Free Electric Light (Blair Dubh Trilogy #3) by Heather Atkinson Page B

dazzling light of the storm. Bloodlust had them in its grip. They looked down at Malcolm as though hoping he’d get back up so they could kill him all over again,
    He watched as they all looked at each other, lips curling into ghastly smiles. Another flicker of lightning, a clap of thunder and his heart rate soared, breath coming out in shallow gasps as he delighted in the kill with them. He’d never felt so alive.
    One of the men - a man named Harold who had been his dad’s best friend since they were small boys - spotted him watching through the windows and pointed him out to his friends. He calmly waited for them as they stepped over Malcolm’s body and entered through the back door.
    “You okay boy?” said Harold, crouching down before him.
    He was hardly listening, his eyes riveted to the shotgun that Harold had cracked and slung over one arm, the gun that had ended the madness.
    Harold saw his best friend lying on the floor, his chest and head blown apart. “Jesus Christ, not you too Chris,” he whispered. The frenzy had died in his deep blue eyes and now they just looked sad and tired as they fixed on him. “Did he hurt you boy?”
    Solemnly he shook his head.
    “What about your mum and sister?”
    Slowly he raised an arm and pointed towards the sitting room. Harold nodded at the other two to check, who skirted round the massive pool of congealing sticky blood and lumps of flesh that had once formed his father. There was a muttered oath then they both returned, shaking their heads.
    “Damn,” was all Harold said. “Come on boy, let’s get you out of here.”
    Harold wrapped him up in his dad’s big coat then steered him out into the night, forcing his face into his side so he wouldn’t have to look at the dead Malcolm but he fought against him, pushing him away. Just as he turned to look the lightning broke through, illuminating the corpse in all its bloody, ruined glory…
    Graeme shook himself out of the past, returning to the present. The pleasure he’d got from seeing that body still disturbed him. It had been different to seeing his dead family, that had just been sad. Seeing Malcolm slain had made sense to him. Evil had come into the village and it had been eradicated. In the aftermath of the massacre the authorities had banded words about like depression and snapped . But Graeme had known different. He’d looked into those black pits in Malcolm’s face and known he was looking into pure evil and - just like Harold and his friends had done - he must join in the fight against it.
    Graeme caressed the rifle in his hands. He’d used a shotgun in his first kill when he was just nineteen. He’d bided his time until he’d stopped being passed from pillar to post between old aunties and uncles who hadn’t a clue what to do with a traumatised teenager and he’d fallen off Social Services’ radar. Then he’d taken a shotgun that had belonged to the deceased husband of one of those old aunties, cleaned it and taken care of it.
    He’d seen killing but he hadn’t known what it would feel like to actually take a life, so he’d followed one of the farmers into an isolated field, a grumpy old bastard who’d caused everyone around him nothing but misery. The man had been a tough sod but he was old and Graeme, though wiry, was strong and young. He’d overpowered him, jammed the shotgun into the old man’s mouth and pulled the trigger. No one had thought anything of it. Suicide had been the verdict. Everyone had quickly put the incident to the backs of their minds and moved on. It had been so ludicrously easy he couldn’t believe it. But it had made him realise that he didn’t like to use a shotgun as a weapon. At first he’d thought using the same weapon Harold and his friends had used to slay the monster in his village would be almost poetic. However every time he’d picked it up and felt the cold steel beneath his fingers he was reminded of that terrible night and the bodies of his family