James Armstrong

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“Never again. Never. Again. Until I can draw breath”

Before the day his life has turned to hell, James was a regular guy. He had a regular job at manufacture, a wife, whom he met just after school and a daughter, as precocious and rebellious as only fifteen year old can be.
Money was tight, as it is for blue-collar guy new to the job, so he had to pull double shifts, grabbing extra cash where he could. His wife worked as well, when there were jobs to be had, so the child was left to her devices.
He knew, of course that she started to run with the bad crowd – the loud music, badly applied make-up and a dozen piercings were an indicator even an overworked guy would not miss. But he never had the time, never had the energy to talk to her. So he hoped it would sort itself out, told himself that it was just a rebellious streak, that she would grow out of it. He told himself those comforting, damned lies, until That Day. The Day when she did not come back home, but instead something else returned, wearing her now pale-white skin, gleaming behind her baby-blue eyes, something cold, and angry, and utterly, utterly alien.
It’s power touched his mind, and made him kneel at her terrible beauty. She fed him, and her mother the cursed blood that coursed through her veins, and she bound them to her.
His life became hell around him. Days on end he would go out to work, talk to his friends and smile like he did not have a care in the world, bound into his own body, silently screaming and crying in despair.
At nights she would play house, pretending that nothing happened, that they were a loving family. She held dinners and birthday parties, gathered her friends – some of them as bound as her family. She would make them get her Christmas gifts, and take her to movies, and she would tell them that she loved them so very much, and that now they were truly a family.
He still does not know how long the nightmare lasted, but one day the veil fell from his eyes, and he was again in command of his mind. For days he pretended that nothing happened, that he was still a slave to her curse, mustering his will to do the unthinkable, and then, on the day he still sees in every nightmare, every single night for the last fifteen years, he killed his daughter.
He took a kitchen knife, and while she slept in the day he stabbed her, and stabbed her, again and again, while the creature that was his daughter raged, and writhed underneath him, shouting obscenities and pleas in equal measure.  He only stopped when the remains could be barely recognized as human rather than a pile of disfigured flesh. Then he set the house on fire, and collapsed, utterly spent.
The impossibility, the wrongness, the sheer magnitude of his sin has rendered him catatonic. He sat through the proceedings and trials, barely answering the questions posed. He didn’t stir when he was convicted to ten years prison, nor even when he was told of his wife’s suicide. Nothing held meaning, and his mind seemed forever locked into that single day, a moment when he last looked at his daughter beautiful eyes, only to stab her in the heart.
But even in his mind he could never hope to hide forever – world was too cruel a place to just let him rot and die, as he surely deserved. They had to bring him out, had to throw him cold and bitter into the reality, made him look at what he has done and admit it, and they still had the gall to call it “help” and “cure”.
He was released on parole, seven years later, with no idea what to do, no means to live. They gave him a job, that bаrely paid itself, if he could be brought to care about that, and they forgot him.
Only one thing could bring him back to life – the vigil, the hunt. Only one thing could earn him redemption, and that is killing every single one of those ugly abominations. So that no one should ever suffer what he suffered, no one should be made do what he did. Never, ever again.