Chapter Twenty-Four

Laury smiled at me, her back to the mass of shadows that lined the clearing. Confusion lived in my veins, fueling my rapid heartbeat and making my head spin. I was vaguely aware of my teeth chattering, but the cold was forgotten as I tried to make sense of the medium's sudden appearance.

“She was coming to warn you,” the cruel boy hissed, and I could feel his breath on my ear. “We stopped her.” To Laury, he barked, “Get up.”

It was only after a moment that Laury attempted to rise, and even then, it was with considerable effort. Now, as she struggled to her feet, I could see that her bare, drenched arms were darkened with bruises and smeared blood; her bottom lip was swollen, too, and she couldn't stand all the way up.

“What have you done to her?” I breathed, afraid to look at her but too fixated to turn away.

The boy simply chuckled. “We dealt with her.”

As if on cue, a thousand twisted voices rose with his in a sick symphony of laughter, shuddering through the air and stabbing my ears with its discordance. Never before had I stood somewhere and felt such evil around me—this, I thought, was every tale of the devil ever penned, suddenly manifested into being. And right now, I was being slowly lowered into the depths of hell; though for what sins, I didn't know.

Forcing myself to breathe, I looked back at Laury, only to find that she was staring right back at me. Except now, rather than a smile, her eyes were brimming with an unspoken apology.

“I should have known,” she murmured, her whisper carrying in the wind. “Oh, Parker, I shouldn't have let them fool me.”

Looking at her sent a pang through my chest, and my knees buckled beneath me. Were it not for the monsters still clutching my arms, I would have crumpled to the ground. Laury's words brought me back to her hurried message on the phone, cut off before she could finish her sentence. The reason for that was now clear, and though my friend was certainly not okay, I found myself thanking God that she was, at the very least, alive.

“You wouldn't have had a chance against us, regardless,” said the boy, still beside me. “You're only human.”

Laury's eyes were still strained, but her mouth opened to bark out a harsh laugh. “If you're using the words 'only' and 'human' in that context, you clearly don't know this species as well as you think you do. You feel so superior to us, yet all you are is a nightmare that we make up in our heads. We don't believe in you—not really. You are nothing here.”

“We are trying to survive.” His voice was sharpened metal.

“The survival of one species is not worth the death of another,” Laury stated coolly.

“Do you hear yourself, medium? One human death, just one, and an entire species can survive just a little bit longer. And really, your kind die by the thousands everyday. Every time you blink, a person takes their last breath. So what does it matter, in the grand scheme of things, if we borrow one more life?”

Borrow, he said; I snorted dizzily. I was beginning to lose feeling to everything around me: the cold, the shadows, the implications of the cruel boy's words—all of it began to blur and spin. Darkness crept into my vision quite suddenly, and I felt myself begin to slip into unconsciousness.

I jolted awake.

But not from a dream: I was still in the clearing, swaying beneath the rain as the shadows pinned my arms back and the boy lurked at my side. His auburn hair glinted in the frosty moonlight, and he looked straight ahead, not seeming to notice the way I jumped beside him. I was certain that I had just woken up, yet I was still in the same place I had been before.

Across the clearing, Laury was watching me.

Her eyes, large and unblinking, met with mine, even as she answered to words the boy had spoken an eternity ago. “A life is not something to be borrowed,” she said evenly, “especially not from a girl who has barely lived the one she has been given. Once you take a person's soul, you sever them from any possibility of truly living—and you can't give it back.”

Her lips moved, and letters spilled out, but all the while, her gaze was resting on me. Shivers crept up and down my spine; though whether from the cold, the creatures, or Laury's intensity, I couldn't tell.

The boy was saying something, but it was meaningless, trivial, because Laury's eyes were words in themselves and as I glanced back at her again and again, I felt myself spinning, spiraling—

I took a deep breath, as if emerging from underwater, and a sharp pain crammed itself into my head. The rain was pouring, and my thoughts were pouring too, out through my ears and mouth and nose, seeping into the air so that there was nothing but blankness in my mind.

