Twilight Nightmares (Twisted Tales Special Edition Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

watched each other for a while. His thin eyebrows turned up and faced the sky, his sadness overcast with fear of the unknown. I knew the fate of that innocent man, and maybe the look on my face revealed to him the reason he should be scared. Perhaps, though, it was the fact that I bound his hands and ankles together and hung him from a meat hook. Maybe it was the tape across his lips and the sigil I painted in blood across his chest. I wondered if it was all of that, or none of it. I suppose it was possible that he knew his fate, and as I thought about that, the pain of my actions suddenly became even more intense.
    "Do you really think this will change things?" Someone said with a rich, thick voice.
    I looked over my left shoulder, and there he stood. He was not a man nor a demon. He was old as time and yet as young as a newborn. His soft eyes spoke of wisdom and power, and his black irises drank in the filtered blood of the kidnapped sun. His salt and pepper hair stayed, though the wind tried its damndest to abuse it.
    I spoke with a wavering voice, "I don't know."
    "The fate of many cannot be averted by this simple offering." He said.
    It terrified me that he looked at no particular thing, yet he seemed to see everything. I looked away from him and said, "It's the only thing I know."
    "You humans hold no bargaining power. I will take all in time, and in truth, you shall see my face one day as I reach in and take your soul." He said, “What you hope to gain here—”
    "I will do whatever it takes to save this city." I interrupted, which was true. In no other circumstance would I ever sacrifice an innocent man, but with the fate of many dependent, or so I believed, on one soul, I thought it to be a good decision.
    "You're too bold; impetuous, even." He said, and faced his head toward the ground. His black overcoat danced in the wind and his shoes reflected the subtle light of the grey sky. He wasn't wet, despite the rain, but what I saw before me was nothing more than what he wanted me to see. For something with an existence in all places but with no particular existence of self, I wasn't surprised.
    "Tell me, what I can do? This apocalypse or whatever you call it, needs to stop."
    "I cannot stop what will come to pass, only take what results from it." He said, and turned toward me. His eyes seemed to look through me as if he could see my soul. "Look at what you've done here, using that sigil to force me to feed upon his soul. This is the reason your creator has forsaken you. Every soul is as precious on its own as a million compared to it."
    "I don’t understand... that doesn't make sense."
    "Of course it doesn't." He said, and looked back at the man in the room above. "If you understood, everything happening now would have never come to pass."
    "So, this is my fault?"
    "No. It’s the fault of every last one of you." He said, and nodded.
    I looked up at the man I doomed to death, and his eyes went wide. Behind him, in the darkness gloom and slightly faded by the reflection of the sky upon the glass, a visage appeared. It looked to be a man, but I'm sure that's what I wanted to see. In reality, it was a creature, some kind of partition of the thing next to me.
    The man's face went dark red as he tried to scream. The tape and window muffled his painful pleas, and I watched inky black claws push through his chest from the rear. Blood trickled down, and the razor-sharp hand seemed to slice through his body with ease. The skin, bone, heart, and all other things human squished and sliced, but what remained in the claw was a soft light. It had the brilliance of the sun but with all the subtlety of a light bulb holding onto its last bit of life. The creature absorbed the man's soul, and faded away from physical existence.
    "This storm will never end will it?"
    There was no response, and when I looked over my shoulder, he'd gone. Several dazzling flashes of light brightened the sky, and loud crashes more thunderous than the