Heartmyth was on figurative fire as the party celebrating the start of the second semester was rallying its most accumulating crowd yet. Sumner had invited them, because apparently he had friends other than them who went to the university. But for his four high school best friends, a Heartmyth rager seemed daunting.
“Are we sure that Sumner is even here?”
“Of course he is, Liss.” Abram confirmed with conviction, affirming his confidence with a firm grip on her hand.
“I’m gonna go find some hot college dude to make out with.” Bridge determined, his own firm grip impeccably caressing his ego.
“Do you ever think about anything without factoring in your penis?” Mercer smirked fiercely, awarding him a comical shove from his best friend.
A redhead came flouncing over to them, specifically attaching herself to Mercer with the loop of her arm.
“Isn’t this party amazing?”
“Harley, are you drunk?” Her boyfriend snickered, alluding to the indistinct conveyance of her words.
“Okay,” Bridge scoffed, an act that preceded the massive rolling of his eyes. “Now that I’ve officially reached fifth wheel status, I’ll see you guys later.”
He faded into the crowd, slipping past belligerently wasted college and high school students that were eagerly assaulting their livers. Unbeknownst to Bridge, he passed a huge gathering that was surrounding the illustrious Sumner Shadows as he tossed a handful shots of vodka down his hatch. Standing directly next to him was a new pal of his who attended Heartmyth and had gifted him the invitation tonight. He had yet to see signs of his friends, but for now, his new pal would serve his means.
“Do another shot with me, Straton.” Sumner said, a belch freely flowing.
“I should cool it.” Straton shook his head. “I’ve got an early class tomorrow.”
“Come on, Jacobs.” His begging echoed his discontent at his friends’ urbane refusal. “Don't bitch out on me.”
The face of one of his best friends’ siblings appeared close by in the corral of kids, halting anymore petulance geared towards Straton, Sumner’s hand flying up as he waved the person over to them.
“Willa!”
Her glossy hair moved like the wind as she met his face from the distance, a glaze of a grin appearing like sunshine in her face. Willa joined them rapidly, a quick hug completed between them.
“Does your brother know you're here?”
Her head shuddered with a silent negative. “Have you seen him?”
“Not yet.” Sumner officiated. “I'm sure he and the others are around here somewhere.”
“Hi.” Straton said, his glittering eyes scouring the entire contents that comprised of the ever gorgeous Willa St. James.
“Oh, right.” Sumner laughed off his bad manners like it was a tasteless joke he'd forgotten to dismiss. “Willa, this is my friend, Straton. He's a freshman here at Heartmyth. And Straton, this is Willa, one of my best friend’s little sister.”
“Nice to meet you.” Straton smiled his effortless and timelessly handsome simper.
“You too.” Willa beamed. “Interesting name, by the way.”
He chuckled slightly. “My parents wanted fairly original names for their children.”
After a symphony of a laugh to interrupt their initial introduction, Sumner said, “Come here.”
Sumner’s plea was met as Willa and Straton ushered closer to him as they witnessed Sumner exchanging his phone with a nearby partier, a grin greasing his face.
“Take a picture of us real quick.”
The random person obliged Sumner’s statement, whether it was because they knew him or due to the shock of being asked outright, neither of them were sure. But once the picture was taken and Sumner was returned his phone, it began to bleat obnoxiously.
“Excuse me, I have to take this.” Sumner looked up from his phone and jolted an eyebrow. “Feel free to make out in my absence.”
While Willa and Straton disregarded the irreverent remark, the rest of Sumner’s friends were mingling with the crowd on the back lawn of one of Heartmyth’s many buildings. Bridge was macking on some questioning senior, Mercer and Harley were dancing with a mass of people in the center of the designated party arena. And that left Abram and Lissa to do whatever they wanted, which was the problem. Lissa just wanted to dance with her loving boyfriend, and Abram was consumed with the notion to find Sumner.
“Abe, can we just grab a drink and dance?” Even as she spoke, Lissa knew her plea was colliding against closed off hearkening.
“I just want to see where Sumner is.” Abram nodded.
“Why? Can't we forget about him and have some fun?”
He smiled. “He's my best friend, Liss. I wanna say thanks for the invite.”
“Well I'm going to grab us some drinks and I'll meet you by Harley and Mercer when you're ready to relinquish yourself from Sumner Shadows.”
