Chapter 32 Vale #2
Up ahead, there’s a wooden archway leading into pitch black nothingness. Letting instinct guide me, I let it swallow me up. The quieter and darker it gets, the more my senses sharpen. Somewhere, water drips. And I can just make out the quiet crunch of distant steps.
It’s only when there’s not a speck of light to be seen that I veer off to the side, hanging back to allow Aston to get ahead of me.
That is, if he dares to enter. Dares to keep playing this game he started, now that he’s walked right into the trap I set for him, flipping our roles.
Keeping my breaths quiet and even, I focus on slowing my heart rate as I listen for footsteps.
As predicted, the ones that were following me seem to grow hesitant—less certain—before coming to a halt completely somewhere in the dark. For a long moment, there’s just his breathing—too loud, quick, and becoming more uneven by the second.
My nostrils flare, mouth watering. I can practically taste his growing unease. Salty like sweat. Coppery like blood. My lips rise of their own accord.
I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I only knew he wouldn’t hesitate to follow.
And as I watch his cloaked figure light up from the phone he digs out—watch the way he yanks the hooded mask off his head, and turns in a circle, darting his gaze right over where I hide in the shadows, too blinded with panic to hone his instincts, his senses…
too lost in feeling, rather than cold, hard knowing…
I recall the way he started to spiral in the bathroom during the lockdown. The way I could see the walls closing in through his dimming eyes.
My sugar has a weakness. A very, very exploitable weakness.
And fuck if some part of me—the baser, irrational part of me, fueled by raw desire—isn’t purring in pleasure at the thought. Crouching, clawing at the ground, readying to pounce.
Who’s the little mouse now?
Just when I think he might actually prove me wrong and give up and turn back the way he came, he toughens his shoulders and strides determinedly ahead, using his phone’s flashlight to guide him deeper into the tunnel.
His mask—I never got a chance to see what it was—is gripped in his fist at his side.
Rather than immediately follow, I hang back and wait until he’s far enough up ahead before following him, so that when I eventually do make a sound—a quick, forceful side-swiping kick of gravel at the wall—and he whirls around with a gasp, the light can’t reach me.
“V-Vale?”
It’s just a whisper, but in the vacuum of the tunnel, it carries like a scream. Not unlike his hard audible gulp a moment later. Around his silhouette, the light shivers, further betraying the panic I have no doubt has leeched his face of all color. It’s almost a pity I can’t see it.
Dragging my teeth over my lip, I reach down, adjusting myself, and wait for him to resume walking. By my estimation, we’re just about at the point where the tunnel rounds a corner, forking off into two directions.
On the left, will be another tunnel—shorter than this one—that will lead into a section of rooms reminiscent of where we’d just been. Only abandoned and littered with rock debris from when water had swept in years ago, causing parts of it to collapse into itself. Highly unstable.
On the right…
I hear his sharp intake of breath when we get there, and then he’s moving, running, scrambling down the short, narrow pathway to where the moon, bright and visible in the sky, peeks around a metal gate leading to freedom.
If he’d turned off his phone’s light a little way’s back, he would’ve noticed the darkness breaking up sooner.
His pounding steps crunch over broken rock and glass, his cloak billowing behind him.
When he reaches the gate leading into just one of the many hidden adit entrances scattered around this part of town, he drops his mask in his haste to open the latch and get out.
He doesn’t seem to notice. A grunt followed by a loud creak sounds into the night—the door giving way.
It all but flies out of his hand, lighter than I imagine he was expecting once loosened.
I catch it before it can slam shut, slipping through after him. But not before reaching down for the mask he’d abandoned. Even before a glance down confirms it, my hands tell me what I probably should’ve anticipated after our enlightening little conversation over the phone the other night.
“What’s your favorite scary movie?” he’d asked.
“How convenient,” he said when I gave him my answer.
Something tells me he’d already had this planned.
I huff shortly through my nose as I quickly take in the white, drooping face before shoving it over my head, under my own hood. Now, no part of me is visible, save for my hands.
Up ahead, at the top of a shallow incline, I can make out Aston’s bent figure as he struggles to catch his breath, the hem of his cloak fluttering and billowing around in the breeze.
As I draw closer, I can make out the cornfield that waits just beyond him, slowly coming into full view. It sways, rustling into the night, the normally golden and green stalks saturated by the moonlit night.
When Aston senses me nearing, he stills, before straightening to his full height. He fumbles with his phone to turn off the flashlight, before hiking up his cloak to stuff it in his pocket.
Only then does he whirl around to face me.
Not having realized how close I was, he stumbles back with a gasp, eyes widening into saucers when they snap up to mine. Not that he can see them through the mask I stole.
His mouth parts, but before he says God only knows what, I surge forward, eliciting a small yelp when I grab him tightly by the arm, and drag him up right up against me.
Upper arms gripped in my hands, I plaster his back to my front. Making sure he can feel just how hard I am through my jeans when I dip my head toward the side of his head, inhaling him deeply through my mask.
It’s not as if I can smell him through the mustiness of the hood. But his little shiver tells me he heard it—felt it in the rise of me against his shoulder—and that’s good enough for me.
For a long moment, we stay just like this.
With me breathing heavily, loudly, evenly in his ear, in no hurry to release him.
And with him standing frozen, trembling ever so slightly in my iron-clad hold.
He gulps—hard.
Behind my mask, I smile, and it’s as real as it is vicious.
It’s then, and only then, that I lean right up against his ear—tighten my bruising hold of him—and break the silence. Snarling through my teeth—
“Run.”