Page 112 of Death is Familiar

Taken away from the family you knew.

Your loss is felt, but you will be found.

Happy, content, with belly round.

Two is the longshot to give us an heir.

But you know what they say about grey eyes, dark hair.

†

I was calm for a time. Comforted by the ink-black silk wrapping around me like a blanket. I maintained my control. Didn’t look too far into Three’s lyrics, or the fact that she was singing about people instead of numbers. I was doing well.

On occasion, I even managed to reflect on the vamp case, which I chose to think of as some sort of accomplishment.

Mulling the details of the case over, I kept myself distracted for as long as I could manage. But without any new intel to go on, or a way to confirm my suspicions, my thoughts looped, and looped, and looped, prodding and poking at the details hoping to uncover who was responsible for the deaths of the familiars.

A serial killer, like Daemonica, would have been a real possibility, if it weren’t for the fact more than one person had been required to subdue and move the familiars, and that serial killers rarely, if ever, hunted in teams.

No, whoever was responsible for the murders had a sense of reality so distorted they believed vampires existed. Or at the very least, believed they were saving familiars by pumping them full of adrenaline. Which had to have started somewhere. Some inciting incident, had to have fed into the belief.

The mind was capable of many wonderful and frightening things in the name of self-preservation. Survivors of traumatic, and life-or-death, situations rarely came out unscathed. Dissociation was common.

Considering I was sitting at the bottom of my own mentally-constructed pit, I was one to talk.

Whispers reverberated within my pit’s pitch-black walls, seething with all of the thoughts I kept at bay. All of the words I didn’t want to speak. It wouldn’t do me any good to look too far into it anyway.

What if I pulled at the thread that unraveled the illusion of my pit, my safety net?

Everything was fine. Perfectly empty and perfectly nothing. Just what I needed, I could stay here indefinitely. Forever, even.

Until I got lonely.

I’m not sure precisely how long it took for me to realize that I needed companionship besides that offered by the darkness, but it materialized, and was soon a feeling I couldn’t shake.

Loneliness hounded me, surrounded me, filled my lungs, and poured out of me.

I needed to talk to someone, to process everything I’d been forced to swallow.

In the darkness, a figure took form.

I’d really done it now.

“I’m impressed.” It was a man, tall, dark, sharp jaw line, dragging an appreciative hand over the warm shadow walls.

Of course, of all people, Todd had appeared in my pit.

He gave me a familiar once over, before looking at the tunnel of light above us, where reality sat some distance away. “Have the walls started to speak yet?”

“Maybe.” My voice sounded strange, too loud.

He gave a knowing nod, then came and sat next to me. “You need to get out.”

I knew that. I did. But I needed to stay here a bit longer.

“Have I ever lied to you?”

I wasn’t going to grace that with an answer.