The Wrath Walker (The Wrath Series Book 1) by Matthew Newson (moboreader txt) 📕

needed to get their racket going in the city until they were strong enough to permanently end the Riccis altogether.

As I continued on in my reading, the next person to die under peculiar circumstances was one of the city council members. The woman drowned in her own pool even though she had been an award-winning swimmer throughout most of her life. The article said the police suspected she had gotten drunk and fallen into her pool, but the odd part was she had drowned in the shallow end. That and the other deaths all seemed to have Wrath’s fingerprints all over them, and it only confirmed for me how the Riccis had been weakened enough for the Amaras to take over.

It seemed like every week there was a story about one of Riccis or city council members dying in some kind of explainable way, and that was why no one had suspected it was the workings of a serial killer. But I knew better than that, it was Wrath who was behind each and every one of them. However, I caught myself in the middle of that thought, because it couldn’t be physically possible for Wrath to have been the killer then. Wrath appeared to be a young man in his mid to late twenties at the most, and if it was really him, he would be well into his seventies or eighties. Maybe it was a group of assassins that worked together, and really believed they were God’s messengers on Earth. They had to be some kind of fanatical cult. I proceeded on through the slew of articles until I came across the story of the death of the mayor. He seemed to be the last to go, because after his death I didn’t find any more city officials and mobsters passing away or getting killed.

The article said the mayor died after he had accidently fallen down the stairs in his home. He had suffered a severe head trauma as well as several broken bones. His neighbors had heard loud noises coming from the mayor’s house, and they called the police, who called an ambulance when they found the mayor unresponsive on the floor. The ambulance rushed him to the hospital where he passed away shortly after he arrived. It sounded to me that Wrath had smacked him around, and then thrown the mayor down the stairs of his own house. The police did a full investigation, but they didn’t find any evidence of foul play, and they confirmed that the mayor was alone when he fell. If Wrath had been there, he had fully concealed his presence, but all my questions were answered when I got to the article that covered the mayor’s funeral on the front page. I zoomed in on the picture to be sure, and I struggled to fully believe what I saw.

A lot of people showed up that day for the mayor’s funeral, and there wasn’t an empty seat in the house. It appeared the photographer had the crowd form a circle around the casket, I guess to show the city how much the mayor was loved by the people. At the top right-hand corner, my eyes locked in on something that seemed completely out of place. All the people around the casket looked like a great sea of black and muted-colored outfits. The shoulder of one man’s jacket peeked out from behind the crowd in the back and could be easily passed over if I hadn’t looked closely. The unmistakable smiling face of Wrath stared back at me from the photo.

There was no mistaking it was him, and my mind raced to come up with some way to explain how it couldn’t be so. He hadn’t aged a day since then, and he looked exactly the same as when I first met him, as he did back when that picture was taken. I practically jumped from my seat, and several people looked at me in surprise. I said a quick sorry and acted like I needed to stretch before I nonchalantly sat back down. I checked again, and it was the same face in the picture of the man I watched bury a knife into Ron’s chest, and showed up in my apartment the night before.

Wrath had killed several high-ranking members of the Ricci family, and people in the city council that year. He was telling the truth when he said he had been to our city before. But if he wasn’t lying about that, then he really was at Sodom and Gomorrah and destroyed it with his brothers. If all that was real, then he had to be telling me the truth when he said there was a way to stop him in that story. But the pieces that made up that puzzle still eluded me because no one seemed to be able to stop the destruction of that city. Something otherworldly was definitely going on in Black Castle, and I found myself in the middle of it. I went through several more years of articles, but nothing stood out like the other ones had. It appeared Wrath hadn’t returned to the city since that time, and if he had, no one documented his escapades in any of the newspapers. There was nothing more I could do there, so I packed up my things and left the records department and the Black Castle.

As I got back into my car, I knew that I had found the very answers I had wanted to find, but with that I had many more questions than when I walked in the building. I felt more hopeless than before, and I figured things couldn’t get any worse for me than they were at that point.

“God, what am I going to do?” I asked quietly as I started my car.

Then the passenger door opened.

Chapter FifteenBrandon Farmer

The City of Black Castle

“IF YOU TRY AND RUN, I’ll put a bullet in your head right now. Do