face as one of the men grabbed and twisted her arm, pulling it back roughly and tearing the bag from her hand while another mugger cupped a hand round her neck in a mocking caress, running his fingers through the dark strands of her hair.
‘How about some sugar for Daddy, pretty lady?’ he murmured greasily. Leaning towards her, he forced a kiss to her mouth, but then drew back sharply, his lip bleeding from where Casey had bitten him.
‘You fucking bitch!’ he snarled, spitting bloody spit into her face and then hitting her hard with the back of his hand.
And the desire to kill them all where they stood rose up within me, shaking me from the inside, and it took everything I had to fight the urge down. It is wrong to kill people. It is wrong.
‘ Hey! ’ I shouted, drawing their attention away from Casey. Rage boiling up inside, I strode forwards into the room and the three youths turned mockingly towards me, one of them still casually swinging Casey’s bag from the straps twined round his arm. ‘That was a mistake,’ I said quietly, enjoying the promise for what it was.
I don’t believe I seriously hurt them… Well, there were no fatal injuries, anyway. They were cowards, so it didn’t take much for them to turn and run. And I was prepared this time for the shocking, powerful surges of exhilaration that swept through me as soon as I hit the first attacker full in the face, relishing the feel of his nose crunching beneath my fist. I didn’t let myself get carried away, even though hurting them filled me with such savage pleasure. This was even easier than it had been last time, for there had been five men then and they had been much bigger than these three teenagers.
The first mugger staggered back whimpering, blood pouring from his broken nose, while the other two came at me at once, one of them with a knife in his hand. But the problem with weapons is that they make people over- confident. It was so easy to take it from him that it almost seemed like he was giving it to me. If he’d just been another mugger, I would have thrown the knife down, but this was the kid who had hit Casey after kissing her and before I knew what I was doing I was pinning him to the wall, about to slice the knife straight through his throat.
His two friends had gone completely still, like statues, staring at us in the lobby. The blade was right there at his neck — one movement of my wrist and he would be dead. This was justice. He was despicable. He was prepared to steal from a pregnant teenager and then assault her. He didn’t deserve to live. Cut the throat — nice and quick. I prepared to do so. And then suddenly caught myself.
He was looking right at me — brown eyes shocked and terrified. I stared at him, taken aback. How had I got here like this? What was I thinking? Casey was crying in the corner and it was this sound that at last snapped me out of it. I dropped the knife like it was burning me. Then I grabbed the boy’s arm and gave him a shove towards his two friends. All three of them were staring at me like frightened rabbits and suddenly the three muggers were gone and I saw three children in their place, barely older than Casey was herself. I ran my eye over them anxiously but apart from the one with the broken nose they didn’t seem too badly hurt.
I took a step towards them and they shrank back in unison. I stopped and when I spoke my voice sounded low and frightening even to myself. ‘If you ever touch my friend over there again, if you ever look at her, if you ever come anywhere near her, I promise I’ll track you down and I’ll kill you.’
I could tell from their expressions that they knew I meant what I’d said. They knew it wasn’t an empty threat. They knew I would kill them without even a second thought. Indeed I had almost done so just mere seconds ago. It terrified me. Perhaps, in that moment, I was even more scared of myself than they were. They were all still staring at me in silence as if too afraid to move but I needed them gone. The boy’s brown eyes felt like they were boring into my soul.
‘Get out,’ I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
As if released by an invisible spring, all three of them scrambled for the door and a moment later they were gone.
I am a madman, lock me away. What had I almost just done? God, am I really that unstable? It was simply that he had made me so angry, hurting Casey like that. He was a threat to her so I wanted to get rid of him. But killing him was the first way I had thought to do so and that appalled me.
I think if I’d been by myself I would have run up to my apartment, locked all the doors, turned the lights off and just rocked back and forth for hours with my arms wrapped over my head, alone in the dark. But Casey was there and she needed me, so, with a great effort, I pulled myself together. Stifling the familiar nausea, I wiped the blood off my hands, brushed the hair out of my eyes and walked over to her where she was still sobbing in the corner by the stairs. She screamed when I touched her and lashed out at me instinctively, hardly seeming to know who I was.
‘Hey!’ I cried. ‘Casey, it’s me. It’s Gabriel. It’s okay, they’ve gone. They’ve all gone. They won’t be coming back.’
I wasn’t expecting her to turn and cling to me as she did, crying into my shirt, her body trembling against mine. I was taken aback for a moment but I recovered quickly and put my arms around her, speaking to her softly while the hysteria died down. She hadn’t been badly hurt, although there would be a black eye later. But she had been frightened, of course, for herself and the easily hurt baby she carried. As I held her I instantly began to feel calmer about what had just happened. Casey had been in danger and I had protected her and that was all there was to it. None of those boys had been seriously hurt and, who knew, perhaps they would think twice about attacking anyone else in the future. Perhaps they would stay at home and do their schoolwork instead. Perhaps their lives would be better for what I had done!
The aura around Casey was golden today and, as I held her, it expanded to encompass both of us. I gazed in amazement at it, over the top of Casey’s head, wondering how she could be unaware of such beauty. When she had calmed down at last, I picked up her bag from where the muggers had dropped it and took her back upstairs to her apartment. She had stopped crying but she was still shaking and when I asked if she’d like me to stay with her for a while, she accepted at once.
Casey still looked deathly white so I made her sit down at the small kitchen table. I boiled the kettle and made tea for her. I gave her a frozen bag of vegetables to press to her already swelling eye. I looked after her. She belonged to me and I was going to keep her safe. I put a mug of tea before her and sat down at the other side of the table.
‘Why didn’t you just give them the bag?’ I asked quietly. ‘Why didn’t you just give it to them?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I panicked. I just panicked. Our rent was in there.’
I sighed. ‘Look, Casey, if anything like that ever happens to you again, just give them what they want and then run away as fast as you can. It doesn’t matter if you’re handing over your whole life savings; just give them what they want. It’s not worth your life.’
Casey nodded. ‘I know… It’s just that nothing like that’s ever happened to me before. My parents have a lot of money. We always lived in a nice area…’ she trailed off.
‘If I give you the money you would get in wages, will you stay here in your apartment at night?’ I asked suddenly.
She winced at the suggestion. ‘Gabriel, I can’t do that,’ she said. ‘I can’t take money from you.’
‘The money doesn’t matter to me,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m very well off, trust me, I won’t miss it. Look, you can’t just think about yourself now, you have to think about your baby too. Please let me help you. I really don’t want anything in return.’
She hesitated for a moment, biting her lip. Then she nodded silently, tears welling in her eyes again, and told me the truth about how her parents had disowned her after finding out she was pregnant, and how she had panicked and fled to the city, taking her younger brother with her.
‘We had all these screaming arguments,’ she said miserably. ‘I’ll never be able to forget some of the things they said to me. My dad called me a liar and a… a filthy slut. I mean, I’ve never even kissed a boy, not properly, not on the mouth… unless you count what just happened downstairs. I did kiss Harry on the cheek once — you know, the boyfriend I had when I was fourteen — does that count? Does it? I couldn’t even look at my Dad in the end because he didn’t even try to disguise the disgust he felt for me, and I just couldn’t bear to see that expression on his face when he looked at me.
‘They said that me and my boyfriend had to learn some responsibility. They said he would have to support me even though I kept telling them there was no boyfriend. I had nowhere to go so I went to my grandparents and asked if I could stay with them, but they said they couldn’t have me in the house. It wasn’t their place to go against my parents’ wishes, they said. Do you know what it feels like to get to the point where you can’t ask for help any