Pulse.

A streak of white, and for an instant—and only that—my eyes were not my own. I was smaller, my skin feeling foreign, but I stood in the same place in the same rain with the same shadows everywhere.

Slash.

A resounding crash in my head brought me back to reality a mere millisecond later, bringing with it a white-hot agony that thrashed my skull to bits and unraveled every conscious though I tried to fathom. Yet I didn't grab my ears, didn't scream, didn't collapse; I simply stood there in the cold and felt my brain be slowly torn apart.

My mind was at war with itself, and no one seemed to know it.

Except, perhaps, Laury, whose focus on me was hardening into curiosity. She narrowed her eyes, just for a heartbeat, then turned quite suddenly back to the auburn-haired boy. For a split second I felt the sensation of playing tug-of-war when the person on the other side suddenly lets go, and flailed mentally until I could blink myself back to reality.

Again, I'd woken up.

“Why Parker?” Laury was asking, when I tuned back into real time. My head still hurt, but now, it was nothing more than a dull throbbing in an unreachable crevice. “Why choose her out of the billions of other girls on this planet? If I'm correct, your species isn't the kind to reuse that same toys twice; and after Rosemary, Parker isn't fresh blood.”

That, for the first time, seemed to give the creature pause. As I looked at him hazily, I saw something that looked almost like confusion etched across his handsome, calm features. For a moment, the clearing was still; even the rain seemed to hold its breath for that little, pointless moment.

“She has a strong mind,” the boy said eventually, but his voice carried none of the pompous superiority that he had exhibited before. “We need souls, yes, but the mind is key.”

I leaned forward, my body seeming to act of its own accord; I felt my lips pull back into a broken snarl. Without meaning to, I let a stream of words fall from my lips. “It's because you travel through dreams,” I intoned, my voice dead. “It's all inside our heads. You thrive by poisoning my mind.”

Both Laury and the boy glanced over at me sharply, surprise clear on their faces. But while Laury's expression quickly became thoughtful, the boy masked his disruption with a cunning twitch of his lips.

“And you can bear it,” he said, reaching out to touch my cheek with an icy palm.

His fingers trailed down to rest beneath my chin, and I held myself rigid against his touch. Every time he looked at me, I felt as if I were a lab specimen, placed under a microscope, burning beneath a bright white light. His eyes had no expression, no shape, only endless depth, and they hurt—they sawed crudely at my insides and sliced apart my heart.

Meanwhile, Laury was appraising me as well, but with the cool, calculated determination of a chess player. “She has a very strong mind,” she said, after a moment. “So strong, in fact, that you could be threatened by it.”

The boy barked out a sharp sound that might have been a laugh. “No one is a threat to us—especially not her. Look at her! Does she look like anything dangerous?”

A flash of indignation sparked through me, and I pressed my lips tightly together to keep the retaliation locked inside. Laury merely tilted her head at his words, a pitying smile flickering quickly across her mouth. “Assuming that nothing threatens you is the easiest way to be beaten.”

“Ah, but it is just as bad to assume that you can beat those who threaten you.”

“I assume nothing.”

It was still pouring rain, but that seemed arbitrary as Laury and the boy faced off across the clearing. The shadows outnumbered her a thousand to one, yet she stood as tall as her broken body would let her and did not allow the ferocity to drop from her eyes.

“I do know something, however,” Laury said. “I know that you—all of you—are not nearly as terrifying as you wish you could be. You're just scary shadows, the things that go bump in the night; but if you didn't exist in our heads, you wouldn't exist at all.”

“You don't know what you're saying.” The boy's eyes flashed eerily in the darkness.

Laury chuckled. “I know exactly what I'm saying, and I know that I'm right. If I were wrong, you wouldn't look so frightened right now.” She lifted her chin, tapping one calculating finger against her lips. “That is fear in your eyes, is it not? But not fear of me, no. You're afraid of her.”

