The tears are hot on my cheeks.
I’ve never been spoken to like that before. With contempt. Loathing. He despises me.
I almost feel I deserve it. If the Shadow Warrior is asking for help things must be really bad. From his point of view I’m a coward. Abandoning a teenage girl to probable death just so that I don’t get hurt. Leaving him to battle to protect her when he’s already badly wounded. But he doesn’t know why.
He wouldn’t understand anyway. He’s a vampire. Humans are just food to him. He’s got a code of honour, he keeps his word, but he doesn’t see the boundary that I’m not supposed to cross, and he doesn’t know that I have crossed it. I can never risk crossing it again.
Even if it costs innocent lives.
Oh God.
Suddenly I feel bile rising in my throat. Then I’m doubled over, vomiting onto the floor. Vomiting out everything. The way I did that summer, again and again, wishing that I could vomit out everything I’d eaten in the past three months. Waking up dreaming that I was vomiting. And in the dreams there were bones in the vomit.
Human bones.
Eleven blank weeks. Eleven weeks of being a mindless animal. Eleven weeks of being a thing. A monster.
Coming out of dark tormented dreams at last to find myself naked in the bracken, ripping at flesh with my claws and teeth.
It was a sheep, thank God. If it had been a human I’d have never regained even this fragile grasp on sanity. But I know they weren’t always sheep. I remember reading the newspaper back issues, and vomiting on the office floor when I found what I had most feared. Reports of three partially-eaten human corpses.
Eaten by me. There is nothing left in my stomach, but I continue to retch.
I can’t let it happen again.
Those things, whatever they are, managed to badly injure Jack of Shadows. If they can do it to him they can do it to me. They could take me down to that level where my mind shuts down and the Beast escapes.
The creature from the Ice Age to which humans are just an easy meal. Me.
I clean up the vomit. Luckily it was on the tiled floor rather than the carpet. I retch and heave again, but nothing comes up. I wash, and rinse out my mouth. Cold water on my face helps me to feel better for a while. Then I look at myself in the mirror, and I hate what I see. I start crying again.
The tears are hot on my cheeks.
FIN