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~1.25~

Woe watched him come back into the garage proper with a mixture of pity and sympathy on her face, along with a touch of surprised recognition when he first appeared… a look that said “Oh, yeah. That’s what he looked like.”

She said absolutely nothing as, sobbing, he let the bundle of string fall and went over to Karrie, to kneel down and feel her cooling skin, looking for a pulse he knew he wouldn’t find.

“Try your phone,” Woe said gently. “As far as I know, it should work.”

“I can’t get a signal down here,” Nick said numbly.

“If you say so,” Woe said. “Um… you have things to do… and so do I, I guess. So… goodbye?”

Nick didn’t respond. He didn’t look up. The girl’s stocking-covered feet made no sound as she departed. For all that Nick could tell… for all that he cared… she might as well have just turned sideways and disappeared. One moment she was there, and the next he was alone… alone in the underground garage which smelled like someone had pissed in it with the body of his daughter, his beautiful Karrie Anne, who was gone before her time.

Gone? No, taken from him… taken by drugs and a man he knew only as the name “Reggie” and a face with a teardrop tattoo. Nick would find Reggie, and Reggie would pay for what he’d done.

Somehow.

Eventually.

But, Nick realized, there were other culprits as well… those who bore equal responsibility to “Reggie” but might fall more easily within his grasp. For one, the little green-haired bitch of a witch who’d stopped him from running to Karrie’s side the moment he’d seen her, who’d prevented him from calling for help, who’d all but shoved him into some kind of dark closet to grope around in during what must undoubtedly have been his daughter’s last moments on earth. Her, and her con artist sister, “Madame Wow“… and the homeless matriarch Judith Nussbaum, AKA “Mama.”

Posted in All Chapters, Arc 01.

5 Responses

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  1. FetiFairy7 said

    I wonder how long it’ll take him to realize he caused her death…

  2. Dakini said

    Poor Nick, having to harm others to make himself feel ‘unguilty’ for his daughter’s death. I’m guessing doing so won’t make him any happier, but I suppose he won’t realize that until the (further) damage he intends is done.

  3. Can this be the makings of a neo-Elizabethan revenge tragedy? One can only hope.

  4. SandMan said

    Well, at least nick is thinking logically. He feels that stress of knowing his daughter was out there dying and the being in the darkness made him hear her voice. But now he’s saying the namme he got from her then is accurate… He shouldn’t believe both… but then again, I know how pissed and unreasonable I’d be if my daughter was dying and I was sent down a strange hallway instead of my daughter’s side.

  5. Donna said

    He was warned. He needed faith. He ignored and now he lost. I pity him but at the same time he needs to be beaten with his own arm and realize that he was her last hope and he failed her.

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