Severing Sanguine: A Companion Book to The Fallocaust Series Book 2 (52 page)

Mantis told us to open our textbooks and after that he started going over the text. I got out my new yellow highlighter and started highlighting the things he was talking about. We were studying an experiment that was performed hundreds of years ago that involved a baby monkey. The experiment was about whether the monkey only liked its mom because it could feed him, or if he liked his mom because she was a source of protection and comfort. That was an easy one to figure out; I think I knew how it ended.

Then there was another click of the door leading outside. I looked up from my highlighting and saw a thin young man, who also had a hoody over his head, standing in the door way. He had a glow of red around his cheeks that suggested he was embarrassed. Well, I guess I wasn’t the only one humiliating myself today.

“S-sorry I’m late…” the young man stammered in a voice that was small but overflowing with submission. I couldn’t get a good look at him, his face was partially covered with the hoody and his hands jammed into his pockets. I could see he had on blue jeans with tears in the knees and a silver chain that looped around a black belt. His hoody was a nice shade of blue with silver swirly designs. I liked the designs; they reminded me of the ones King Silas used to carve into my arm.

Mantis stopped and I saw the professor give him an absolutely scathing look. “Take your seat and don’t interrupt me further,” he said in an icy tone that rivalled Elish’s.

I saw the young man nod before he lowered his head and clutch his binder and books to his chest, then without another word he walked through the rows of desks.

Then I got a good look at him…

And to further add to my ongoing embarrassment and humiliation, my heart skipped.

He was… he was beautiful.

The young man had shining silver hair that fell over large eyes so black they seemed to suck in the light of the room. His face was thin, his lips full, and his nose small, all of this on a backdrop of milky white skin that didn’t have a single flaw on it.

Then he made eye contact with me, and quickly I looked away and pretended I was busy highlighting things. I heard the chair scraping beside me and then him sitting down, and as I heard his binder unzip I smelled the faint and pleasant aroma of peppermint mixed in with something I could only describe as sugar or candy.

I could hear Mantis giving his lecture but my mind was swimming and my heart rapidly beating. I didn’t know what was happening to me but I felt like I had been picked up and held by my feet then shaken. My thoughts were a mess; my breathing and my heart were a mess… what was happening to me?

This was kind of like how I felt when King Silas had kissed me. Did that mean… did that mean I might like this guy? That was incredibly stupid I had only known him for about sixty seconds.

My ears burned. It wasn’t until ten minutes had passed that I gathered up the nerve to look over at him.

He had his hoody drawn down now, and his silver hair was falling over ears adorned with black crystal earrings embedded in polished silver. He was looking at his binder but he wasn’t highlighting like I was… he was drawing something on a blank piece of paper.

I craned my neck and saw he was drawing a tree with his lead pencil, and a good one at that. It had a thick trunk full of knots and burls and long branches that he was just starting to draw the leaves on. We didn’t have trees like that in the greywastes. The blacktrees didn’t get leaves, or at least not the ones I had seen. Merchants at Sunshine House used to say that further north some of the old trees got leaves but the kind we had here were pine-type trees that didn’t grow anything but sharp needles that got into your shoes.

Without realizing it I found all of my attention drawn to the young man’s art work. In a hypnotic way he was dragging the lead pencil over the snowy white paper, in such feathered, light movements it made me envious of his grace. He seemed like a delicate angel in both his appearance and his movements.

I wished for talent like his. I could only draw crows and that was nothing but chicken scratch compared to his flawless movements.

Maybe he could teach me how to draw…

Suddenly the young man turned his head to look at me. Through a spasm of terror I quickly looked away and distracted myself highlighting something. I hadn’t been paying that much attention to what Mantis was talking about though but I knew that wasn’t the point.

“And as time went on the baby monkey in cage B was found to have extreme emotional problems. It was fearful of the researchers and would scream and hide in the back of the cage when they attempted to handle it…”

The man with the silver hair was still staring at me. I tried to shake off the heat covering my face but as the seconds dragged on I found myself unable to handle it. He wouldn’t go back to his drawing and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.

I looked up at the doorway leading to the hallway outside. I played with the idea of dropping everything and making a break for it but that would cause more people to stare at me and I had had about enough of that today. And even if I did run away I would only have to come back again for my Thursday class, unless I was planning on giving up college altogether.

I swallowed hard and started paying deep attention to my textbook, highlighting everything that Mantis told us to highlight, and to distract myself further, I took the notes so detailed they had come word-for-word out of Mantis’s mouth. If this young man was going to stare at me for the rest of the semester I would probably be at the top of my class.

Finally, after assigning us an end-of-term essay about our choice of topic, class was dismissed and we were free to go. I glanced up as the rows of people started putting their binders and textbooks away and tried to draw up on my confidence to get out of this seat and go to my next class.

To my relief the young man got up first, I watched his back as he left.

He has really nice curves…

I heard Crow chuckle inside of my head which flustered me. So I got my things and tried to leave the classroom as quickly as…

“Sami.” I froze in place like Mantis’s voice was the freeze ray of a super villain. Then slowly I turned around and looked at him.

The silver-haired man was standing right beside him. Struck dumb I gaped at the two of them, my mouth twisted into a knot with not a single answer inside of my head. All I could do was stare and I knew I looked like an idiot.

Mantis smiled at me, with a shine inside of his steel-grey eyes that hinted to an amusement I didn’t appreciate. I knew Mantis didn’t care for me and I was hoping he hadn’t noticed the man with silver hair staring at me, and I hoped even more he didn’t have Silas’s penchant for deriving joy in other people’s discomfort.

