Chapter 22 Damon
DAMON
The sun is a goddamn hammer overhead, viciously bright and scorching hot.
It presses against my skull like a brand, sizzling behind my eyes.
Every breath tastes like ash and metal. My body’s still swimming, achy, and poisoned from the shit I shoved up my nose, and down my throat hours ago, once we finished with the mole.
Anything to smother the crawling voices that plague me.
The bastards are still here, whispering louder now, skittering just out of reach, entities at the edges of my vision, twitching like dying insects.
Laughing at my weakness, screaming that I'm worthless. Fuck, they’re always laughing, and I hate it.
I drag myself across the vast quad, my ribs a splintered, painful cage from the unhinged princess's fists and fury.
Every haggard breath rubs against my contusions, like rough sandpaper.
Rage flickers through me with the recollection.
She put her hands on me, and bested me, and I allowed her to keep breathing and walk away.
The voices hiss mockingly, a chorus of phantom laughter rising from the shadows that cling to the school's neat brick walls.
Her pretty, irate face flashes in my mind, forcing me to replay the way she struck me, and how I stumbled.
She did that to me, a fucking woman, a stranger to Mayhem, and now every mark on my skin burns, like her fingerprints are carved into me.
Wrath coils under my flesh, clawing at my blackened soul, demanding to be appeased by her blood.
Students rush across the quad, polished shoes and rubber soles clicking on stone paths, their pressed shirts, shitty khakis, and too-short skirts, a parade of order I’ll never belong to.
They glance at me, quick, sharp, like a blade nicking skin, and then instantly look away, steps quickening to increase the distance between us, as if at any moment I might lunge at them.
Fear is in their eyes and pouring from their cells, as if they know what’s inside of me, they feel it, the darkness that won't loosen its grip on my soul. They shrink back when I pass, clutching their books and bags tighter, whispering behind their hands, pretending their fear doesn’t stink and pollute the air around me.
They think that if they don’t look at me, I can’t see them.
Like children hiding under blankets, praying the monster doesn’t bite their toes, but I see everything.
Their eyes with too much white showing, the way their breaths hitch, their very spinelessness.
Cowards, every last one of them. Pretending their books, schedules, and their shiny futures make them safe in this malignant world, when all it would take is me cutting across the grass to watch their little towers tumble, and their futures vanish with the strike of my favorite blade.
I’m the bogeyman that crawled out of their bedtime stories, and they know it.
The shadows confirm it, circling my boots, stretching jagged, clawed hands toward their trembling spines.
They snicker, hiss, and coil around me like thick, dark smoke.
They’re afraid of you, Damon. Good. Make them scream. Remind them what you are.
Everything within me wants to. Just so I can feel the pressure in my chest ease for one damn second.
Then, to add insult to injury, there’s being summoned here this morning by Cross, with a snap of his fingers, demanding I show up like I’m his pet dog, after almost no sleep.
The heat worsens with the thought, making sweat prickle and sting at the back of my neck.
I should’ve ignored him, and left him to stew in his rage without me.
Instead, here I am, pacing this prestigious courtyard like a chained animal, waiting for him.
My head is pounding from the concussion the little unhinged princess gave me last night, the aftereffects of the bender I was on, and dealing with the mole situation.
Not to mention the nightmares that plagued me, when I did finally get some sleep.
All of this is becoming too much at once, and I wonder if I'm going mad, as everyone believes I am.
I take a seat on a stone bench, as I drag one of my hands through the rat nest that my hair has become, accidentally touching the large, sore lump on my forehead.
"FUCK!" I growl with irritation, and a trio of girls scamper off at a run with frightened whimpers.
I flip my phone over and re-read the screen, trying to determine if I missed something, and grimace when I catch a wispy shadow with long, dagger fingers trying to steal it from me.
Get it together, Damon, nothing's fucking there.
Soule U - 9 am. Don't be fucking late.
Don't make me come find you, Damon.
Fucking prick, always trying to command River and me around, like some glorified Caesar or something.
