Elle
Demons. I’m not arguing if they’re real because there’s one right in front of me.
No, not one, a legion.
Thousands are hosted in Gant Auclair’s lean, muscular frame as he hovers over the hospital bed, a dark entity all in black. That’s the only explanation for how someone could be so grossly inhumane. They aren’t human to begin with. They’re creatures, things that fester in the darkness.
Things I couldn’t see masked behind that insanely handsome face and hidden in those pitch-black irises. Their inky colour doesn’t block out the windows to his soul like I’d first thought because they aren’t covers. They’re abysses, bottomless traps I’d willingly jumped into like an adrenaline junky.
They’re sucking me in deeper now and as my feet scramble to climb out, the glass shards he’d slipped into my ballet slippers lacerate my soles all over again with a fresh gush of blood. It’s not fair that after everything, my heart convulses, threatening to rupture at the mere sight of him.
I shake my head slowly and blink, but he doesn’t use his supernatural abilities to disappear like he has over the past three days.
He’d been an apparition in the armchair beside my bed. “Give in to the darkness, Dovey. I’m here to pull you back out.”
He’d appeared in the corner by the window, streaked in stripes of silvery moonlight and darkness from the blinds. “Don’t fight it. The sleep. It’ll help you heal. It’s just goodbye for now, baby.”
He’d hovered over me and stroked my hair. “I’ll fix it. I’ll piece everything back together.”
He was beside me, in the hospital bed, beneath the covers, holding me in every dream. But his touch hadn’t eased any of my pain. It exaggerated it because all I wanted was for him to let me go. And all I wanted was for him to stay.
“I’ll take it all away. The pain. And I’ll give it to whoever deserves it tenfold. I promise.”
I wanted him to be real so he could lie to me again because that version of reality was bearable, regardless of it being untrue.
‘We could just pretend,’ he used to say. ‘I love you, Dove. I need you to know that.’
I needed to pretend that someone loved me because I couldn’t do it myself.
“ Dove ,” Gant whispers, pulling the tube from my grasp.
The nickname awakens me from my drug-induced stupor and hatred, blinding hatred hazes the fringes of my vision.
“Get out.” It slips from my raw throat like a croak, a deathly calm one. A warning to both of us. “ Get out .”
He shakes his head slowly, the longer wavy locks at the top falling into those black pits in his skull. “I can’t do that. Especially not after what you were just thinking.”
“You don’t know what the fuck I was thinking,” I snap, squeezing the tube between my fingers as humiliation blooms in my chest.
I hate how he thinks he can read me so easily. I hate the fact that he can.
“Yes, I do,” he says, but there’s no snideness in his tone. It’s hollow and raw, as empty, rough, and achy as I feel, like he’s my mirror image rather than the gloating conqueror of my destroyed future.
“You think nothing’s left for you. Ballet is questionable, like Beaulieu. Jaime hasn’t visited, and you’re being discharged tomorrow, so you have nowhere to go. So what? You thought you could leave for good and abandon me?”
I glare up at him, utterly lost for words. That is until they come speeding up my throat and past my lips with sheer venom. “Leave you? Leave you?! There is no you for me to leave. You’re already dead to me.”
“Dove — ”
“Your second death will be when you’re back in the ground. Back beneath the earth’s crust that you’ve crawled out of instead of your mother’s cunt. Or maybe they’re the same. The passageway for fiends—”
“Dove!” he snaps, his fingers clenching around my throat so hard that he cuts off the rest of my vitriolic words.
Gripping me tighter until I sputter, he brings me closer to his bent form until our foreheads touch. The contact ignites the pain still radiating tenfold in every fibre of my being. But I don’t flinch. I glare back into those voids glaring down at me.
What? Is bringing up his deceased mother somehow too much for him? He has no problem mentioning mine. He just did, and guess what? She’s dead to me, too.
