Heart of Flesh (High School Hell #3)

By I.D. Russell

Samantha Abraham lost everything when she lost joshua--but the fight for the ruby, and what it means, isn't over yet.
Sam is back in River City and the events of Heart of Clay have left her raw. If deranged necromancers were bad, you’d think Debbie and her slugs would be small potatoes, but Sam’s life has gone straight back to hell in her senior year. even with her high level hapkido skills, and a budding relationship with hockey hunk Rick Hansen, nothing seems to fill the gaping hole that joshua and duckie’s disappearances have left . . .
But just as suddenly as he vanished, Joshua reappears with grave tidings, and sam must decide what lengths she’ll go to prevent her life--and her boyfriend’s body--from falling apart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: I.D. Russell
• Release date: Oct 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781988383057

I.D. Russell

When he’s not working full time, training in Hapkido and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, or looking after his kids, Ian likes to relax with a good book/board game/video game/movie/retro pro-wrestling match. Somewhere in there he finds time to write and make movies.Check out www.ringojones.com for links to his movies and follow him on Facebook, twitter, and youtube

Book preview

PROLOGUE

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I don’t get it Frank, why are we still watching this school?

Kids mulled around the large staircase that fronted the red brick high school. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the Canadian flag was flapping in the breeze. It was a postcard of a day in the quiet of suburbia. But behind every postcard is a mentally-deranged postman on the edge of snapping and stabbing Granny in the face.

Evil needs a diploma too, Jimmy. It sits in the back row and draws little pictures of knives, ink doodles of body parts, satanic verses of bad teenage poetry. Don’t you remember the weird kid who always sat in the back? The one who grew up to be a serial killer?

Sure, but in my high school, the weird kid grew up to be an internet millionaire.

Frank took a sip of his milkshake and frowned. They’d been parked here across the street from John A. MacDonald high for so long, the thing had turned into chocolate milk. He didn’t know why they kept coming back, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. All through the long summer, the school had sat empty. The only person coming and going was a little janitor named Salvador. Putting the squeeze on him had been less than Charmin soft.

I’ve heard things about that internet, Jimmy. It’s nothing but porn and pirated music.

Yeah, but Frank, it’s the wave of the future. Even you can’t ignore that.

Sometimes, Frank forgot how young Jimmy was. He turned to look at his partner, all fresh-faced and wide eyed, still amazed that the sun rose every morning. He was wearing his standard issues, looking more business casual than detective. These kids today didn’t understand that the law had to look a part, had to inspire fear in the bad guys. You should show up looking like the world was at your mercy, not like you were applying for a bank loan.

Frank tugged at the open collar of his faded white shirt. The polyester was irritating his skin. There was a rash on his neck, something red and scaly the doc had told him to lather with a foul-smelling cream. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was his diet, or maybe it was just his body finally realizing that it was getting old. Either way, no rash was going to slow him down, not when there was still unfinished business.

The old ways were the old ways for a reason, kid. You don’t see us all wearing lettuce on our feet instead of shoes just because it’s environmentally friendly do you?

Frank didn’t even acknowledge the shocked expression on his partners face. He didn’t feel up for giving another lesson on the way the world worked. For almost six months now, he’d been unable to let this case go.

It had all started so innocently. A couple of robberies, a hit to the head by an unknown attacker, then a strange rash of teenage fights, a principal and entire school pretending a student didn’t exist, and then a teacher up and vanishing. Everyone told him he was reading too much into nothing, that he was turning the pages of a book that wasn’t even a part of the same series. But he knew there was more to this story. Sometimes you just have to follow your cop instincts. Whenever they had a free minute, they were here watching, or making sudden drop ins to St. Mark’s all boys high school across town. Sooner or later, someone would slip up, something would jump out of the bushes, and they’d finally put the close on this case.

The school bell rang and the kids started filing inside. Soon the stairs were clear, the building a silent cold obelisk of learning.

Can we go now, Frank? We really should head back to the precinct. I’ve got a lot of paperwork to catch up on.

Frank turned the key in the ignition, swallowing his pride for another day. He wouldn’t forget. If he had to show up here in a wheelchair, he would keep coming back until he had his answers.

First things first, Jimmy. Burritos at Pablo’s, a quick shake down of the egg-head at the sissy school, then you can do your homework. He pulled out on to the quiet street and drove away.

CHAPTER ONE

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A pair of dead eyes stared back at her from the milk carton. The photo was in black and white, a little grainy, but the smile was familiar. She’d seen it almost every day since kindergarten. Duckie. They’d been friends forever, two against a world that constantly told them they were outsiders. He’d been a life raft in the turbulent waters of John A. MacDonald High.

