Cataclysm by C.L. Parker Read Free Book Online Page A

going to happen.
    The traffic was unusually thick for that time of night. College kids had descended upon their small town for spring break partying, and it was interfering with their mad dash to seclusion. Kerrigan did her best to weave in and out of the vehicles, but it still took far too long. They weren’t going to make it. Dominic felt the tingling sensation creep up on him and looked down at his black leather cuff watch. The digital alarm went off. Midnight.
    Knowing what that sound meant, Kerrigan reached over and grabbed the collar of his shirt, pulling him toward her. Her eyes never left the road, but her lips still managed to find his before she let him go.
    As he began to fade from sight, Dominic looked out of his window in time to see Olivia pass them in the Mustang. She was holding onto the steering wheel tight, trying to keep the car on the road while slapping at Tyson. And then there was Colton. He was looking at Dominic with wild-eyed wonderment, and his mouth dropped open just as the last of his brother’s physical form dissipated with tiny gold and white sparks.

There are times in our lives when no matter what we do to protect the ones we love from the evil we perceive to be buried inside of us, the truth rears its ugly head and slams into our face, forcing us to show our hand. At that point all we can do is batten down the hatches and prepare to ride out the storm.
    Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, best friends—they all want to believe the very best in us. They overlook our flaws, explain them away, hype up all the good deeds we have done. For the most part, it’s the right thing to do.
    They say two wrongs don’t make a right, but two rights can’t undo a wrong either, now can they?
    When you’re a person as deeply affected by your own conscience as Dominic, no matter how hard they try, your family can’t pardon you from your crimes. You have become your very own judge, jury, and executioner, and you’re not about to let yourself get off that easily. No slap on the wrist for you. Nope. You deserve life without the possibility of parole, and you’ll imprison yourself in that truth for the duration of your miserable existence.
    We, more than anyone else, see the dark spot within ourselves, and it’s magnified tenfold just because we let it be. What starts out as a minuscule speck of something not quite right—say, a tiny white lie—we let grow and fester until we have made it into a pitch-black cloud that shrouds our soul. It becomes bigger than us, by our own design, because it eats away at our conscience. Some of us refuse to let it go, even when it becomes a moot point, believing that we’re not really as good as our loved ones believed us to be because, well, how is that possible when we did something wrong? But there’s not one single person on the face of the planet who can say they have led a perfect life. That they haven’t gotten away with some harmless lie or a little cheat here and there.
    Here’s where it starts to get a little messy: Some of us get carried away and start compounding those little cheats and harmless lies. Before we know it, cheats and lies have morphed into things much worse until we’re swimming in shit up to our eyeballs because it eventually has to come out. Right?
    Whether it’s something we choose to do because we really aren’t as good to the core as our loved ones had hoped or believed, or if we really are good, but were forced to the dark side because a better alternative hadn’t presented itself at the time, we still did it, and we must atone for those sins. Eventually.
    Dominic was paying for his big time.
    He was cursed—a freakish specter, one of those things that go bump in the night, the stuff children’s nightmares are made of. He believed he deserved what he had become, and that all those “dirty deeds done dirt cheap” in his past had led to the sentence he carried. His penance for cheating, stealing, beating, and killing was