Chapter 19
SKELKER/SONNY
“Don’t go into the woods by yourself, mijo.” It’s a distant voice, unfamiliar but pleasant. Familiar yet strange. Sometimes I remember her face. I think she smells like apples. But then the scent of metal and ash and sulfur fills my nose. And I forget what apples even are.
I walk a dark trail. I free-fall, plummeting, sliding over jagged rocks and glass and cold dirt. The darkness is thick, suffocating. Invisible hands wrap around my wrists and tug me forward.
I’m in the woods near the Wishing Tree, and then I’m gone. Everything remains except for me. I vanish. I watch myself fade. And I spend the next twenty years in agony. Excruciatingly barbaric agony.
He carves me in his image. I see my new face in the hall of mirrors. The animal I’ve become. There is carnal pleasure with other dark beings. We find beauty amidst the rot. It’s fleeting, shallow, disingenuous. I detach from feeling anything beyond physical touch.
Sssss. Skelker. Sonny. Skelker.
Stop. Make it stop. It hurts. It’s a black hole. A void. An emptiness. He wants me to forget until he needs me to remember.
And then he showed me her.
Black hair. One blue eye, one brown. Soft supple curves, exuding fragrant jasmine blooms in every sway of her hips. She makes my fucking glands hurt. I want to ruin her for it. To punish her for existing. She’s a reminder that I am broken. Damaged. A monster.
But she is not light or sunbeams either. She, too, is blanketed in darkness. But hers is exquisite, delicate, seductive. It follows her, longing and yearning for her as they all do. As I do too. I hate her for the provocation. For the decimation.
And yet when my fingers are inside her decadent cunt, my heart beats faster than it does when I’m feasting on the devil’s essence. I lick my lips, my pronged tongue quivering as I still can taste the remnants of her on my unholy skin. It stains me.
I will destroy her the way the devil has destroyed me. I will make her a face to match mine. The way I want to make her cum on my cock while I carve my name into her chest… this carnal act of branding her, wrecking her… I’m almost foaming at the mouth imagining it.
And I know it pleases my devil. This is what he’s always wanted.
It’s what I was taken for. If he can’t have his sweet Willa, then he will settle for her descendant.
And he will use me to claim her. The disfigured Crane and the Harker whore—two damned souls cursed to wander in between the gray and the dark without joy or pleasure except for the divine moments we are inside each other.
But I don’t like sharing her. I won’t. We are fate. Destined. End game. The very fabric of our DNA has been intertwined since the beginning of time. Cranes and Harkers. Harkers and Cranes. Mine. Mine. Mine.
Her drunkenness dizzies me. It disorients me in the dark.
Trapped in her shadow, the poison hides the veil.
I can make out her figure, her silhouette, but I can’t reach her.
Not until she sobers up. And this time, I’ve waited too long.
My sickness festers, my craving intensifying.
I want to split her open and scream in her face while I shatter her over and over again.
Fuck. Sweat dots the back of my neck. Desperation. Fury. Need. It fuels me and terrorizes me as she works to block me out of her mind. The devil whispers, “Be patient.” But he did not raise me to be.
He taught me from a young age to take what I want when I want it. And now he’s toying with me. Taunting me. This is how he derives pleasure. A walking contradiction. A force that takes. He takes. I take. “You promised me,” I growl.
“You are weak, my son. If you want her, take her. Just as I took my sweet Willa against the tree so many moons ago.” Son, he calls me. I am no one’s son anymore. But I don’t dare disagree. His voice is power. And it is also pain. It rattles as much as it soothes.
I’m not lost, not found. They let me go. My own blood. But now, more of the devil’s venom runs through my veins than theirs.
I claw at the edges of her mind, raking my fingers up and down like nails scratching steel.
Let me in. I swallow hard, my throat constricting from the lack of saliva.
I am free-falling again. Stumbling over dark objects in her mind.
Let me in. I scream louder. She’s going to fucking pay for denying me this long.
Break through. Break free.
I am not ready. If I leave, I will not return. But isn’t that what you’ve always wanted? I can’t tell if it’s me or him asking the question.
I remember the river, my brother ignoring me.
Maybe I would have looked like him one day.
If I hadn’t been turned into this. The shadow pushed me in.
I could barely swim. I thought I was dead.
The boy who looked like me jumped in the river and saved me.
He yelled at me for not being careful. He didn’t believe me about the shadow.
There was another boy. Another brother. He was a sad boy for no particular reason. I don’t remember much else. The river was cold. My leg was bleeding. Bones. Bones. Him. He stitched me up and told me not to tell Papa.
That was the first time my flesh would be mutilated. If only I’d known then it was just the beginning…
I should’ve listened to the brother called Bones. And to the sad boy who told me not to wander into the woods alone. But the voice I long for, the one that feels like an empty hole in my chest, is the voice that comes from the one who smells like apples.
My heart is heavy. I close my eyes and drift. I wait. That’s all that sleeping is for me now. There are no dreams or nightmares for Skelkers. Only long gaps of quiet and stillness in between the chaos.
I listen for Mia’s breath and heartbeat, but the poison keeps it quiet, almost to a whisper. Though I have trained myself on how to seek it out. And soon, nothing will keep me away. My cock stirs, its boned ridges throbbing in anticipation.
This will be her downfall. She can’t resist me. She wants me to rip her apart. When her brown eye darkens with forbidden desire, her blue one flickers with all the filthy things she wants me to do to her.
Let me in so he will let me out.
I hear a faint whimper, soft and delicate like a kitten purring.
I sniff the air. It smells and tastes like her lips.
Like cherry pie. It used to be my favorite.
Back when he used to let us celebrate our human birthdays, he’d give us a thick warm slice along with fizzy pop soda and French vanilla ice cream.
But when I started crying for my parents, missing them on my special day, the devil said, “No more.” He took it all away. There were no more parties ever again. “Joy was weakness,” he’d say.
I lick my lips, thirsty for her essence. When the poison wears off, she’d better be ready. I’m coming for her. I will take away everything that makes her human and turn her into a monster like me.