Severing Sanguine: A Companion Book to The Fallocaust Series Book 2 (42 page)

I pulled away with a gasp, and looked down.

“It’s okay…” Silas whispered.

I stared at it, and all of a sudden the heat boiling my insides turned to the coldest of winters. Like a frozen comet I fell back to earth, back to this world, and back to the nightmare that was my life.

Horror claimed me then, horror over what was happening to my body. I was getting hard, I was hard and when it got hard it wanted sex. Just like Jasper got before he fucked me.

“I can take care of that…” Silas said in a low and seductive tone. “No need to be anxious. It’ll feel good, I promise. You’ve never done anything like this before, have you?”

I jumped up off of the couch. Silas immediately sat up, looking surprised at my sudden action.

For a moment I was frozen, frozen in a state of limbo. The terror, embarrassment, and sickening feeling inside of me was so thick I swear I could see it coming off of my body. It was so many emotions combined into one horrible feeling and at that moment I just… I had to get away from this feeling. I had to escape this situation.

My eyes started searching every inch of the living room and I could feel pain on my arms as I clenched and clawed them.

This wasn’t good. This wasn’t good. These feelings were bad; it meant I was a pervert like Jasper. I was going to turn into Jasper. Why was it getting stiff? I had enjoyed the kiss so why was this happening to me?

I was confused, I didn’t know what I was talking about and I knew I didn’t. I knew something was happening inside of me but all it was telling me was that I was some sort of pervert. Some sort of… of…

‘I told you, you will always be Jasper’s whore.’

‘You’re broken. You’re broken, demon-monkey.’

‘What’s worse though is now you want it. Your body wants sex.’

‘I bet you liked it the entire time. I bet you really liked Jasper fucking you. Remember that time you got hard when he was yanking out your pubic hair?’

‘I do.’

‘I DO!’

Silas got up and I took a step back, the constriction in my rib cage making me start to pant.

“Sanguine…” Silas whispered curiously. “You’re in turmoil. Why?”

Then he took another step towards me, and I took another step away from him. My movements quick and my skin crawling with insects that burrowed in and out.

“Sanguine… you know I’m not going to hurt you, right? I understand you’re… you must be confused.” Silas’s brow furrowed and I saw him sigh. “You’re… I’m sorry. You must not even know what the hell is going on. Of course you wouldn’t, you were down there for so long.”

He glanced at me. “When they’re eleven we tend to sit them down with me and Elish and we explain how things work… do you want me to explain what’s happening with–”

“I know what’s happening!” I suddenly screamed. I put my hand on my unbrushed, messy hair and clenched it. My teeth ground. “I know what’s happening! I’m a pervert, there’s something wrong with me.”

Though I was deep in my own inner misery, I saw Silas’s face pale and his hands drop. As I looked around the dark apartment, I could see Silas staring at me, a blank expression on his face like he was an android and his mind had been wiped.

A low whine sounded from my throat and I looked around desperately. I don’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t know what I wanted. Down there was already starting to return to normal, so what more was I looking for?

I just wanted this feeling to go away. I wanted to become a different person, someone who didn’t have Jasper’s rotten breath always an inch away from my face. The only thing I wanted out of life was to just be left alone in peace.

But I was in peace now… if you took away all of what was wrong with me I was in a safe area. Alegria, this skyscraper, was a safe place to be with guards by the door… I was living with the king for fuck sakes.

But the king had started to want something in return for his hospitality. Was that it? I knew he had sex with the others; I had been ambushed by Nero and Ceph when I had gotten into the fridge.

I looked at Silas who was quickly walking towards me.

“Calm down… we don’t need to do anything,” Silas said. “Take a deep breath, I’ll get the wire and make some designs on your arm. Would you like that?”

My eye watched him like they were motion sensors. I could see his mouth moving. I could hear the words though they sounded far away, too far for me to make proper sense of them.

Then I felt his hand touch my shoulder and with a recoil of horror I snapped away.

Though my mind didn’t let me stop at just flinching away, I had to make him stop being… being near me. I had to make him stop saying words. I had to stop him, stop him from making me feel this way.

Without thinking I raised my hands, and not knowing just what I was doing or how I was doing it, I raised my hands and pressed them against Silas’s face.

And I made them burn.

I made them burn like the inferno that was eating my internal body alive.

A burst of burnt-smelling smoke erupted from King Silas’s face, and soon after a scream of pain. In my shock I retracted, not realizing what I had just done. I looked at Silas’s face, two raw, red patches in the shapes of my clenched hands appearing where his smooth, porcelain skin used to be.

I looked down at my hands and saw they had a layer of Silas’s skin on them.

My entire body started to shake. I gagged on the bile rising up from my stomach and almost threw up from sheer horror.

“I’m sorry!” I said, half-choking, half-gagging on my own words. “I’m sorry! Please forgive me I didn’t… I didn’t mean to…”

Silas was on his knees, his hands over his face. I could see papery skin in between his fingers, some charred and black but most of it almost opaque. His own hands were trembling, but I could see he was trying to take deep breaths. He was trying to push himself past the pain. I had done the same thing.

“It’s okay…” Silas said in a raspy voice. He pulled his hands away and let out a breath as more skin pulled away, the raw and tender flesh underneath the seared skin was bright red. And the smell. Fuck, the smell… burning corpses. I knew that smell.

“Sanguine, love…” Silas looked up at me. I put my own trembling hand over my mouth as I saw I had seared both of his eyes. I could see wrinkles in the whites of his eyes, they were burnt. “Get Elish… it will be just fine. Just, be a dear, get Elish… now.”

I stared at him dumbly.

“Now, Sanguine!” Silas said in a sharper voice.