My raw, chapped throat suddenly isn’t so chafed as a wet gurgle bubbles into my mouth. His fingers twitch and readjust, but he doesn’t let go as my stomach contracts. As my lips part to—
“Spit it in my mouth. Please, ” he rasps, his eyelids drifting halfway shut as he licks his lips in anticipation.
We’re so close that his tongue swipes my lower lip, and I recoil so hard and fast that he loses his grip on my neck as I fall back onto the pillows.
More pain tears through me as I swipe the back of my hand against my lips to wipe away his touch. The same hand with the fucking IV needle that crushes further into my vein upon the contact.
Please. Gant never begged, and that little plea catches me off guard as he stares down at me with a mad desperation I’ve never seen before. And I never want to see it again because I’d already fallen for him. I’d already broken.
Was it not enough for him the first time? Does he want to turn my fragments into pulverised powder?
“ Please, ” he whispers. “I miss your taste.”
The audacity!
I swallow the wad of saliva into my gut, denying him. “You’re sick,” I whisper, the hoarseness back. “Absolutely fucked in the head to even come here.”
His eyelids lift a fraction in lament as he tears his gaze from my lips. “I know you don’t want to see me. I know you barred me from the visitor’s list.”
Why did I think that’d work? Supernatural creatures can walk through walls.
“And yet here you are anyway. Ignoring my wants because yours are more important.”
He swallows. “Me being here despite your wishes isn’t a want. It’s a need. I need to explain—”
“You need to return to the underworld. Your mission here is done.”
“Dove—”
“ Don’t. Fucking. Call. Me. Dove! ” I shriek, a wave of manic energy rushing over me. “Get out, or I’ll scream bloody murder for the night nurse.”
Why hadn’t I already? Why had I tolerated his presence for this long?
“Go ahead,” he says, daring me before nodding at the closed door. “Scream and scream until your lungs bleed. They won’t come. They’ll think we’re having fun getting reconnected. Why do you think I haven’t gagged you already?”
My stomach flips.
“Why do you think I’m here despite the ban? And after hours.”
I grit my teeth as I follow his gaze to the door.
“I’ve always been here, Dove. Since the first night you were admitted. I played nice. I was a good boy, agreeing with the doctors not to visit unless you were unconscious or delirious. I didn’t want to add to the stress you were already undergoing.”
Stress? That’s an understatement.
“ You, ” I sputter. “You weren’t a dream? You were here? The whole time.”
“You thought you were dreaming about me?” he asks, a sudden lightness to his tone, a glint in his eye. “You dreamt that I was in this bed? Holding you?”
My mouth drifts open in horror, and I try to recoil, but the handlebars of the hospital bed stop me. “What the fuck sort of hospital is this?” I whisper to myself in utter disbelief because he isn’t the only one who’d visited me in those dreams.
Zedd, a member of Gant’s horsemen, had slipped into my room dressed in dark purple scrubs and a hairnet. He’d brought me a lunch and dinner tray that I hadn’t eaten. When I woke up, they were gone, and I assumed they had never been there to begin with.
Bae, another horseman with his long hair neatly French braided and dressed in black scrubs, had come to empty my trays and take out the rubbish at my bedside. He’d been accompanied by his wolf-dog, Zoi, who’d licked my palm and sniffed my bandaged feet.
No…that wasn’t real. They weren’t —
“My grandfather’s, of course,” Gant’s voice cuts through my thoughts to answer my question.
Of course. The Auclairs operate everything in town. Maybe that’s what gave him the delusional impression he could run my life, too.
Hadn’t he?
My new rush of energy is like a super drug because I bolt upright and pull at the blankets, suddenly desperate to be free of them and anything else Gant Auclair, including this hospital.
“What are you doing?” he asks, his normally cool voice rising as I tug at the sticky tape holding the IV in place.
His pale hands snatch my wrists in an attempt to stop me, but I’m faster. I rip the needle out with a wince, grip it like a dagger, and point it at him.
“Get the fuck away from me or this goes into your eye.”