Lissa pulled Abram in for a kiss quickly, so quick like they'd do it for the rest of their lives. He reveled into the small burst of passion. He beheld his beautiful girlfriend as she walked away, and all Abram could mutter to himself that he was the luckiest guy ever to be so happy and in love with the plentifully quintessential Alissandra Llewellyn.
But the issue with Abram wanting to find Sumner was that he didn’t want to be found. After receiving the call and stepping away from the stumbling and liquor laced crowd, Sumner had a bad feeling. And not just because of who he knew was contacting him at the moment. Things were being set into motion, things were changing.
Tonight was the night.
Once he was far enough away from anyone wanting to locate the unmanned king of Westbrooke High, Sumner slipped the familiar burner phone from his jacket sleeve and answered the imperious call.
“I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about me.” Sumner sneered into the phone.
The woman on the other end was clearly distraught over the contact immersed between them, a loose grip on her breathing. It was new, this interaction between them. It was only about a month ago that Sumner had learned the truth, and it had been driving him utterly insane to not spill the treacherous truth to his friends. But these things needed planning, these things needed to happen at just the right moment with just the right people. The woman on the phone with Sumner was one of those people.
“Blackmail is one of those hard things to dismiss.” She snarled, a hoard of needles poking out of her tone, ready to attack Sumner with the edges of her words.
She clearly had no idea who she was dealing with.
He laughed at her futile crack to dislocate his composure. “Well, when you put it like that, it does tend to take on a dismal context.”
“What do you want, Sumner? Enough games. Quit wasting my time and tell me how we can end this What is it going to take to make this, to make you, go away forever?”
He’d been right. This was it. Everything was in place, shifting accordingly. Not even the stars could have aligned such a perfect preamble to the night. It was happening. After a sufferable month of silence, it all ended tonight.
Tonight was the night.
“Armor Falls Cemetery. Be there in an hour. Tonight will be the last you hear of me. I swear on my mother’s grave.”
“It better be.” The woman snidely dictated. If there was one thing Sumner could appreciate, it was someone who attempted to equal his own perspicacity. “Or else your wretch of a mother would no longer have a son to be disappointed in, when I took care of you myself.”
The woman hung up, and left Sumner to break his astute exterior. He growled, both out loud and in the black scribble of his mind. It was as if his mind was a blank piece of paper, and he was attempting to make a perfect circle with a black crayon while someone angrily manipulated the sheet of paper. He had underestimated her ability to get under his skin, and he’d let it affect him. So much so, that he felt the slipping of his usual veil, the one that kept him from losing complete control of the plan and unleashing
his wrath on all those that dared to defy him.
And that’s how Abram found him, approaching him like Sumner had about five seconds before he created a billowing inferno of vexation.
“Sumner, hey.”
His best friend's neck snapped over to Abram so fast, the latter thought he heard an echoing crack, Sumner's eyes searing targets into Abram’s own.
“What do you want?”
“Whoa.” Abram continued to near his friend, caution gushing through every nerve he possessed. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Get out of my way, Abraham.”
“Not my name, dick.”
Sumner pushed past him, throwing a shoulder against Abram’s, propelling him backwards, so that he was stumbling over the lush lawn to remain standing.
Abram had never seen Sumner so detached from normalcy. The vibes falling from his friend scared him, venomous tendrils whirling within and seeping out of Sumner like demonic, inebriated fireflies. Abram just surveyed as his friend dissolved into the swarm of population partying all over. And he was beginning to think that tonight just might be the night Sumner Shadows lost himself.
It was about thirty minutes later before his friends found him. Bridge had just left a boys’ dorm room after some very hot heavypetting with the questioning senior he had been making out with earlier in the night. He was feeling pretty great as he weaved through the masses. Only trouble was that he didn’t spot any of his friends lingering within the throes of the party. Lissa and Abram had long left the area they had formerly resided, and there were no traces of Harley and Mercer grinding together offkey and void of rhythm. And Lord knew where Sumner was hiding himself.
“Hey,” Bridge stopped an indiscriminate someone passing by him. “Have you seen Sumner Shadows?”
“Yeah, he told Jacobs he had to get the fuck out of here.”
“Thanks.” The guy left him prior to telling Bridge who this omniscient ‘Jacobs’ individual was.
“B.”
