Personal Demon
Page 65

Benicio’s thoughts were too muddled to distinguish, one intense wave after another. Under that, I could pick up Karl’s steady throb of anger and distress.
Then there was the man on the floor. Dying…His soul, slipping from his body, the grief and anxiety and fear of the others swirling around him, a cocktail more potent than anything I ever dreamed of. I drank it in, oblivious to my surroundings. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten in there. Couldn’t remember why I was there.
Couldn’t even remember who this man was, lying on the floor, dying. All that mattered was that he was dying and when he did, the reward would be beyond imagining.
Karl was yelling about getting someone to leave. Not me. He wouldn’t do that—wouldn’t pull me away, not when death was so close, hanging in the air…
This was what I was made for. This was where I belonged, in the center of the whirlwind, drinking it in…
“You need to get her out of here.” Benicio’s voice.
“You don’t think I’m trying?” Karl’s snarl.
The room spun, pulling me under.
“It’s the chaos.” Benicio. “She’s—”
“I know what’s happening.” Karl. “And apparently you do too.”
His anger spiked and I shuddered. So delicious, so perfectly—Hands went around my waist. Lifted me. I lashed out with everything I had. The arms only gripped tighter and carried me, kicking and punching and screaming, from the room, out two doors, into the bright glare of a white room.
The chaos lifeline snapped under the glare of those bathroom lights. I looked up and saw my reflection—a nightmarish version of myself, my hair wild, lips pulled back in a snarl, face contorted with pure animal rage.
The face of a demon.
Karl carried me into the bedroom. He lowered me onto the bed, and as I gulped air, my throat raw from screaming, I struggled to block the memory of my reflection, telling myself it’d been some hellish trick of my mind.
The last five minutes flooded back. What I’d felt in that room. What I’d thought. All of it as alien as that horror in the mirror and yet, like the reflection, recognizable.
“K-K-Karl…”
I looked up, my eyes filled with tears of shame, and could see only a watery figure. I felt his arms around me as he crouched, pulling my face against his chest.
“Shh, shh, shh.”
“I-I-I—”
“Shhh.”
I forced my head up, to find his face, to look him in the eyes.
“I wanted him to die, Karl. I couldn’t even remember who he was. A man I know, I like, and I wanted him to die so I could feed off—”
My head jolted forward, gorge rising, and before I could stop it, I threw up on him.
“Oh God, oh God, I’m so—”
He took my chin and lifted it, looking me in the eye. “It’s okay, Hope.”
With his free hand, he deftly unbuttoned his shirt, peeled it off and tossed it on the bed, never breaking eye contact. Thinking of that—throwing a vomit-covered shirt onto Benicio Cortez’s Egyptian cotton sheets—I had to bite back a surge of hysterical laughter. My eyes filled at the same time and I started shaking so badly I couldn’t breathe.
 
My mind was back in that room, wallowing in the chaos, gulping it down, seeing Troy…
A sudden vision shoved the memory aside. I was peering through bushes, watching a dark-haired young man on a restaurant patio, eating a burger with one hand, writing with the other, gaze fixed on a book. Something about him looked familiar.
The vision faded and I saw Troy again, dying. Then I saw him sitting across from me, laughing and flirting, and I was thinking what a nice guy he was, how he was someone I’d like to know better, someone I…
Wanted to watch die?
My stomach heaved, but there was nothing left.
Karl pulled my face back to his. I struggled to understand him.
“Focus on me, Hope. On what I’m showing you.”
His face swam in front of me, then vanished, and I was behind the bushes again. I could see my hand, holding back a branch as I peered through. My fingers were long and slender, masculine but smooth, not a child’s but not yet a man’s.
“Hey!” a voice boomed. “So this is where you’re hiding.”
The dark-haired man at the table lifted his head, lips curving in a crooked smile that finally made the recognition click. Jeremy Danvers, the werewolf Alpha. Another young man, thickset and muscular, grabbed him in a headlock, leaned over, snatched Jeremy’s drink, took a swig and made a face.
“Get this man a beer,” he called to two others stepping onto the patio.
“Next year,” Jeremy said. “When I can legally—”
“Stop being so damned proper. It’s hot. I’m buying you a beer. You’re drinking it.”
The man swung a chair around and plunked down.
“Please, sit, Antonio,” Jeremy said. “No, you aren’t interrupting my work at all.”
They continued bantering as the other young men joined them, but the conversation faded under the swirling emotions from the watcher. Envy. Longing. Loneliness. His fingers whitened on the branch as he strained to listen, lapping up the camaraderie from the patio, caught up in his feelings. Then others overlapped—those of an adult looking back on the memory. Regret, grief and guilt, as intense as the chaos of the panic room, and it swept me along, giving me something to feed on, a rich substitute devoid of moral consequences.
After a moment, though, it wasn’t enough and the shaking started anew, my chest constricting, breathing ragged—
“Focus, Hope. Focus on me.”
Another vision. This one black emptiness. Only voices. One I knew, but much younger than I’d ever heard it.
“You don’t understand, Dad.”
“Yes, I do. You’re the one who doesn’t. The Pack isn’t for us.”
“It’s for werewolves, isn’t it? And we’re werewolves. That’s how it’s supposed to be—living like that, with others, others like us. I feel it—”
“It’s an instinct. You have to fight it. Rise above it. It’s not a club with a special handshake, Karl. They won’t let us in. They’d kill us.”
“How do you know that if you’ve never tried?”
“I know. We have to stay out of their way. We have to—”