A thousand pairs of pitch black eyes turned to me; hundreds upon hundreds of gazes crawling along my skin. The shadows behind me loosened their vise-like grips on my arms, and that was probably because they knew the stares alone could root me to my place.

Laury believed that these creatures were scared of me, but if anything, it was the other way around. They petrified me; they ignited a fear in me that was so deep, I couldn't help but think it'd become ingrained on a cellular level. And fear, you know, is a funny thing. It makes you act as an alien to your normal self; it forces rash decisions into your brain and convinces you that they are okay. And when you are put into a situation that is either fight or flight—it often makes you run.

I ran. The terror built up inside me and I hurled myself forward, into the clearing, my bare feet burning as they scraped against bark and rocks. Mud caked my ankles, but that didn't matter as I ran straight for the flimsy wall of shadows. My breath came in heavy pants, water flowed into my eyes, and my entire body shook with the effort. I heard a shout, then several, but I was too far, too far for them to catch me, and just when I thought I'd made it—

I wasn't fast enough.

Because suddenly, I was airborne. An invisible force slammed into my back and sent me hurtling skyward, to a dizzying height. As I plummeted back down, I heard Laury scream my name. Then I hit the muddy earth, landing on my right arm with a sickening crack that reverberated through my entire body. I curled into the ground, my face in the dirt, I bit my tongue to ward off the agony. Darkness filled my mind, consuming me for a single freeing moment.

“Where do you think you're going?” a furious voice bellowed, jolting me back to consciousness. I opened my eyes blearily to find myself staring up at the boy. He was livid. His eyes were narrow slits, and his face burned with anger. He glared down at me, his foot poised as if to kick me in the stomach.

He didn't.

Instead, with a cold, strong hand, he gripped the collar of my shirt and hauled me to my feet. Rain streamed through my hair, spilling clods of soil into my eyes and onto my tongue. He shook me, sending sharp pain through my arm, and I cried out.

“Does that hurt?” he asked, his voice heavy with cruel glee.

I tried to choke out a “No,” but the sound was pitiful. Soulless joy filled the boy's eyes, so close to mine, and he took my limp, throbbing arm between his fingers. His grip was gentle at first, but only for a moment—because seconds later, he was squeezing my arm like it was the only thing left to anchor him to the ground. It hurt so much that I scream tore itself from my lips, the white hot pain rushing through my nerves and into my head and building up a strange lucidity that somehow resulted in anger.

“Don't touch me!” I shrieked, and arched back as far as I could, flinging myself out of his grip and back onto the ground. As I scrambled to my feet, I swear I could see the air between us simmering.

The boy stared at me for a moment, his jaw set, his eyes on fire, his pale lips pressed so tightly together that they were almost white. For a moment, all that existed was him, me, and the curtain of rain pouring down between us. The forest, the lake, and the shadows all disappeared, leaving only the two of us skirting around each other. He edged toward me, and I backed away, and this game continued until, before I knew it, my feet were digging into the coarse sand at the very edge of the lake.

“Watch out, Parker,” said the boy. “Wouldn't want to fall in; especially not in weather like this.”

My teeth chattering, I risked a glance over my shoulder at the lake. The boy was right: it was overflowing, the rain causing it to spill onto the banks and the heavy wind making the water rise in waves. Without thinking about it, I took a step forward, only to crash right into the boy's solid frame. He laughed at me as I stumbled away, and his voice tread air like razor sharp wings. His eyes drifted briefly shut, and for that miniscule moment, I looked at him and could almost believe that he was normal; a teenager just like me; a handsome boy standing in the rain. But when he lifted his gaze and fixed me again with those bottomless irises, I knew that normal was the word least apt to describe him.

The boy was a monster, and nothing more.

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Dedicated to Gray because she has fabulous comments and freaks out over my characters, which I love.

A/N: So it's been over a month since I last posted a chapter, and that is actually unacceptable. I realized today that I've had this chapter finished all week...I just never edited it and kind of forgot. But here you go (finally). Enjoy, and thanks for sticking with me through my sporadic updates!