Following his nickname’s utterance, he grinned up at Mercer, whose expression seemed focal to the phone he cradled in his hand, right next to his heart.
“Everything alright? Where’s Harley?”
“Headed home,” Mercer mentioned flippantly, having larger issues at hand than the current whereabouts of his girlfriend, such as the phone resonating visibly along the lines of his palm. “Did you get the same text?”
Silencing any feedback, Bridge took in the scene of Lissa and Abram pushing past several people to get to them.
“Did you guys get the text?”
“What text?” Bridge scoffed, his eyes rolling on cue.
Mercer tilted his head toward his shorter best friend. “From Sumner.”
Bridge’s phone buzzed in immaculate segue, displaying a new text from the missing member of their best friend brigade.
Armor Falls Cemetery. Now.
“Why the fuck is Sumner at a cemetery?” Bridge exhaled as exhaustion and exasperation rocked on his knuckles. “And we all got this text?” The successive tipping of their heads was all the clarity Bridge deemed essential.
“Earlier, he was being super weird,” Abram used in addition. “Evasive, manic, douchey. Make that megadouchey.”
An energetic, embroidered scoff escaped past Mercer’s mouth, his eyes slick with hesitancy. “We’re going, aren’t we?”
Walking around a cemetery late at night was altogether as one would have perceived when dwelling on late night strolls where the dead roamed recklessly. The four friends were ambling in between rows upon rows of the deceased, gravestones bearing the names of those lost by the living. And the idea of Sumner needing to enact a tryst with them here was already encapsulating them in aromatic fear.
“Sumner?” Abram belched, scanning the grounds for some visible sign of occupancy, but the field of the departed was void of much ruckus, the only things in clear view being a discarded shovel and a pile of random building equipment.
“You can stop,” Lissa demanded as she grabbed Abram’s hand, her whole body fighting the frigid air of the night for warmth. “You’ve succeeded in scaring our souls out of us.”
They heard some rustling to their right, the moon beaming down on them when they saw another headstone, only this one held a colossal significance.
“Look.”
Obliging Mercer’s automatic maneuver and reading the grave, the friends realized why Sumner had arrived here, even if his reasoning was still ambiguous.
The stone read, ‘Marjorie Cobbins Shadows. Beloved sister, wife, and mother. May your brightness always cast the biggest shadow’.
“Why did he come here? Why would he do that to himself?”
Nodding at Bridge, Lissa added, “Why tonight?”
Sumner jumped out from behind a nearby bush by the wooded outskirts of the cemetery, panic and despair melting his face to almost complete unrecognition. He tackled Abram, seeking him out over the others. The pair hit the ground hard, their friends scrambling to make sense of what their eyes were presently viewing.
“This is your fault!” Sumner seethed, incisors catching air as they were exposed from his open jaw, a crystal indication of just how enraged he was. He was a boy berserk, everything but foam forming between his teeth and eroding his enamel.
“Sumner, get off of him!” Lissa cried, searching around for something to attack her crazed companion with, her friends quickly doing the same.
“I’ll kill you!” He landed a punch against Abram’s jaw, repeating the brutish bit as he faced the rest of them. “I’ll kill all of you!”
Having found a since forgotten shovel by someone tending to the cemetery preceding their incursion, Mercer quickly acquired and then swung the landscaping instrument roughly at Sumner’s temple. He went tumbling, no longer on top of a still startled Abram, his remaining friends helping him to his shaky feet while Mercer’s entire soul went limp.
“Oh, God.” He dropped the shovel, his hands flying to his face as he stood over Sumner’s motionless body lying on the ground. “What did I do?”
“We have to go.” Lissa said, already pulling an emotionally stunted Abram from the scene at hand.
“Mercer,” Bridge tiptoed closer to his best friend, glancing from him to Sumner, who was still unmoving, and back again. “We need to get out of here. People are going to ask questions.”
“Like how we killed him?” He choked on a sob, swallowing his sorrow as it etched razorblade slits on the way down his throat.
A loud grunt of incoherence barged out of Sumner’s mouth, his body seizing ferociously in a single spasm. But his eyelids were still crippling drapes on his face, indicating his depleting motion.
“See? No one killed anyone tonight.” Bridge slid a hand into Mercer’s, gently leading him away from the crippled crazie coming to on the terrain adjacent to them. “We gotta go.”
