The Mist and the Lightning. Part 19

“Enough!” Kors yelled so loudly that he woke Arel up, who jumped up on the bed and stared at them incomprehension. But Kors didn’t care about Arel right now, he only looked at Nik:

“Demon, stop lying and fooling me, hiding behind love! Just let the human go! What are you afraid of?!”

“I’m not afraid of anything! I am him!”

“N-o-o-o! You are not him at all! My son was dead!”

“Well, if someone dies, can’t you continue to love him?”

But Kors didn’t listen to him anymore:

“Let the human go! I want to ask my son how he survived! Let HIM tell me the truth, I don’t believe YOU anymore! Gods! You… you and the witch resurrected him with Black Water! That’s why you always need it! His body lives only thanks to this hard stimulation. What did you turn him into? You made him a walking corpse!” Kors roughly pushed Arelaway, jumped out of bed and began hastily dressing.

“Where are you going?” Nik asked suspiciously.

“Anywhere! Only not to lie in bed with my dead son!”

“No! Thanks to me, he’s alive!” Nik shook his shaggy head and squeezed his temples with his palms.

“Thanks to you, he moves a little! But if you leave him, he will die!”

Kors paced the room nervously from corner to corner.

“That’s why he’s mentally retarded! Not developed, barely walks, sees and speaks poorly. Falls constantly into a state of stupor, sits without moving, and is silent. He told me, ‘I don’t exist. I am nobody. I died’. He told it to me! And I didn’t attach any importance to these words! That’s why you don’t feel cold in his body, you don’t feel hunger, food is tasteless for you. And the world comes alive a little only in the dark!”

“No, that's not because of it!”

“My son! Gods! I saw my little boy there, with the witch, in the dark crypt, with his hands tied, as they bind the dead! The living dead, he was digging the ground… my poor son… you didn’t even give him a name! I have understood everything! I understand why you smell like death! It’s the sweetish smell of grave decay… the smell of decay!”

“You don’t understand anything!” Nik exclaimedalready with obvious anger, watching Kors rushing around the room, getting ready, grabbing his things, fastening his iron stick to the belt. “You only think that you understand everything, daddy, but in fact you always have your favorite garbage in your head!”

Kors paused for a moment.

“No, Demon, I have understood everything! And, damn it, I realized this even when I first saw you at the interrogation! I thought you were the Demon in the body of my dead son! Therefore, I began to avenge him without pity! And I was right! My intuition did not fail me at that moment! I! Was! Right!”

“But you yourself later communicated only with my human part many times! He talked to you, played chess and cards. Did you play with the dead?!”

“You confuse me because you keep him alive a little for your own purposes!” Kors approached the bed from Nik’s side, hovering over him and looking down with a challenge, and Nik lowered his eyes, staring at the bedspread, and was silent. “Well? Why are you keeping silent?!” Kors shouted indignantly. “You have nothing to say? And I, a fool, reproached myself so much for this spring ball, for punishing you so, for exposing you to ridicule! I did everything right! It serves you! Deceiver!”

Nik didn’t answer, just gave Kors a quick, wolfish glare and twisted his lips in an evil, nasty grin.

And in the head of Kors, the memory of his campaign with the unclean ones under the mountains to the Ore Town suddenly flashed very clearly. The way they swam across the lake and then made a halt in a cold cave with lilac stone flowers. Kors then asked Nik for a long time about his life, and, as it seemed to him, he learned a lot.

Karina told me that you grant wishes. And I believe in it. You know, I haven’t asked you to do mine yet.

“And?”