This ain't fucking Rome, bitch, and we've already conquered everything that matters.
That's not true, though, is it? There's one new tasty morsel we haven't conquered yet. In fact, we’re so far from making any headway against little Olivia Springhill that it's laughable.
Both times that I've personally gone after her, she's handed me my ass on a silver platter, as if I wasn't the big, bad monster with sharp teeth, hiding in the dark, waiting to rip her apart.
If I weren't so secure in my manhood, my balls and dick would have shriveled up, and disappeared inside my body, with shame at being bested by a five-foot-nothing girl with purple fucking hair.
“Damon,” a deep voice tugs me from my daydreams of strangling a green-eyed succubus with her own purple-tinged hair, and the voices that were encouraging me to commit violence instantly protest, until it's so loud in my head that I have to slam my hands over my ears. For a heartbeat, I don’t know if the voice is real, or if I'm imagining it. I turn, blinking against the white heat, and River’s there, calm and careful, glowing as if the sun itself was worshiping him.
His movements are subtle, as if he’s tiptoeing around a feral wolf.
His mouth moves more slowly than my brain can process.
"You good?" His eyes say more than his words: don’t lose it here, not now.
A laugh tears out of me, raw and ugly. “Good? I’m better than good.
Look at them run.” My jaw aches from grinning, too sharp and wide.
I can still feel the shadows tugging at me, nipping at my heels like predators.
They want me to chase the cowards down, and bring about bloodshed that will further cake me in misery.
River doesn’t answer, but I catch the flicker of unease in his bright, green eyes filled with pity, worry, and fear; it's all the same poison.
Every drop makes me feel as worthless and monstrous as the shadows protest that I am.
It wasn't always this way. I wasn't always this damaged.
When did that change? Was it when I killed my first person, my tenth?
I've lost count now of how many lives I have taken.
It's probably for the best. I don't want to know how much blood is tainting my soul.
"Did you even ice that thing, Damon?" River questions, his chin motioning toward my head, and taking a step closer, and it causes my hackles to further rise.
"Shut the fuck up!" I growl, bending over in my sitting position until my chest is flat with my thighs, as I force deep breaths through my nose, and try with difficulty not to puke up my liver.
"Jesus, you're in an asshole mood this morning.
Forget I even fucking asked," River huffs, taking a seat further down the bench from where I'm sitting, and I watch as one of my shadows moves up behind him, caressing his angelic white-blond hair.
Fuck, I need a drink, or an eight-ball of coke, maybe both, anything to get through this day.
I know I should apologize to River, the fucker can be sensitive, getting his nuts all tied in knots, especially when I yell at him, but my lips refuse to move and utter the words.
I'm just about to consider finding a place in the library, to crash for a few hours of shut-eye, when Cross approaches us, already rocking a miserable scowl.
"What happened to your neck?" River questions, getting up from the bench and moving closer to Cross, to inspect the reddish-purple mark on his neck. Hmmm, pretty sure that's the imprint of teeth. If possible, Cross gets even more surly at River's inquiry.
"Rough night?" I grin, wondering if the person who left that mark on him is still breathing this morning, probably not.
Cross is an asshole, and particular about what he allows in the bedroom.
Besides, he's the one who usually does the marking.
I should fucking know. I still have a burn mark on my lower back, from the last time I let him fuck my ass.
"Olivia came home this morning after being with Sim all night, wearing his shirt and boxer shorts, and being as defiant as ever.
This was her handiwork." He motions to his neck with aggravation.
I see it clearly, the violence thrumming under his skin, waiting for somewhere to land.
Everyone in this yard is now a target for his fists and fury.
Cross won't care if it’s Sim, Olivia, or the next wide-eyed kid who looks too long in his direction; he wants blood.
"She also decided it was wise to mouth off to my father.
" Something in his demeanor suggests that he's not providing the whole story, but I let him roll with it, rather than calling him out.
We all have secrets, and Cross's would fill the Las Vegas desert.