“Have you thought about what your end-of-year group assignment is going to be, Sami?” Mantis asked casually. The young man beside him was shifting around, a hand scratching up and down his arm like he was nervous. Though I saw that he was holding a red piece of paper in his hand and I wondered if that was the source of his unease.

I shook my head and glanced at my textbook as if hoping it would help me.

‘What about the baby monkeys?’
Crow suggested.

“The… baby monkeys,” I blurted, taking Crow’s help and running with it. Though as I thought of what Mantis was saying I realized this probably would be the best project anyways. “I… I think I would do good at that, from experience.”

The silver-haired man looked at me with a spark of new interest; Mantis only nodded and then took the red slip of paper from the young man’s hands. “Yes, I was actually hoping you would choose Harry Harlow’s experiment. I think you would do wonderful studying the effects of social isolation.” Mantis took the pen cap off of the pen he was holding with his teeth and signed the red slip for the young man.

“Have you thought of a partner yet?” Mantis asked.

I stared at him, Mantis waited several seconds for me to respond before saying lightly, “I did say you could pair up as long as your work reflects that of two people.” Then to my horror he looked over at the young man. “Perhaps having someone else’s grade as a responsibility will encourage you to come to class and actually be on time, Jack?”

Jack?

I looked over at the silver-haired man in absolute shock, to the point where my mouth dropped open. Sure enough, as he spoke… I saw…

I saw he had pointed teeth like me… exactly like me…

“You want me to… partner with him?” Jack said surprised. He looked over at me, or what was left of me anyways. I believe I had melted into a pool of nauseas sickness. I felt so queasy I was sure… I was sure…

I stumbled back and held out my hand to steady myself. I managed to grab hold of the desk but it offered nothing but a solid thing to focus on as the room spun around me like I was on a carnival ride. I tried to close my eyes in a desperate attempt to find reprieve from this spin-cycle Mantis had inadvertently put me on but it only made the bile rise up my throat.

“Sami are you… okay?” I felt a cold hand on my forehead. I could see his tie and his blazer but everything else was going shiny, shiny and swirly and…

Like a dormant volcano announcing its re-emergence into the world… I suddenly threw up.

Right on Mantis’s shoes.

I clasped my hand over my mouth to stop the vomit from spilling out but it was no use. I gagged again and another stream of puke shot from my mouth and splattered onto the grey carpet below.

Humiliated and horrified, I turned and ran out of the room as quickly as I could, ignoring Mantis behind me calling my name.

I ran down the hallway which was thankfully empty, to further hammer in what was now the most embarrassing moment of my life I suddenly heard none other than Jack call to me. Though facing my brother, the man who had teeth like me, who I had shared a steel mother with, was the last thing on my mind.

I needed some place dark to hide in… I looked around the hallway but only saw lit up classrooms. I took a turn to find the exit to at least lead me to outside, but I found something better.

I opened the door of a janitor’s closet and when I saw enclosed darkness, I took it. I closed the door behind me and crouched down into the pitch black, smelling cleaning chemicals and the stale damp smell of an air-dried mop, and closed my eyes. Though not before drawing my hoody even farther over my head.

That was it… I was never going to be able to show my face in public again. There was no way I could ever face Jack over what had just happened. I was going to have to leave the family, go back to the greywastes… no, they might find me. I was going to have to leave the planet and go live on Mars. There was no way I could see them, my entire life was over.

My eyes burned. I wiped them with my sleeve and in that moment I had never hated myself more. I felt so angry I opened my eyes and looked for anything I could hurt myself with.

“Yes, you know what to do,”
Crow said in a silent hiss.
“You know what will make you feel better. Just like when your sunglasses fell off in Melchai and everyone saw your eyes. Hurt yourself to feel better – that’s your only reprieve.”

I sniffed and nodded. “Why did that have to happen? I’m never going to be able to face Mantis or Jack.” I felt a prickle of relief as I found an exacto knife resting beside a plastic container of bleach. I took it and slid the yellow lever until I saw a shine of metal. I rolled up my sleeves and started pressing the blade into my arm.

‘Because you can’t be around people,’
Crow hissed. I couldn’t see him, the room was too small, but his voice was crystal clear inside of my head. So clear I was surprised it didn’t echo.
‘You might be a chimera but you’ll always be socially inept. Just like the baby monkey without a mother – you’ll never be normal. No matter your new clothes, your college classes, or your family you will always be fucked up. Just look what happened to the monkey without its mom? No happy ending there and you will have no happy ending either.’

His words crushed me, but perhaps the only reason they had so much power over me was because I saw truth in every syllable. Even psychology wasn’t on my side; I was always going to be broken. You could fix up the exterior of a house all you want, but once you stepped inside you would see the gouges in the walls, the wires hanging from the ceilings, you would see the mould, the destruction, the sadness, and the abandonment.

I would always be broken. And to prove to myself just how broken I was I slid the knife over my already scarred skin and watched the pale white split in half like an unzipped zipper. The yellow bubbles of fat were my reward and the blood that started to frame the pockets, my relief.

My face twisted in misery and pain. I let out an anguished cry and threw the knife up against the metal door… then I buried my face into my drawn-up knees and sobbed.

I cried for a long time. Lost in misery and self-hatred, I let my pain take me by the neck and throw me into the deepest chasms of my mind. The dark places where Crow was born from and fed from. The areas where Jasper’s presence still lingered, and still left trails of slime behind it that glowed a brilliance that rivalled the sun.

Why would I even think I could manage going to college? I couldn’t even handle knowing that silver-haired man was Jack. I threw up on Mantis’s damn shoes from the shock of it, how could I handle school?