The edge in his tones snapped me out of my stupor. I nodded, suppressing another gag, and ran out of the doors and into the hall.

“Hey… are you allowed out?” one of the thiens asked. His voice was full of hesitation but I also sensed apprehension.

“Yes,” I said before heading to the stairwell. I pushed open the door and started quickly walking down the stairs, two by two.

Everything inside of me had frozen in a state of animation. My brain was frozen, as was my emotions. I was on autopilot, I could panic later. I just had to get King Silas help.

‘He’s going to kill you after
,’ Crow growled.

I pushed him from my mind, though he was always the fly buzzing around my head. I ignored him though and walked down the two flights of stairs. Then I went through a door with a metal two and a six above it and found the double doors that had the main apartment behind it.

I knocked on it lightly at first but I realized it was still early morning so I knocked harder.

A sleepy sengil answered me, but as soon as he saw me I saw his face pale.

“Silas needs Elish,” I said to him, talking sucked the breath out of my lungs. I clawed my arms more. “Silas needs Elish, now.”

The sengil paled further. He turned around, looking at the closed bedroom, and turned back to me.

“Okay,” the young man said nervously. He half-shut the door and I stood there staring at the ground. I wanted more than anything to escape right now.

“Silas is going to kill you,” Crow taunted, his voice no longer in my head. Like he so often did he went from being a voice in my head to a physical person behind me.

I whimpered and shook my head. Had I really screwed all of this up? I hadn’t meant to hurt him.

“Monster, monster, monster.” Crow’s voice was singy and taunting. “You hurt everyone you who likes you. You can’t be trusted around people. That’s why all you have is me.”

I scrunched my shoulders and tightened my arms around my chest. “I know…” I said slowly. “I know he’s going to be angry at me.”

“You fuck up everything good that has ever happened to you,” Crow said. “Which is why you belong in a cage. Which is why you can never have friends.”

He continued, “You can’t even let someone who likes you, touch you. You’ll never have a real relationship, a real friend, or a real family.”

“I just need more time to recover…” I whimpered.

“Either way, it will be different from now on,” Crow said.

“Who are you speaking to?” I jumped and let out a gasp as the door swung open. Elish was staring at me, his purple eyes frozen slabs and his short blond hair messed up. “What does Silas want?”

“He needs you…” I said to him, staring at the carpet underneath my loafer-type shoes Silas had given me for indoors. “I – I…”

Do I say it?

“Say it,”
Crow suddenly snapped. “Say it, say it, say it, say it.”

SAY IT SAY IT SAY IT.

“I accidently burned him. I think I blinded him.”

No expression on Elish’s face, not even a faint tightening of his jaw. The chimera immediately walked past me and disappeared into the stairwell. No second glances, no pulling my arm to go with him, he just walked away.

“Would you like to come in?” the sleepy sengil asked. “We have a guest room.”

I shook my head, that was the last thing I wanted was to be in Elish’s apartment. I knew he would beat me for hurting the king, and once Silas recovered he would beat me as well.

But where was I supposed to go? I couldn’t go back to the apartment – I just couldn’t.

“I’m going to…” I said quietly. It was summer, it was warm… maybe I could go on the roof? “I’m going to go… walk around, clear my head.”

The sengil gave me a skeptical look but he nodded. I think he didn’t have the authority to tell me what to do.

I didn’t know where I was supposed to go but my feet took me towards the elevator. I think maybe I would go to the roof… or I would go to a storage room and find a couch I could make into a cave. Some place that was dark where I could process what just happened. I needed some place to hide… until they killed me for hurting Silas.

Or would they? Silas said he wasn’t angry but how could he not be?

When I was in the elevator I looked at all of the buttons. There were twenty-seven floors, then the roof and the lobby though that was listed as floor one. There was also a basement but I knew they would look there first.

I was about to press the button for the roof when the elevator gave a pull. My heart leapt and shot to my throat as the elevator started to bring me some place downstairs.

I tried to push the button for the roof but it wasn’t overriding its other command. I gritted my teeth, trying to force down my anxiety and angrily slammed my hand against the keypad, lighting up all of the buttons.

It still wasn’t stopping. The floor numbers were changing rapidly and soon I was in single digits and then… I was on the lobby floor.

With an anxious thrum inside of my chest and my body pressed against the wall, I braced myself for who was going to greet me.

The door opened and I felt a growl but it disappeared when I became face-to-face with Garrett.

“Ohh… hey… gotta… gottsa job as an elevaty attendernat, eh? Good… good man!” Garrett slurred.

A very drunk Garrett.

He stumbled into the elevator, needing to support himself with a hand pressed against the wall. He reeked of alcohol and smelly cologne and was completely blitzed.

Garrett looked at me with glassy eyes. “Floor… floor… what’s, what’s Apolly and Arty’s floor? Take me to… Arry and… Party’s… take me to the party floor.”

I stared at him, before I turned around and looked towards the lobby. A fancy lobby with a fountain in the middle that was sculpted to look like a carracat. There were even those persian carpets on the floors, the ones that rich people in movies had.

And beyond that were glass windows, reinforced with bulletproof glass, and two doors leading outside, both guarded by thiens.

I… I think I wanted to go outside. I think I needed… time away.

Or maybe I was scared of seeing Silas after what I had done to him. Maybe I was too full of shame and hatred for myself. For not being able to control myself.

I just was scared of turning into Jasper.

That’s all.

My eyes travelled back to Garrett, just in time to see him slide to the floor. A crumpled mess of chimera, dressed in a black suit and a crooked red tie.

Then I saw he was wearing shiny black shoes. Beautiful shoes that looked like they had never touched greywaste ash.