Chapter Forty-Five • Safe • Damien
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Ihold Lillith’s face in my hands, and I can’t seem to stop staring at her. Her face is pale, her silvery eyes hooded and sleepy. I’m distantly aware of the familiar sound of Oren’s snoring a few feet away, but I just can’t tear my eyes away from Lillith.
My beautiful woman. My savior. My fucking everything.
“I didn’t tell you I loved you before I got off the phone,” I say, through tears that won’t fucking stop.
“What?”
“You told me you loved me, and to kill it at the show. And I totally Han Solo’d you.
” God, it hurts to talk. Like razor blades on my esophagus.
I guess that’s what I get for extubating myself like some kind of rookie.
I hope I didn’t do any permanent damage, but at least I’m not the vocalist of my fucking band.
She snorts a surprised laugh and shakes her head. “I didn’t even notice,” she says. “I know you love me.” She lifts her hand to cup the side of my face.
Memories start to filter through, little by little.
Bit by bit. The absolute armageddon of the curtain falling over me like a tidal wave.
The desperate flailing as I tried to free myself from underneath its fiery weight.
Mind-numbing pain. So much fucking pain that I couldn’t think about a single other thing.
Screaming. And then calm darkness. Endless darkness.
Until this moment.
Lillith braces a hand gently over my Adam’s apple, and the sharp pain inside my throat slowly subsides. I shake my head, grasping her hand. “No, you’re exhausted.”
“I’m fine,” she lies.
But the soothed feeling in my throat reminds me to check on the bruising she had when I flew out from California.
Lillith’s neck still displays that awful, dark bruise.
But it looks less like the mottled patchwork it was before.
Now it looks like a ligature mark. A single, straight line around her throat where the other bruises have faded.
I gently thumb the mark and she gives me a smile that looks more like a grimace. “We were just about to try to undo it,” she tells me under her breath. “But I got a pang that something horrible had happened, and then I looked at my phone I had about a hundred notifications.”
My stomach sinks to my feet. “What do you mean?” I ask. “I thought you said you were going to tell me when you guys came up with a plan.”
She frowns this time. Inhaling deeply and exhaling. “Well... The ritual was risky. And I didn’t want to worry you with it while you were busy with the tour. I don’t want to disrupt your life.”
My anger is a quick, hot thing. And maybe it’s because I’m exhausted and vulnerable, but I can’t leash it before it snaps out at her. “Lillith. You are my fucking life.”
She flinches, probably vulnerable and tender too. She doesn’t say anything and my stomach tightens even more.
“Why are you keeping things from me?” I ask. “You promised me.”
“You need to realize that it’s only very recently that I haven’t had to do everything completely by myself, Damien,” she says.
Her voice is soft, but her words are sharp and clipped.
“I’m just... tired, Damien. And scared. I’m scared all the time.
And you almost died, and that might be because of me. ”
“Because of you? It was the stupid production company, I told you—”
“Aemon thinks this is a trap,” she says, cutting me off.
“That’s why he’s not here with us. Because he’s a fucking coward, and he didn’t want to risk being caught by whatever the Aberrant is that keeps coming after us.
He may have done this to you to smoke me out of my hiding spot.
He knew I wouldn’t just wait while you were fighting for your life across the country.
And now the only way I can get back is with an airplane. ”
The anger building in me shrinks and collapses in on itself. The density of the dread settling into the pit of my gut is like a black hole.
I have the urge to ask her why the fuck she would come here if she knew that. But I stop myself, knowing it would crush her and would make me sound like an ungrateful asshole.
Regardless of me buttoning my lip, her expression falls into something sad and devastating.
Her voice drops so quiet that I almost can’t hear it over the quickening pace of my heartrate monitor.
“I just... couldn’t face a world where you don’t exist,” she says. “I couldn’t. Even if it means my life is forfeit.”
I don’t know what to say. If I open my mouth I’ll probably say something shitty and mean.
I know I’m just stressed out. I know it’s coming from a place of care.
But that doesn’t mean she deserves to be treated badly.
So instead of saying anything, I just pull her against me, squeezing my arms tightly around her until I hear her exhale from the force of the embrace.
I tuck her head under my chin and breathe out of my nose.
Maybe I’m freaking out for no reason. Maybe she’ll be able to get home just fine. Maybe nothing bad will happen, for once.
The door opens and we both stiffen as a doctor strides into the room.
He’s wearing his white lab coat and a too-straight smile that crinkles the edges of his tastefully aged eyes.
He’s got a bit of scruff on his face and carefully coiffed silver hair.
He doesn’t have the drawn look I’d expect from a doctor assigned to the ICU. But maybe he just started his shift.
“How are we doing?” he asks, the deep timbre of his voice like something out of Grey’s Anatomy.
I squint at him. What kind of question is that?
I’m not sure how to respond. “Did you even look at my chart, dude?”
He blinks and it’s... weird. It’s off. Lillith starts to tremble in my arms.
I glance down at her to find her looking past the doctor. Her pupils have constricted into little pin pricks. I follow the line of her gaze to the hallway.
There’s... blood. A lot of it. And fletcher’s wrist is lax, draped across the floor. I recognize the wristband he’s wearing from here.
I look back up at the ‘doctor’, and he’s staring down at my girlfriend with a grin that curls just a little too much at the corners
“Found you,” he says, his voice far lower than seems natural for a normal human being.
My brain stalls for too long, because just when my body finally tells me to move—to get in front of Lillith and protect her from this creep—the pressure in the room peaks as if I’m sharing the space with the world’s largest subwoofer.
I tighten my arms around her even as my ears click and pop. Hot liquid pours out of my ears, then every large window in my hospital room shatters outward, like a blast has detonated right next to my bed.
The creature tears Lillith out of my arms. I try to follow her, my IV pulling out of my arm and spurting blood across the wall as the fucker leaps onto the window ledge, cloven feet crushing the shattered glass still clinking to the pane.
Lillith’s terrified expression as she reaches for me slices into me.
I reach for her just as the monster leaps out of the window.
Her blood-curdling scream reaches me even past my busted eardrums. I slip in my own blood as I hurry to look out the window for her.
But I realize with nauseating clarity that she’s already gone.
They’ve vanished into thin air.