The night was looking up, the list was getting shorter and there was another body in the ground. I kicked the spade at my feet and glanced skywards where the moon was full and spilling it's light over the clearing, it highlighted the blood on my shirt and the chill of the midnight air made me feel warm inside, another few hours and it would be over. We could all go back to living our pointless lives and forget about this, clean the blood from our clothes and move on. But for now, the slaughter was to be enjoyed, revelled in.

I turned my back on the first moon of the New Year, and went back to the house where the screams although muted, could still be heard and her final, pitiful begging was like a lover's caress. But soon she would be silenced for all of eternity and the last image in her mind would be our faces, the last words she would hear would be our sentence on her. The way it should be. Our judgement was fair on them, they had seen the year out, enjoyed the countdown to their deaths unlike their victims, and now on the dawn of the New Year, those deaths would be avenged.

I entered the room where she was bound and relished in the fact she was barely recognisable. She deserved more, but as we were discovering, as capable as these people were at delivering pain, deaths, - they couldn't take it to the degree their victims had, so their deaths were drawn out and painful, but nothing like what we had hoped. The lady who lay in front of me, slicked with her own blood, choking on her own vomit was the woman who had played party in the deaths of two beautiful young girls. Girls so pure, they were angelic. She had sent them to their graves used, abused and dismembered, and this woman could barely take half of what she had done to them.

I kneeled on the floor beside her torturer who had finished his knife play and now watched as she bled to death. I breathed in the scent of her, mingled with the abattoir smell of the room, I could still smell her underneath. Her musk that which had drove men wild, which had entranced her husband to her. Her husband who was now buried, a man who'd went to his grave after being treated like the pig he was. Hung, drawn, quartered then put to rest, where by any rights his soul would descend to hell.

As I looked at her, I could picture the girls. How they would have trusted this nice lady, went to her and then survived torture after torture, perversion after perversion until finally their bodies could take no more and they had died. And it was with that in mind that I ended her life, it was quicker than it ought to be have been, but she had lived long enough. I needed closure on her particularly; I needed to have the murderer of my sisters' die by my hand. Dig her grave and see her into it.

I laid her to an uneasy rest, her corpse resting only metres from her lover's, and for the first time in ten months I felt good. I pulled the scrap of paper from my hand and looked at it before scoring across her name in her own blood. My gaze dropped to the last four names on the list, two men, and two women. I put it back in my pocket and started back towards the house. I knew the two women were already inside, being dealt with. But their crimes had not personally affected me and in a way I felt sorry for them, because for those they had crossed, they would endure a horrific punishment, which they did deserve but I don't believe I'd have had the stomach to do it.

The men were on their way, and as I retired that night to the loft of our building. Even secluded away in the rafters, I could hear the screams. The last words that would echo into eternity as futile attempts at survival, no one survives. I knew we wouldn't survive this either. As much as this provided the closure we all so desperately sought, these deaths would live on with us forever.

I was very much a man who believed in "an eye for an eye" yet now, after following that ritual of revenge I found myself sickened. I had been emotionless throughout the night, through each horror, each perversion, and each brutal death. But now, as my bones began to ache with digging so many graves I felt the guilt seep in. Someone's sister, child, daughter lay at rest now, sent to their grave by my hand, at the time I had felt righteous. It had been deserved. Now, I felt empty.

I fell eventually to a troubled sleep, awaking in the morning to a house scrubbed clean yet still reeking of a deathly aroma. I left feeling broken. I had avenged the deaths of my angels, but in doing so I had condemned myself to an existence riddled with guilt and had assured my destiny, that I would be sent to hell when my own calling came. For all I had done, I would never see my angels again.

My thoughts turned to God, how would he judge me? Would he let me see my girls again? Or would he send me away at the gates and on the long road to hell. It was something I'd just have to wait and see, but already I believed I was in hell. The images of both my angels and their tormentors haunted me daily. As the year progressed, my friends dwindled away, suicide, homicide… all those who took part in the New Year festivities died in one way or another.

Soon I was the only one left. And they all haunted me. Taunting me that in death they had something in life I would never again be able to attain. They had peace.

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