Chapter Twenty-Three #2
My throat tightens around the memory, and I push through it.
“A woman… beautiful. The kind of beautiful that doesn’t look real, like someone designed it specifically to make you stop thinking for long enough that you can’t run.
Dark hair, eyes like old glass, that color that doesn’t quite settle into any particular shade.
” I pause. “She looked at the man I was with and she—” I have to stop again.
She snapped his neck.
Not quickly, not like in the films where it’s over before you process it. She did it the way you’d break a twig you found inconvenient. One-handed, while she was looking at me.
“She killed him,” I say, because the room doesn’t need the mechanics of it and I don’t need to hear myself describe it out loud, not with Scorch’s ember-glow already brightening at the edges of his forearms. “He tried to put himself between us and she—” The sentence doesn’t finish cleanly, so I leave it where it lands.
“And then she was there, right in front of me, and I couldn’t move.
I don’t know if that was a power or just pure terror, but I couldn’t make my body work. ”
The city lights were scattered below the lookout like scattered diamonds. I remember thinking that if I could get off the hood and run, if I could make my legs respond…
“She grabbed my jaw.” My hand moves before I can stop it, fingers pressing against my own face in the ghost of someone else’s grip.
“Like this. And she tilted my head back, and she smiled at me, and she said—” I have to stop to swallow.
The memory of her voice is the worst part, the part that surfaces at three in the morning when the hunger wakes me, and the dark feels hostile.
“She said, ‘I have plans for you, little scion.’ ”
The room is absolutely silent.
I don’t look at Rogue.
I can’t.
Because I know what his expression looks like when he’s working very hard to keep it still, and I don’t have the emotional balance right now to look at that and keep talking.
“She bit me.” The words land flatly. “Drained me, not quickly, slowly. Like she was taking exactly the amount she intended, not a drop more. And the whole time I was losing consciousness, she was watching me. Watching my face. She fucking enjoyed it.” Something cold moves through my chest at the recollection.
“Not the way a monster enjoys it, not mindlessly, she was clinical about it. Like I was an experiment she was running and the results were satisfying. I… I thought I was dying,” I say, and the simplicity of those five words carries more weight than I can dress them in anything else.
“I was dying. I felt myself going under, and then she pried my mouth open, and she made me drink her fucking blood, and the last thing I heard before everything went dark was her voice…” I pause. “Saying I was going to be very useful.”
The silence holds, and I finally have the willpower to glance at Rogue.
He gives me a small but somehow powerful head nod, and it is all the encouragement I need to keep going.
Rolling my shoulders, I stand taller. “I woke up in a warehouse…” I continue, because stopping now would be worse than continuing, because the only way through this tunnel is forward, “… alone. And I didn’t know what I was, what had happened, or why everything was so…
” a small hiss escapes through my teeth, “… loud. Bright. Everything was too much. The dark felt full of things I could see clearly, and I didn’t understand why. And the hunger was—”
A low growl inadvertently erupts from my throat. Everyone tenses, which only makes me feel more anxious about all of this. How do you explain the hunger to people who have never experienced anything adjacent to it?
“It was like drowning,” I say carefully. “But the thing you were drowning in was need. Like your whole body became one single enormous want and there was no edge to it, no ceiling, nothing to measure it against.”
My jaw tightens. “I was stumbling around aimlessly until I found a diner. I was trying to find… I don’t even know what I was trying to find.
People… normalcy, something that made sense.
And there was a waitress, and she cut her finger on something behind the counter, and…
” I stop. The ember-glow along Scorch’s forearms brightens, barely perceptibly, but I see it.
“And I lost control,” I say, and I make myself say it plainly, without softening it, because these people deserve the unvarnished version, and I deserve to say it out loud instead of letting it live in the dark part of my chest where it’s been eating me for three weeks.