They began to jog after Lissa and Abram, who were doing the same thing as they made their way across the other side of the cemetery. That’s when a deafening scream pierced the air, alarming all of them, a sudden awareness that the wail of anguish was emitting from the fallen Sumner Shadows.
“Run!” Bridge matched the maniac’s power and delivery when he shouted the command.
Communally, they sought sanctuary on the far side of the cemetery where most of the woods prepared to take its claim over the land the cemetery engrossed. It was then that Bridge observed his friends running into the woods for shelter. He stopped just in front of the forest’s opening, spotting some unexplained wooden stakes discarded by an earlier visitor, seeming like additionally misplaced building materials. Instincts thundered inside of him, his own personal monsoon of survival as Bridge scooped up one of the stakes and joined his friends in the shrouds of the forest, just out of reach from the grounds.
“What is that?” Lissa’s eyes honed right in on the weapon in her friend’s veined grasp.
“Life insurance.”
They all quieted as footsteps prodded close
r to them beneath the bribery of the leafy protection. Reticence kept them all inanely tepid. Their heartbeats enveloped every sound, pounding on their ears like hollow drums while their pulses put their souls in some variant of a chokehold.
Just as he was sure Sumner was close enough, seconds from accosting them, Bridge lunged forward, his stake poised to strike its victim with white hot apathy. The stake connected with flesh, Bridge forcing all of his weight into the burrowing of the blunt object. He fell on top of his mark, the bloody stake protruding from the once alabaster neck, having nicked the carotid artery without attempting to do so. Bridge’s aim was to critically subdue Sumner, so he’d meant to hit Sumner in the chest, nonfatally, of course.
Not only was the person underneath him shorter than anticipated, thus defining the volatile laceration, but this person was without a doubt not Sumner Shadows.
They came out to see the brawl just as Bridge rolled off of the older woman, tears queued in his eyes over what had just accidentally ensued. His friends were horrified, looking beyond for a sign of Sumner that wasn’t available. The bleeding woman’s eyes were the size of a landing strip, aching in expansion as her entire carcass convulsed.
“Oh God!” Lissa shrieked, her cheeks glistening with obvious emotion.
“What’s happening?” Abram’s hands meandered over his buzzed blond hair and tangible beard.
The aging bleeding beauty clawed at the stake in her neck. Bridge scooted over in the grass toward her, sobs and swimming pool cries pouring from him like a fountain of sensibility.
“I’m so sorry.” He cried. “I thought you were someone else, someone trying to hurt us.”
Through bloody teeth, she managed to spit out, “I heard a scream.”
Mercer sniffled violently, his best struggle at keeping himself in one coherent piece.
She reached for the stake again, but Bridge swatted her hand away. “No, you’ll bleed out.” Then, to his friends, he said, “Why isn’t someone calling the cops?”
“No, it’s too late.” The woman said, despite her increasing trembling. “I know who really did this.” She started to cough up a sizable quantity of dark blood, and she quickly added a final decree as she placed a hand on the stake still in her neck, her eyes unclouding as an admittance foxtrotted on her tongue. “Make sure you kill that bastard.”
And then she yanked out the stake, a gasp emerging from her as the blood in her carotid flowed freely without its previous barricade preventing its euphoric release. The crying stopped as Bridge rose to his feet, all of them eyeing one another abrasively. Could the woman that had just died by their hand been aware of and openly addressing the desired termination of Sumner Shadows?
“She knew him?” Mercer prompted.
Not caring, Bridge paced, eyes glued to the body of the life he had just ended.
“This is bad.”
They all knew it was true. They knew the moment that they had stepped foot onto the land of Armor Falls Cemetery that their night had gone south. The four of them were a collective of panic, while they stared down at the fallen body in front of them.
“This is really bad.” Bridge said once more.
Lissa ran a hand through her long brunette hair. “Where is he? Where’s Sumner?”
Still pacing, Bridge regarded his friends by saying, “Lissa, who cares? There’s a body!”
“He lured us here. We have to find him.”
Stepping away from the body, Mercer stated, “We need to get out of here.”
“Where do you suggest we go, Mercer? The police? Arclan?”
“Somewhere that doesn’t have us staring at a dead body, Bridge!”
“Enough!”
Abram serrated his silence to wrangle everyone back to the spectrum of rational thinking. They couldn’t lose it. Not now. There was a murder involved, and their ‘friend’ was missing. They couldn’t lose it now when they were so close to losing it all.