But he was gone now. The carton said: MISSING, but she knew the truth. Duckie was dead, burnt to a cinder in the ruins of the hotel Ravenloft. He’d gone back to try to save Joshua, died trying to be a hero. Deadly tendrils of gas had seeped out of the main broken in the fight, caught a flame, and sent the whole twisted mass of Necromancers, golems, and antique furniture up like a candle.

I’m in love with you, Samantha Abraham, he’d told her in the hotel room. The words had been a splash of ice water. He loved her? I always have been and always will be. It’s funny how you think you know someone, only to find out that everything you thought you knew was a lie. How could she have missed it all those years? All those nights of renting cheesy horror movies, watching old television shows on DVD, playing MMO’s, the sleepovers, the board games, the birthday parties, skating in the snow, ski trips, dinners with parents, helping with homework. It was a lifetime of memories all tainted now with second guesses, the knowledge that he was in it for other reasons.

Did he know what was coming? When he’d said the words, she could see a great weight lifted from his shoulders. He had to suspect that it would change their lives forever, but there didn’t seem to be any regrets. Could he have seen the sacrifice he was about to make? Did he have a sixth sense that the end was approaching? Was he putting his affairs in order? Or was that all just the bloom of hindsight playing tricks on her memory?

Looking in to the picture’s eyes, she could again see Duckie running down the basement hallway to find the gemstone that controlled Joshua. He was looking back at her as Rick pulled her to safety. She wanted to cry out, No, don’t go! but her memory was a movie on repeat in her head.

She and Rick had waited by the burning building for as long as they could, hoping against all hope that Joshua and Duckie would emerge from the wreckage coughing and soot-covered like Lazarus, but as the approaching sirens blared in the night air, their hopes slowly faded. Things like that only happen in the movies. Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean-Claude Van-Damme can leap into trouble, brush off danger with a one-liner and a karate kick. But the real world doesn’t have a script. The hero’s survival isn’t assured by a blockbuster budget, attached star, and sequel potential. The real world is hard, brutal, and unforgiving. It only takes from you, gives fleeting glimpses of happiness before snatching them away in an instant.

You really shouldn’t drink that stuff, Sam. We’re not cows, most of the world can’t even digest lactose.

Snapping back to reality, Sam looked from the monochrome face of her dead friend to her mother, standing next to the fridge, a spoon dipped partway in to a lactose-free Greek yoghurt container. She was wearing bright pink yoga pants, a black workout shirt, her skin perfectly tanned and tucked. Her hair was held back with a white bandanna, her make-up immaculate. She was the smiling trophy wife, former model, pain-in-the-neck that Sam had to live with.

Without saying a word, Sam drank right from the carton, milk spilling over her cheeks to the granite counter top below. Her mother just rolled her eyes and shook her head.

We have almond milk, you know, soy and coconut too. You really should look after yourself better. I mean, look how pale your skin is, you look like a ghost. Why not get some sun for a change?

I’m in mourning, mom, Sam frowned, feeling her long black hair fall back over her face, hiding the prominent mole above her eyebrow from view.

Her mom crossed her arms over her chest. Sam, breaking up with a boy is not the end of the world. You’re not even eighteen. You’re going to have so many more boyfriends before you’re through, you have no idea. I mean, do you really think your father was my first?

She was talking about Joshua, Sam’s ex.

If losing Duckie had been hard, losing Joshua had been a dagger to the heart. He was the man she loved and his death had pushed her over the edge, into black pools of despair that she never knew existed. She’d gone full Goth. She wore black, listened to The Cure on endless repeat, wrote page after page of private blog entries that cursed the world and everyone in it. She should be having the time of her life in senior year, but instead she was locked in a shade-drawn room day after day, trying not to have to face the hell of her own creation.

Escaping her mother and going to school solved nothing. They whispered in the halls. She caught glances behind her back as the other kids secretly conspired about her. There she goes, they’d say, Joshua’s ex-girlfriend. No, another replied, she was the best friend of that kid that ran away.

She would walk by, do her best not to give any indication that she had heard them. The teachers all tried their best to make her feel like she wasn’t alone. We’re here for you, Sam, they’d all say, you’re not alone. But what did they know? She was alone. None of them knew what it felt like and could never know.

Sam would sit in the counselor’s office as Miss Stevens read over case studies for ways of dealing with a problem student. It was nothing but clinical jokes.

