Page 48 of The Villains of Winter

KODIAK, ARKANSAS

WINTER

​​ CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

ON THE KINGSHEAD EXPRESS, ELLIOTT stumbled onto the train, as flightless as a fox sparrow with its wings clipped, staggering past the rows of rich, velvet maroon compartment seats. He couldn’t catch his breath. He hyperventilated in rapid bursts. Lucien almost killed me.

Lucien Montclair almost drowned me alive.

A fear swelled behind his chest bone. We killed him and left the body.

All of the train passengers’ eyes seemed to watch Elliott, their judgment laid thickly on his skin from the hot gaze of their mass attention. Don’t spiral, Elliott. No one is staring at you. No one even knows you. No one here is from Banebury. Elliott heaved a breath down his throat to steady himself. Finally, he glanced around. No one bothered to look at him. Cheerful holiday music rained down from the speakers across the festive train.

Merry families and couples celebrated the holidays. Brightly dressed, red-nosed carolers crowded the entrance of the train with happy clots of ruddy-faced children and spirited adults. “Oh what fun it is to ride and sing a sleighing song tonight!”

Lucien laid slain on the mountain snow, bleeding in rivulets–How could none of them even be affected by the ritual ceremony? How were they all so damned jubilant?

“Oh, jingle bells! Jingle bells!” Dozens of train riders drunkenly sang along. “Jingle all the way! Oh, what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh. Hey!”

Slain. Slain. Slain.

The train was overpacked. Elliott tripped over his polished shoes past the suburban parents with rowdy, high-sugared children grinning with fistfuls of candy canes; he shouldered around the packs of loud high school football players that complained about yesterday’s loss of the New England Patriots to the Minnesota Vikings.

Elliott blundered through them, gripping the snowy train ticket he’d purchased with his head low. His throat throbbed. Compartment 31A.

Lucien’s clenching hands were still tightening around his neck, and he begged his vomit to return to his stomach as he shakily unlocked the kingwood doors. He wasn’t going to make it far. As soon as he tumbled inside, Elliott kicked off the stolen oxfords from his feet and he felt his way through to the sink, emptying the bile trapped in his chest between sobs.

“Oh, God. God, what have we done?” He cried out. “How could I do this again?”

Graphic images re-emerged of the grisly rainstorm, the careening vehicle, then Samhain night flashed before his eyes, James thrusting the knife into Lucien’s abdomen with dark fury. By Yule season, Lucien was a ravine of blood, his body ravaged apart. Repeatedly.

Then burnt.

Burnt human remains churned through Elliott’s nostrils, his mouth salty and watery with repulsion at himself. He stripped himself of the expensive overcoat that was tailor-stitched–property of Hán Callum韓–tangling the socks as he left a pile of clothes on the voluminous floors.

Elliott fumbled barefoot into the marbled shower, navigating aimlessly beneath the leonine statue of the shower head. Elliott, himself, didn’t feel as dignified and powerful as the lion statue at all. He felt like a lost, hopeless puppy.

All he could think of was Buck on the Thirty Mile River, stolen from the life he knew and afraid. He even still felt the brawny weight of the buck antlers on his head.

He slid down the granite shower walls that enveloped him, letting the hot water barrage him like artillery warfare, drenching him in heat and deluging him in water. Bile vertiginously gorged his throat again as he suffocated beneath the water, throttled by Lucien’s brutish hands, submerging him in boiling-hot water. I will delight in the sound.

Lucien’s merciless grip was tattooed across his neck in inks of violent bruises. The purpled bruises might ameliorate into faded-blue hues, then lighten to sickening-greens and flesh-yellows, however, the internal scars would be permanent. Lucien’s explosive words still screamed around in Elliott’s head. The honorariums aren’t merely slaughtered; they’re kept alive for weeks–dissected, exsanguinated, and examined in pursuit of alchemy.

As if breaching his thoughts like a silent serial killer in the night, Elliott heard the doorknob twist. He quickly rose to his unsteady feet like a newborn fawn in the woods, dazed as he remembered where he was before scouring and scrubbing himself with the complimentary citrus-scented soap. He fervently washed out the pine stems, twigs, and dirt that clung to his curls. He washed away any sign of Lucien on his body.

James’s voice found him. “Are you alright?”

Elliott’s skin was dampened with melted, gritted ice. Despite the fresh, hot water after he washed out the ice and grit, he was shell-shocked.

Elliott parted his mouth, but words wouldn’t come. He swallowed his tears. How could James and Elliott have scorched a man’s skeleton? Why spare Elliott? How was that fair?

Elliott nodded, then he realized James couldn’t see him through the steamed shower door. “Sorry–I was freezing, I ran in the shower. Don’t worry, I won’t use up all the hot water.”

“I’m not worried.” James sounded exhausted. “Are you hungry?”

How could James think of dinner? We slaughtered someone. Lucien had parents, brothers, cousins. Exactly like…

Exactly like Mr. Newton.