I followed him.
What else could I do? My body felt like a puppet. What the FUCK is happening to me. I walked beside him out of my shattered apartment, down the stairs, and into the cool night air, moving on legs that felt numb.
I kept glancing down at my collarbone. The skin was smooth. It had no scars or injuries.As if the silvery scar, the searing pain, the entire thing had been a my hallucination of my new found panic.
Maybe it was. Maybe this was all a psychotic break. Maybe I imagined it.
All of it. My brain had finally snapped.
We turned a corner, putting my apartment building out of sight. The normalcy of the street, a couple laughing, a distant siren, the glow of a bodega, felt like a mockery. My life was back there, in pieces. And I was walking away with the man who broke it.
A sudden, desperate thought seized me. This is my chance. The second he looks away, I'll run. I'll scream. I'll get to that bodega.
I took a half-step to the side, preparing to bolt.
The warmth started, a tingle right where the scar had been. It was warning me. I froze, my breath caught. The warmth quickly sharpened into a hot, needle-like pain. The silvery lines flickered back into view on my skin,they were faint but unmistakable.
The migraine-threat pulsed behind my eyes, and that deep, instinctual dread coiled in my gut, as if whispering that I was making a terrible, bad mistake.
I flinched, hugging my arms around myself, and fell back in step beside him.
He didn't even turn his head. He'd known.
"Don't fight it," he said, his voice low and matter-of-fact. He wasn't gloating. "It's easier if you don't fight it."
The scar on my collarbone faded again, the pain and dread receding like a tide, leaving only a cold, hollow certainty in its wake.
I kept walking, my eyes were on the pavement in front of me. I was following him. And I had no idea where we were going.
There was no dungeon or sleek back van waiting for me. He took me to a budget chain hotel off the highway. It had stained carpets and the smell of stale cigarettes. It was almost worse. So normal, so utterly mundane for such a horrifying situation.
He unlocked the door to a room with two double beds. He tossed a key card onto the dresser.
"Bathroom's there. Don't try the window. You sleep there," he said, pointing to the bed farthest from the door. His tone was flat, instructional, like he was laying out rules for a dog.
I just stood by the door, shell-shocked. My mind was spinning, trying to find a handhold in this nightmare. "I... I need my phone. I need to call my roommate. Lena will be losing her mind."
Kael didn't even look at me as he checked the locks on the window. "No."
The word was so simple, so final. "What do you mean, no?"
"No calls. No contact. It's a security risk." He finally turned, his gaze sweeping over me. "And the human is irrelevant."
The human. He said it like Lena was a species of insect.
Anger, hot and sharp, cut through some of the fog in my head. "She's not irrelevant! She's my friend! I need to tell her I'm okay!"
"You're not okay," Kael stated, his voice utterly devoid of emotion. "And telling her anything puts a target on her back. She's safer thinking you're missing."
The cold logic of it was like a punch to the gut. My shoulders slumped. I felt the phantom ache of the scar on my collarbone, a reminder of what happened when I argued.
My eyes flicked to the two beds. A new, different kind of fear twisted in my stomach. I crossed my arms over my chest, trying to look tough.
"And just so we're crystal clear," I said, my voice was trembling despite my best effort. "I'm not sleeping with you. I don't care what my ancestors did. That's not happening."
A flicker of something,amusement? disdain?, in his cold eyes. He let out a short, sharp breath that wasn't quite a laugh.
"Don't flatter yourself" he said, his voice dripped with a condescension that made me want to slap him. "The thought is the furthest thing from my mind. We leave at 5 a.m. Get some sleep."
He turned his back on me, effectively ending the conversation.
Sleep was impossible.
The second Kael's breathing evened out into a steady rhythm from the other bed, the voices started.
This was inside. A chaotic, overlapping radio broadcast tuned to a thousand different stations at once.
...the scent of pine and blood, the pack is restless...
...the moon is a claw tonight, a sharp little claw...
...he dares to bring the Key here, to our territory...
...hungry, so hungry, the little things that scurry in the walls...
They were whispers, growls, thoughts that weren't my own. They came in waves .
A wave of primal anger from one, I felt a thread of cold, ancient calculation from another. I clutched my hands over my ears, but it did nothing. The voices weren't outside; they were in living in my mind rent free.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to focus on the hum of the mini-fridge, the distant highway noise. Anything. But the voices were a, pulling me under.I could feel a fresh wave of fear, it was not my own, it slithered through me. Their emotions started seeping into me.
I could feel pain, anger, resentment, grief.
I couldn't tell which one was mine anymore.
I can't. I can't do this.
I sat up, my heart started beating faster. Kael was still sleeping in the other bed. I couldn't wake him. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.
Driven by a desperate need to do something, I slid out of bed. Maybe... maybe there was something in the room. A Bible in the nightstand? Something or anything to make it stop. People said that helped with ghosts, right? Were these ghosts?
I moved silently, with my bare feet cold on the rough carpet. I didn't dare turn on a light. I ran my hands over the cheap particle-wood dresser, the tacky landscape painting on the wall, the cold glass of the TV screen. Nothing. It was all just... stuff. Dead, silent stuff.
The voices swelled, a more louder cacophony of alien consciousness.
...the little human is awake, she's afraid, I can sense it...
I stumbled into the bathroom, locking the door and sinking to the floor, my back were against the cold tub. I pressed my forehead to my knees, rocking slightly.
Make it stop. Make it stop.
I tried to build a wall in my mind. I Imagined bricks, one by one, stacking them up. And the voices were like water, seeping through the cracks. I tried to scream at them internally
GET OUT! GET OUT!
GET OUT
but they just seemed to get louder, amused by my struggle. Seeping through anyway.