"WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE FIND MY DAUGHTER!"

Cole burst into his home and turned all the rooms upside down. He tugged at sock drawers and looked inside the smallest of compartments. He used his walking stick to shove objects aside, so aggressively that the stick eventually snapped into two, rendering him helpless to walk by himself. So he didn't walk. He crawled instead, like a four-legged creature, searching underneath couches and tables, peering into holes in walls that wouldn't accommodate a rat, much less someone of Mallory's size.

He was going crazy, and he knew it.

"You're losing your mind," Susan said, backed against the wall with Samantha and some boy he hadn't seen before, well secured from Cole's wrath. "It's clear she's not here, Cole."

"Then where is she?" Cole yelled, trying to rise to his feet but falling back down. His cancer had stripped him of basic strength, but cancer was nothing to the passion boiling inside of him, the dangerous anger that empowered him ever since that cryptic phone call from Lewis. Sickness be damned. He would find his daughter.

"What are you all standing looking like idiots for? Get your legs moving and find my daughter. Find her before I kill somebody!"

They moved immediately, as much fear in their frantic movements as was in their faces. Cole knew well enough, even in the heat of the moment, that he was acting like a tyrant, that he was out of himself. But he didn't care. All he wanted to know was where his daughter was. And he didn't care how he would come to find her. He didn't even if it meant slaughtering someone. He never felt passion like this in years, this burning sensation that rippled through the walls of his heart, something insatiable, something capable of destroying.

"She's not anywhere, sir." Samantha came back, her voice quivering. "I didn't find her anywhere."

"Cole, she's not—" Susan stopped when Cole shot her a threatening look. She knew better than to say that.

"Yeah, she isn't anywhere," the boy who he had never seen said. Cole looked at him and couldn't make out his true features. His rage had blinded him from seeing the boy for what he was. Instead, it made him see him as Jason. Every teenage boy that was unfortunate enough to walk by at this moment would be Jason to him. Because in truth, that was the person he wanted to kill right now. He'd been the instigator of chaos, the harbinger to Mallory's doom, and consequently, his as well.

Cole didn't even realise when he plunged for the boy's collar and began to shake him, a fervent, desperate, angry grapple that would somehow bring Mallory back from the distant beyond. The boy struggled in his grip, clawed at his throat as though to abate the deprivation of oxygen, a consequence of Cole's iron man grip. Susan made a cry of alarm and pulled Cole away from him.

"Are you stupid? You were actually going to kill him!"

"H=he's crazy," the boy said, stuttering, holding his throat, trauma so raw in his eyes. "Y'all are crazy!" He gathered himself and ran out of the house.

Samantha followed. "Allen, wait!"

Susan stared at him with accusation in her eyes, and for once, she did not disgust him. In her anger, it was easy to imagine she was the passionate Jane. "Something has gone loose in your head, Cole. I've never known you to be so irrational. What would have become of you if you had killed that boy and gotten arrested? What do you have to say for yourself?"

"Where's my daughter?"

Susan stared at him, dumbfounded. "Why are you asking a question you know the answer to? You know where she is, Cole. You do."

Cole winced at her. For the first time in her life, she was right about something.

He did know.