Burn
Twenty-Nine
Darkness
I am stumbling. The scratching of sharp rocks and twigs digging into the bottoms of my feet. The ink-black monster has its talons wrapped around the tender, stick-thin expanse of my wrist, guiding me, pushing me forward, and it smells like decay, rotting flesh and copper that comes with split lips and broken bones and bruising kisses that Royce would force on me, and it burns my lungs with every breath. The nails scratch at my skin, leaving long, red ribbons that drip red onto the leaves below me.
Above me, the sky is dark blue, nearly black, and in the back of my fuzzy, sleep-deprived mind, I know more than several hours have passed. It was bright yellow daylight when I stumbled out of that hell house, leaving smears of blood and tar across the white door frame and soaking wet footprints, and the air has gotten cold, my breath clouding as it pushes past my cracked, bleeding lips.
I'm shivering, my teeth chattering; my body weight is too low for me to stay properly warm but everything tastes like hot metal and smoke and anything I do eat comes back up. As we walk, I manage to ask, "Where are we going?"
My demon doesn't reply, only shifts and ripples, its shape twisting, condensing down into a familiar figure — the dark eyes, the vanilla-pale scars marring the otherwise handsome features that are twisted with blood lust. Any breath in my lungs vanishes in a heartbeat, leaving me breathless and dizzy, stars dancing behind my eyes.
Royce.
Monster-boy is grinning at me, his teeth sharp like razors. His t-shirt is wet and I can see his skin through it; my body heats up fractionally. I hate myself for still loving the way he looks, the way his hair curls around the muscles on his throat, and how his dark eyes glare through me. "Hi, doll face." His voice is raspy and low and it sounds like he's had his throat crushed and I think of the red-sea room of Lyle House, how his skin sent electricity through my veins, how he'd pressed down on me a big boy body of ice and the smell gun smoke in my lungs.
"What's going on?"
"Rae wants to see you."
My stomach is in my rib cage and my mouth burns with vomit. "No! Let me go!" I am struggling, squirming, yanking hard against the iron tight grasp of talons on my skin.
Blood drips down my arm, splattering below; it's staining my sleeve, spreading not unlike wildfire across the fabric of my sweatshirt. The flow doesn't stop, continues until I'm wading through ankle-deep sea of red, and Royce is pressed against my back, electricity loud like wax paper in a doctor's office, and his smell is different now, no longer gun smoke and fire, but burnt spices and sticky-sweet bleach.
"Let's go," he whispers in that haunting voice of his.
I hate how my skin pebbles with goosebumps regardless. My stomach is cramped and knotted like a necklace and Royce all but carries me. His skin makes me crackle all over, part-static, part-arousal. Buried deep, deep down some part of me still loves him and I hate that part; if I could, I would've burned it long ago.
Back when Royce was still sweet-as-sugar, a blonde-haired girl with thirteen freckles on the inside of her left forearm named Chloe Saunders was best friends with a dark-haired bombshell beauty with a fascination with fire named Rachelle Rodgers.
Lauren knows instinctively something is wrong. Not bad or good just wrong. The air is stale and the accompanying silence is ringing in her ears as she pushes open the front door. After Chloe left, she'd woken Ramon and together they drove around the city, searching high and low for her and then they went to the police station. She remembers thinking that she isn't too fond of police stations because of that monster her niece dated, the one who ripped her apart from the inside out and taped her together with lazy stitching like a rag doll but she doesn't have much of a choice.
"Chloe?" Only the soft sticking of her shoes hitting the linoleum floor responds to her. Ice is creeping through her veins as she ascends up the stairs.
No response, just dead silence and her heart starts to beat faster. Did her niece slice herself open again after coming back to an empty, abandoned house? Will she be curled up like a puppy in a patch of sun, shivering under a mountain of blankets because she just doesn't eat anymore?
Lauren swallows, reaching Chloe's door and pulling it open. The bed is empty and unmade, the blankets thrown back and tangled from where Ramon had pulled himself out after the commotion. Piles of clothes — dirty from the musky stink rising up — make the floor a bio hazard but she steps inside anyway. Despite the messy bed and floor, the rest of her room is meticulously clean.
It's as she steps closer that she feels the crackle of paper under her socked feet and looks down. A loose leaf sheet of paper with Chloe's hurried, cramped handwriting, familiar.
He won't let me go. He's never gonna stop. I don't know what to do anymore; it hurts to be with him in the same way it hurts to be without him. Every time he hurts me, I know I deserve it. I'm a bad daughter, a bad niece. There's the taste of blood in my gums all the time. It reminds me how awful I am but how much worse he is; if I'm the devil, he's the master of them. I'm a liar; he's the one to tell you the truth while thrusting a knife into you.
Lauren swallows past the rise of bile in her throat as she reads her niece's most inner thoughts as she spiraled deeper and deeper until she hit rock bottom — until her parents passed away a brilliant blaze that took her self-esteem. She's about to put the paper down when the name "Rae" catches her eye.
I know Rae had something to do with it. She's always had a thing for fire, even when we were little, and there's no doubt it was her that started the fire. Here her handwriting changes to almost childish-scrawl splayed across the page, crooked letters and smudged out names like she had trouble writing. Something cold replaces the doctor's blood. I didn't know it had gotten out of control like that. If only I'd done something. If only I'd realized how far she could go. I would've stopped her if I did and maybe…
It's like a piece of clicking together, snapping into place. The fire, Rae's sudden disappearance after, Chloe's refusal to even mention the other girl's name. Vomit floods Lauren's mouth and she empties the contents of her stomach into the bag-lined trash can, spitting bile and phlegm as she tries to process the idea of Rae and fire and Jennifer's blazing home.