An Evil Mind

“Leave me alone! My friends are in the house! If I scream, they’ll call the cops!”

This earns a laugh from the man, and it spreads to the other men, until it resembles a ring of hoarse hyenas. She is so defenseless, I tremble with the urge to reach in and pull her out, pull her to safety.

“Av!” Wren hisses. “Call them off!”

Avery’s smiles just gets wider. “Not yet. They haven’t really scared her yet.”

“They’re going to – they’re not going to touch her, are they?”

Avery glowers. “No. I ordered them to just…just scare the shit out of her. But they can’t touch her. I told them they can’t.”

Wren swings back to the men, now so close they’ve formed a ring around Sophia. She tries to run, but one of them catches her and throws her to the ground in the center. There’s more laughter.

“Leave her alone!”

That voice is young, strong, angry. I’ve never heard I sound that way before, but I know who it belongs to by heart. Jack, proud and tawny-haired, draws all the men’s attention. His blue eyes aren’t icy, instead burning with white-blue fire. He still has baby fat on his cheeks, but the rest of him is tall, lanky; a boy-growing-too-fast kind of lanky. And he’s just as infuriatingly handsome. But he’s not the Ice Prince I know now – his expressions boil over, his emotions clear and legible in his every tensed muscle and flexing fist. He is a lion, a little king, angry and righteous and true.

Two of the men start towards Jack, but he ducks under their grasp and bolts for Sophia. One man throws himself on Jack, slamming them both to the ground in a spray of pine needles and dirt.

“Jack!” Sophia screams. Jack swears, kick and punching and thrashing like a wild animal, but the other two men catch up and put his arms behind him in a lock, forcing him to his knees.

A soft fog starts to roll in through the trees. The other men turn to Sophia, who screams and curls against a tree trunk like it’ll offer her some protection.

“Leave her alone!” Jack screams, a piercing scream that rips my heart into jagged pieces. “You f*cking bastards, pick on someone who can fight back! No! No, Sophia! Sophia, run!”

“N-No,” Avery’s voice is clear, though Wren seems to be paralyzed, focused entirely on Sophia and Jack. “No, this isn’t how it’s supposed to – back off. Just back off.”

Her whispered commands don’t work. The men close in, and Sophia puts her head in her hands.

“Help me, Jack,” She cries. Some of the men sway, obviously drunk, as they close the gap and start pulling at Sophia’s dress. I choke back bile but Jack reacts quicker – the man holding him cries out and collapses, and Jack jumps up, scooping the aluminum baseball bat the man dropped and swinging it into the man, over and over and over. Avery swears, and even shell-shocked Wren flinches. Two men dive for Jack, but Jack slips through their meaty arms and swings for their skulls, a hollow, sickening thwack resounding through the trees when metal meets bone. The fourth man fumbles with something in his jacket, a gun maybe, but Jack ducks behind the first man who’s hauled himself off the ground, and the bullet cuts into the man’s shoulder, the force of it pinning him to the ground again. Jack takes the moment to lunge in, slamming the bat over the gunman’s neck. He crumples like a rag doll, the gun dropping into the leaves.

The whole time, Jack is grinning madly, his mouth and face blood-spattered.

The fifth man, the one who’d pinned Sophia to the tree, is frantically trying to pull his pants on. Jack slams the bat into his side, and the man staggers into the leaves, reaching for the gun. But Jack swings again, and Sophia screams. Something cracks, and it isn’t the bat, and the man holds his hand up, and against the night vision it’s a cluster of broken bones and mangled meat and dangling skin. The man looks at it, stunned, and then the pain catches up to him, and he starts crying and crawling away and begging.

“Please, man, we didn’t mean – we weren’t gonna –”

The man gets up, and starts running, and Jack throws back his head and laughs, and then chases after him. They disappear into the gloom, the night vision losing sight of them, but not of the sobbing Sophia, who staggers to her feet and tries to pull her dress back on. She’s shaking too badly. She tries to walk away, but trips on something, and her fall isn’t far but she rolls down the hill, hitting trees with vicious momentum until she rolls to a stop. There’s a stunned silence, minutes ticking by as Sophia squirms and there’s a squelching noise and then she goes still, her white-blonde hair splaying in the pine needles.

“Holy f*ck,” Avery whispers. “Holy –”

From the darkness, Jack returns and a shiver runs through me, his grin gone and an even more terrifying expression in its place – one I’ve come to know very well.

The mask.

The ice mask is wearing him.

But it lasts for only a second, because when he sees Sophia he makes a choked noise and runs to her, dropping the bloodstained bat and cradling her in his arms.

“Soph,” He whispers. “Sophie, Sophie please –”

He holds his hand out, sticky and wet with blood. Sophia doesn’t move. He pats the pine needles around Sophia’s body and chokes again, the sound of a wild animal shot through. Blood. A pool of blood around her pelvis, her floral dress stained with it.

There’s a noise, like Avery shifting and her shoe breaking a twig. Jack’s head snaps up, eyes glowing an unholy white with the night vision, and he grabs the bat, face twisting with rage. Avery swears and takes off running, and as Jack advances, Wren’s paralysis breaks and he drops the camera, the lens barely catching his shoes as they flash by. Jack’s bigger shoes pass just a split-second after.

“I’ll kill you!” His screams echo. “I’ll f*cking kill you!”

He keeps screaming, the sound fading and coming back, like he’s walking in circles. The metallic noise of a bat hitting splintering wood resounds, and his screams are deep and strong and furious and riddled with pain, and over them, Nameless finally speaks.

“He keeps screaming for a while. And then the tape cuts out.”

The tablet screen goes blue, then goes dark. My hands want to shake, but I compose them. Nameless is watching me for a reaction.

“So?” I say. “What was I supposed to learn from this?”

Nameless quirks a brow. “You weren’t terrified? He beat four men into pulp and killed the last one – ”

“The last one ran off the cliff because it was dark,” I say smoothly. “Jack didn’t push him. He killed himself.”

“He wouldn’t have been running if Jack wasn’t chasing him,” Nameless counters. “Don’t defend him. He killed a man and he’s going to jail for it once we turn this tape in to the feds.”

“He didn’t, and there’s no body anyway,” I retort. “You can’t prove anything.”

“Belina Hernandez. You know her, don’t you? You went to visit her.”

“How do you know –”

“Her pathetic computer was very easy to access. She keeps a journal on it. Belina Hernandez is the wife of the man who ran off the cliff; James Hernandez. Your bloodthirsty nemesis has been paying her child support under the guise of federal funds because he’s so guilt-ridden. How do you think it’ll look when the jury sees that? He’s practically convinced he killed James, and that’ll convince the jury.”