category, at least from what I could gather by watching her. Her mother and father, maybe. A detective love interest that I’d seen coming and going from her place numerous times. Then a girl, a pretty Latino girl. Rough around the edges, but interesting. I found myself watching her long after Ari had left her apartment. The blond tips of her short black hair stuck messily in all directions, which I found cute. Some of the mail delivered to the apartment—which I’d clandestinely examined, naturally—was addressed to Tina Alvarez. I slid her name into my memory bank for safekeeping. I might need it for later.
Then there was a family in that rich section of Durham, with two little kids. Philip and Eve Baxter, I discovered after a property records search. Ari had only lurked outside their house, never approaching them. Perhaps it was time I made an introduction. I didn’t want it to come to that—hurting kids, it should never come to that—but I needed to make a point before my neck was on the chopping block courtesy of Durham’s boys in blue.
The loss of a few innocents was worth the bigger cause. Or as Mr. Spock so aptly put it, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
One last warning shot. I’d give Ari that. Then it was war.