Page 123 of Pareidolia

I could show you.

Fucking stupid “probably not a hallucination” monster.

“Yeah, whose?”

Noah’s grin widens, showing off his straight, white teeth. “Mine.”

“Of course. Ranger Daniels.”

He laughs. “Honestly, I’m just glad there’s someone maintaining it now so I don’t have to haul myself up there once a week to make sure no one’s vandalized it. Besides, you might decide you like it here enough to stay.” He bumps into my shoulder and my arm twitches. Something pulses through me—a low, strange sensation that I don’t understand. An undercurrent of something that starts at the tips of my fingers and arrows into my chest, and I realize it happened because Noah’s bare arm brushed against a little sliver of my exposed skin.

A flood of copper in my mouth is the only thing that makes me realize I’m biting on the inside of my cheek to stop myself from saying something I shouldn’t, from jerking away… from pushing him into the back of the damn store and using my hammer to crack his head open so I can fucking understand the warmth on his face, the tingle that spilled up my arm.

I could show you.

Those words echo in my head again and I have to bite harder, force the soft temptation out of my mind… but it’s there, writing the promise along my veins as things beneath my skin start to squirm again. They strain, like they’re trying to burst free to go back to the forest.

Back to the trees—to the earth.

To death, to rot.

To Nox.

“I…” I frown. What the fuck am I actually doing? I’ve spent my entire life chasing the high of how I felt when I killed Rory Daniels, chasing the emotion that I saw on his face as he fell.

I’ve spent my entire life wanting to understand—wanting to feel—wanting to know.

I could show you.

Everything I’ve ever wanted, right at my fingertips—or at the clawed tips of Nox’s—and I’d walked away because… what? Because I was worried about the way he’d said the word home.

Ridiculous. He couldn’t make me into a home any more than Noah Daniels could as he smiles at me, any more than my parents had been able to before they realized they had a fucked-up mess as their only child.

He couldn’t change me. No one could change me.

“Can we actually raincheck on the grocery shopping?” I try to sound a little contrite, but I know I’m probably failing miserably. “I know it seems ridiculous, but I just got an idea and I don’t want to lose it.” When Noah’s brows come together and he frowns, I sigh. “Writer, remember? We have to take inspiration where we can get it.”

Apparently that also means following monsters into the forest, even though there’s a very real chance it’s going to kill me when it realizes there’s nothing inside me worth eating.

“Oh, right.” His expression melts back into fondness just as quickly as the concern came, and the way he so easily shifts from one emotion to the next convinces me more than anything that I’m making the right decision.

I could show you.

His words are drawing me back to the Duskfen Forest like a siren, and I’m tired of pretending I’m the kind of person who would ever have the self-restraint to ignore their call.

Of course, when Noah drops me off after insisting on carrying the boards up to the fire tower for me, there’s no one in the little cabin. Nox is still just as gone now as he was the second Noah showed up. It’s not doing the best for my little “you aren’t crazy and imagining things, Aspen” theory, but as soon as I insist he can come another day to help me rebuild the railing and I hear Noah’s footsteps disappearing back down the stairs, I rip off my glove.

The red glow is still there, and those black tendrils are squirming beneath my skin so it looks like my veins are made of tiny, dark, writhing snakes. I clench my fingers and let out a groan. The anxious, unsettled feeling is starting to fade now that I’m back at the fire tower, but it’s still there, an undercurrent beneath my pulse that’s demanding I fix this.

That I find the promise.

I could show you.

My eyes flick to the broken railing outside the window, to the forest behind it where I’d seen that flash of white and red. I drop my gloves onto the counter and check to make sure Noah’s nowhere in sight before I start down the stairs. I look at the leaves on the ground when I get to the bottom of the tower, to the place where blood had soaked into the earth, even though the forest had already consumed any evidence that I’d killed at all.

Ahead of me, the wind makes the trees groan, the leaves rustle… and with a silent acknowledgement that my survival instincts really are as weak as a wet paper towel, I make my way deeper into the forest, to the place I’d seen that red and white flash eight years ago, to the place I’d seen it last night.

I could show you.