Page 104 of Pareidolia

The feel of the banister beneath my fingers is nearly enough to make me shiver. Maybe coming here wasn’t such a good idea after all. I’m trying to avoid my baser impulses, trying to keep myself from killing someone else.

Not because I don’t want to be a bad person. I’d just nearly gotten caught the last time, and I’m too fucking pretty for prison. The last time had been when I was eighteen, and I’d fled all the way across the United States to make sure no one could tie me to the body.

But the first time…

My fingers clench on the banister and I drop forward, pressing my chest to the railing so I can look over the edge.

You really never forget your first time—nothing can quite live up to the thrill of it.

It’s been eight years. I was only fifteen… but when I close my eyes, I can picture it just as clearly as if it were happening in front of me.

His wide eyes when he realized I wasn’t as weak as he thought I was. The confusion when his back hit the railing and momentum carried him over the edge.

The horror in his eyes as he fell all the way down.

Down, down, down… crunch.

And I can remember how breathless I was. How the revulsion of being attacked gave way to something soft and tingling sweeping through my body…

Up until that point, my emotions had been mute, dull.

But when I pushed Rory over the railing, I felt my heart race for the first time.

And that more than anything else is why I can’t just kill people. I know how it makes me feel—I know how much I crave it.

If I give in to becoming that monster, I’ll never turn back. I’ll get caught because I’ll want it too much. I know myself well enough to know that impulse control is not my strong suit.

I’ll have to content myself with writing about it in the pages of my books while I quietly remember the way Rory’s scream had cut off in an abrupt, wet impact as he hit the ground. The shiver that passes through me leaves me helpless to the way my hand trails beneath my shirt, brushing against my bare skin. The touch tears a shiver along my spine and a little groan from my chest.

This is exactly why I can’t let myself just be the monster I know I could be. If I did, I’d end up getting addicted to the way just the memory of it sends tingles of pleasure through my stomach.

If I did, I’d never want to stop.

Fingers drift upward, tickling across my stomach, up toward my nipples, while my other hand grips the banister and I stare down at the ground below.

They never found his body. I had to assume that something bigger had dragged it off into the woods. But I could remember—I would always remember—the broken angle of his arm, the pool of red spilling out beneath him.

And the flash I saw in the forest.

Something huge.

Red on white.

My hand shifts from my pebbled nipples to the tattoo that spans across my collarbone.

I saw something that day—something with wings—and I still don’t have an explanation for it. Maybe it was my excited mind, overstimulated at fifteen and high on my first murder.

Or maybe it was something else.

Something big.

I just know when I close my eyes, I can still see the details in perfect clarity. When I look at myself without my shirt on, I can see it inked into my skin.

Something in the woods.

Something that carried off the body of my first victim.

Memories have me so caught up that I don’t hear the sound of someone on the stairs behind me until it’s too late. There’s a man standing there, his eyes wide and his face full of a strange mixture of fear and fury.