Stories I Never Finished

Angel

———PREVIEW———

"Yeah, I know, Mr Harnelli." Michael's voice droned with faint annoyance, pale fingers wrapped around the edges of his silver flip phone as he held it to his ear.

Each step he took in polished black shoes crunched against wilting snow and weeds, concrete paths long since gone within the distance behind him—a small town clustered together, with only dirt roads and towering trees leading toward its cherished church.

The night glinted it's stars within blackened skies, moonlight casting its vicious glow upon the world among streetlights and houses whose curtains were yet to close.
Dressed in a sleek dark red velvet jacket thrown over a black turtleneck sweater and black trousers, the worn-down and blood stained wooden baseball bat Michael clutched in his left hand felt out of place with his esteemed style—beautiful ruby ring rested on his middle finger.

"I get it." Michael grumbled, his tone sharp with a slight drawl to it—a lingering taste of the beaten path of life clinging to the superior accent he worked hard to refine. "I'll get your son home, no need to worry 'bout it."

He paused, tongue pushing against his cheek as a hard glare carved itself into his face; green eyes darkening with anguish at the words the fifty-year-old harshly uttered on the other line.

"You wanna go there, priest? Wanna talk with that tongue when we both know where it's been?" Michael seethed, fingers gripping his bat tightly as he came to a stop in the rotting front garden of the church. "He's not even your real son."

"I told ya', the Lord knows everything." A wicked smirk pulled at the corners of pink lips as Michael listened to the town priest spit pathetically at him, "and He tells me all. Now," he swung his bat to grip properly, "go to bed, Mr Harnelli, your son'll be perfectly fine. Cross my heart on the Lord's name."

He snapped his phone shut, disconnecting the call, and stuffed it into an inner pocket of his jacket before trudging through the fallen leaves and dampened dirt toward the church entrance.

Pushing open the heavy wooden door, rich oak carved with floral patterns of the Garden of Eden, Michael stepped inside; letting the doors swing shut with an echoed thud behind him.
Unlike the rest of the town, whose existence gleamed with a mix of traditional and modernisation, the church was an old, paint-peeling, building of great importance.

It had been built at the very beginning of colonisation, dirt paths and brandished settlements once surrounding it as people crowded the building in the hopes of plastic salvation, and it seemed at times it was the only thing holding the shithole town of Cascade together.
From the Tomas Boys always stealing from Jones' market and the high school cliques running every extracurricular joint into the ground with bullying and chaos, to the miserable parents destroying their homes and the broken families splintered into shards, the church held everything together each Sunday.

Walking casually down the centre aisle, eyes focused on the altar at the front whose candles were illuminating a beautiful painting of Mother Mary, Michael ignored the odd scattered Bible or lost hymn papers littered through the church.

"And how did I know you would be here?" Michael boldly spoke, stealing the attention of the tall slender male standing by Mother Mary.

Dark, vicious blue eyes lifted toward the well dressed male; an emotionless loathing held within their soulless gaze.
With skin as pale as a beam of pure light from the moon, flesh covered by the long sleeves of a plain black cotton shirt—fabric ripped in burned holes around his collar—, and long legs hidden by snug black jeans whose ends were stuffed into dirty black combat boots, Luke was a beautiful creature with the darkness of a thousand tormented demons.