“We’re going to prison. I’m gonna get life without parole.”
Abram, abruptly the epitome of calm, countered with, “No one is going to prison.”
Lissa eliminated the small distance between the tall blond and herself, grabbing his hand eagerly.
“Abram, please tell me you have a plan.”
He looked around, his eyes locking on the woods on the outskirts of the cemetery.
“Grab a leg.”
“Are you fucking crazy?” Mercer said, ever the explicit language for him. “What about this woman’s family? What about everything and everyone important in her life?”
“What about our lives, Mercer? Do you want them to be over because of an accident, over an act Sumner drove us to commit? The police won’t believe our story, not even Adelaide.”
Bringing up her mother stirred up another round of vehement conflicts within Lissa, administering fret alongside the contours of her heart. Abram caught the eyes of every one of his friends thoroughly, hoping that they really grasped that there was only one feasible choice blazing at them like a field of flickering fluorescents.
“So, grab a leg.”
Hauling the body into the woods was the easy part. They ran into difficulty when deciding who would have to dig the grave. Ultimately, Mercer and Abram stepped up and made a cursory two foot grave. Finished with its mediocre development, the two boys looked to Lissa and Bridge, who were both mimes during the morose operation.
“Should we say something or?” Mercer recounted.
“If she knew Sumner, she knew what he was capable of.”
“Bridge!”
“What?” He scoffed at Lissa harshly. “Sumner did horrible things to us over and over again. This woman, whoever she was, was aware of that. Or was I the only one in attendance as she pried that stake from her own neck?”
“Stop.” Abram sighed a gorge of a huff. “No turning on each other, alright? From now on, we’re in this. A united front. We make a pact right now. We tell no one. Ever. We take this to our own graves. All in favor?”
A feeble smirk on their lips, the friends admired the fearless way Abram commanded their dire circumstances. They all simply gave confirmation with the decline of their heads.
After that, easing down the body into its new earthy home was a breeze. Mercer was smoothing out the top of the grave when they heard a loud scuffle nearby.
“What was that?”
Bridge shook his head at Lissa. “Probably just an animal or something.”
“Well we should go before that animal becomes a person.” She braced her arms over one another.
“What do we do, about Sumner?”
Mercer’s words paused their forefronts of thought. Sumner could have been out in the cemetery running amok, lurking and waiting for their blood to cake around his knuckles. This could all have been part of an even bigger scheme to have them rot in jail.
“I’ll take the stake and burn it.” Bridge cleared his throat. “No murder weapon, no crime.”
“Sumner just attacked us.” Mercer jeered. “Aren’t you worried about explaining that instead of destroying evidence?”
“No, I’m not, not when I’m worrying about the murder that just happened, Mercer.”
“We go home.” Abram stated, taking the shovel and tossing it back toward the cemetery. “And none of this ever happened.”
“Agreed.” Lissa tilted her head to prove so.
Reaching the adjoined consensus, the four of them left the DIY gravesite and executed the short hike out of the woods and back to the white lit cemetery. When they broke through the trees together, each of them were on edge that Sumner would pounce on them as fast as a lethally ravenous lion that had been deprived of premium sustenance. But all that met them when headstones came into view was the quiet night around them, licking the back of their necks with late night perspiration.
“Let’s just get back to the Jeep and go home.” Mercer nodded.
Holding onto the stake, the bloody tip stained and drying, Bright gave a bow with the decline of hi
s head as it changed axises. “Tonight never happened.”
In unison, Lissa and Abram too said, “Never happened.”
Walking back the way they had ran, Mercer was in front leading them back to his vehicle, so he was the first to see the limp form in the dark.
“Guys,” he said, his tone oozing disbelief and alarm. “Over there.”
Upon closer analysis, they happened to come across the late Marjorie Shadows’ grave just as they had before, and lying on the ground crumpled about a foot from it was Sumner, just as they had left him.
“Is he actually dead?” Lissa’s breathing hitched an octave as she aroused the proposition.