Think about all the great things you have going for you, Samantha, she smiled. Why, one more year of high school and you’ll be able to go to University! I’ve seen your grades, you should have your pick of schools!

It was all so sugary sweet that it almost made Sam sick. There’s not a damn thing in that book of yours that can handle what I’m dealing with, woman. There’d never been a seventeen-year-old that killed her boyfriend and best friend. Never been a seventeen-year-old that was in love with a golem. Never been a seventeen-year-old that had so much taken away at once.

You can just keep reading those books of yours, talk all about the steps to recovery, tell me all about how I should get my mind on other things, suggest all the hobbies you want. It’s not going to help.

Oh, don’t talk like that, Samantha. I know it seems hard right now, but you just have to give it some time. The human mind is a resilient thing, we can get over a lot. Even things that seem insurmountable at the time.

Sam sighed and nodded, doing just enough to convince Miss Stevens that she was getting through to her, convince her that her little games were working, but as soon as she left the office, she was back into the darkness, returning to the depths of despair to wait it out. Some small part of Sam knew she deserved to suffer, that she should pay the penance for her crimes.

She walked back through the halls to her locker. She spotted Rick through the crowd, but ducked her head, avoiding him. He was trying to help, but she didn’t want it. That night, he had told her that he loved her, too. It was just another man spilling his guts in a moment of crisis, but in Rick’s case, it didn’t cost him his life.

Rick was the only other person who knew the truth, the only one who was there in Toronto and came home alive. He kept telling her that he was there for her, that he carried the same burden of knowledge, but it was ultimately an empty gesture. He thought his love could save her, thought it could bring her back out of the darkness, could fill the hole in her life. She scoffed to herself, he is such a man.

She opened her locker, trying to avoid noticing the empty one beside her, reserved for Duckie, should he ever come back. She took out her iPod and headphones, slid to the ground. As far as the world was concerned, Duckie and Joshua were runaways. It had no idea about what happened, that the milk carton pleas were empty gestures.

The ghosts still haunted Sam. Everything reminded her of her dead friends. Some nights, she could swear she saw Joshua standing outside her window, looking up at her, silently judging. Every time she saw Duckie’s mom’s pale and worn out face, sick with worry and fear, she wondered if it would be much worse for her to know that her boy was dead. At least now she has hope. Better to let someone have it.

Would it have been any easier if there had been some kind of big memorial service for Duckie and Joshua? If the news cameras circled the school, if reporters talked about the tragedy of the two boys killed in a fire in a seedy Toronto hotel? Would standing up in front of everyone and pouring her heart out in a stirring and touching eulogy, giving everyone closure, have changed things?

The first few notes of The Cure’s Disintegration blared in Sam’s ears, drowning out the world around her.

She knew she was a coward. That she could never tell Duckie’s mom the truth. How do you tell a mother that her son died to stop a cult of sexually-depraved Necromancers and their hideous creations? How do you tell something out of science fiction to a mother and expect her to put aside reality to believe you?

And how do you tell Coach Lepine that the star hockey player he’s been fostering was actually a golem? How do you tell the world that everything they know is a lie?

Sam couldn’t do any of that. She had to keep the truth bottled up inside, had to be the one to bear the burden of knowledge alone. The world thought that Duckie and Joshua were missing, and that’s what it would believe.

The next track, Last Dance, echoed in her head:

"A woman now standing where once

There was only a girl."

Lost in darkness and pain, in a world without mercy, Sam sat alone, knowing that there was no easy way out. She could only keep on going and hope that life would get better someday. She just hoped it happened soon.

CHAPTER TWO

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Class, for tomorrow I want you all to read up on the 1995 Quebec referendum, and bring three articles in for discussion.

There was a collective groan from the students as Miss Fitzjohn spoke. They shoved binders into backpacks and rose from their desks to head out for the next period, whispering about ‘homework already?’

In the back of the class, Rick watched Sam as she stuck a cap on her pen and folded up her notebook. He could just make out lines of text filling the pages, strange drawings in the margins. It didn’t look like class notes. Was it some kind of journal?

He still couldn’t believe how much she’d changed over the summer. She sure seemed to have dived headlong into the whole Goth thing. She was draped in black; black pants, black shirt, black hoodie, black nails, black shoes, black knapsack, heck for all he knew she had on black socks and underwear.

He’d really wanted to be with her over the summer, try to work through everything that had to be eating her up inside. But as usual, he was travelling all over the country to hockey skill development camps. There were two weeks in Montreal, two in Toronto, two in Vancouver, and two