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Chapter Thirty: ‘No quarter...’
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Hector was in shock.

He wanted to run from the room, but his legs refused to work. For a time, he could only stare at the red words in disbelief. It didn’t feel real. It couldn’t be.

But there was more. Horrifically, he saw another bloody message, this time on the sliding doors to his closet. Simply:

open -->

He didn’t want to. He dreaded what he would see in there. But he had to look. He had to know what Geoffrey had done. And when he slid the door back, he saw a second dead body.

This one was Nathan. The young man had surely come to offer Hector a ride to school. And Geoffrey had torn him to pieces.

And still another message was scrawled onto the rear wall of the closet:

See you at school, son.

Hector could hardly breathe. He wanted to cry. He wanted to vomit. He wanted to scream. But more than anything else--he wanted to kill Geoffrey. As the seconds passed, as he regained his mind, his breath, Hector soon decided that the only thing that mattered now was ensuring Geoffrey never hurt anyone ever again. All other concerns came second. His grief and disgust and shock, it would all have to wait.

Tears in his eyes, he bolted back downstairs. Geoffrey had already left, of course, but Hector checked the rest of the house to be sure. He still saw no sign of his mother.

Back on the motorcycle, he pressed the machine for all the speed it could give him. He tried to think. What would Garovel do? Probably try to assess the situation calmly. Hector didn’t know if he could do that right now. He’d never felt this kind of mind-numbing anger before, this unfiltered hatred. But Garovel wasn’t here to talk sense into him. And he could not afford to be stupid about this, or even more people would end up dead.