Bridge was incapable of opening his mouth for his usual retort of woe, because the idea that they had killed two people tonight as opposed to one was so mind melting, he thought he might just spontaneously combust in the middle of Armor Falls Cemetery, a bonfire in mourning over the night’s abysmal coil of encounters. Mercer must have been concealing identical logic, because he immediately leaned against the closest headstone, his muscles craving the assist to keep him standing. Falling back into the helm of authority, Abram gradually approached the slumbering Sumner, torn between wanting him to stay unmoving and hoping that another person hadn’t gulped their last batch of lifesupporting air on their watch.
Fingers pressed against Sumner's neck, Abram relaxed into facing his friends. “He's alive.”
Maybe it was a thrust of adrenaline emptying itself throughout Sumner's bloodstream, or maybe he had been waiting for Abram to be in his current proximity, but as Abram hefted his pair of fingers from his flesh, Sumner snarled to life and swept the towering blond from his feet with the unyielding jab of his tensed arm.
Lissa's scream arrived just before Abram’s ungrateful thud to the ground, his friend's stunned reactions much slower than Sumner's vengeful intentions. He climbed on top of Abram and without pausing to ponder on his impulsive scheme, plunged a previously concealed knife into Abram’s skin in one swift slice to sever his once imperfect flesh.
A roar slashed in every angle through the cemetery, Abram crying out at the splicing of his skin. Writhing the blade in a miniscule lopsided oval, Sumner reveled in the tearing of tissue.
“She’s mine!” The angrycries came pouring out of him. “She’ll always be mine.”
While reeling from the pain, Abram glanced over at Lissa, always knowing that it had gotten under Sumner’s skin that he had taken the girl Sumner had always been crushing on, much like Sumner’s knife was doing a great job of at the moment. Unable to handle what was happening, Lissa yelled in unmatched fury, throwing out her leg and kicking the assailant with all the gusto she could conjure. Sumner fell from his position of straddling Abram once more to cracking his head alongside the protruding edge of the nearest headstone, knocking him out cold in one sufficient bang.
“Abe,” Clearing herself of lingering animosity, Lissa bent down and covered Abram’s wound, which was still seeping blood even through her firmly placed fingers. “You’re going to be fine.”
He kept quivering, utterly petrified at what just came about with him and the person he used to consider his best friend in the universe, his shaking getting worse and worse as the seconds ticked faster than a stopwatch. Lissa looked at her remaining friends, at Bridge hugging his murder weapon like it was going to save a life in contrast to the one it had taken, tears coming to his face as he aimed his eyes at the tremoring yet statuesque state Abram was currently thriving. Which left Lissa only one choice.
“Mercer, get over here.”
Obliging mindlessly without much verbal restraint, Mercer sauntered over to the pair, his lip quivering at the sight of one of his best friends in such withering peril.
“Hand on the wound.” Lissa directed with falsified confidence. “Don’t forget to apply pressure.”
“What?”
“Now!”
He knelt down in a flash, taking a knee and taking over for her as she rose like a phoenix from the wilting embers of their night. She reached for her back pocket, doing what they should have done at the start of the incursion of this terrible evening, her hands finding her phone.
Bridge fidgeted in place, flustered by her agile dialing. “What are you doing?”
“Calling my mother.”
“Lissa—”
“Abram is traumatized!” She bellowed, her indignation masquerading her absolute terror that welled against her ribs, rattling the cell of her fragile heart. “Bridge, he needs help! We can keep our pact about...earlier,” Her reference didn’t need to be clarified. The freshly evoked grave was still too close to be a fading murmur of recollect. “But we are not keeping quiet about Sumner shoving a knife in my boyfriend’s chest!”
“Where’s Sumner?”
Mercer’s words felt icy on all of their spines, because when they turned back toward Abram’s twitching frame, his was the only one in view.
“How is that possible?” Bridge cried.
As Abram lied on the cold, earthy ground, unable to do anything but withstand his searing agony and his abrasive convulsions, he dwelled on the simple evidence that he was within a centimeter of losing his life, his mind, and everything else he held up on the pedestal of his still young life. And it pained him worse than the knife had when it severed his skin that the bringer of the most brutal pain of his life was the person he used to trust more than any living thing ever to exist.
In one night, they had gone from running for their lives to becoming a teenage clique of murderers to almost earning their own graves in Armor Falls Cemetery. And it was too much to deal with as Abram’s view was clouded by darkness, allowing the void to swallow him up, not caring if he ever came out of it as long as he was safe from the sinister sociopathic scandals of Sumner Shadows.
22
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT