Page 85 of Pareidolia

Almost as fast as a moth’s wings.

“Save you. I can save you. Cut it out.”

Save me?

Save me from what?

My gaze flicks to the forest.

Nox.

Nox is there.

I wonder if he can feel the way my blood slips down my stomach, how it’s wet and sticky when it trails into my pants and slicks along my thighs.

I wonder if those shadows inside me, those squirming, living things, are going to try to find their way back to him when I bleed out. It’s different this time. Different because it isn’t Nox hurting me.

We spill through the door with the knife still in my stomach, and Noah’s free hand tears at the buttons of my shirt. They rip away with little pop pop pops as they fall to the floor, accompanied by the wet drops of my blood.

When I look down, I see the black, squirming things that live beneath my skin clinging to the blade buried in my stomach, desperately trying to keep the liquid that should be in my body inside me.

Nox tearing me open so many times is probably the only reason I’m alive right now.

That’s not what Noah is looking at, though. He’s glaring at the tattoo on my chest, the one that’s squirming and glowing, like it’s the devil himself.

“Look… he has you. Alex,” he whispers, frantically staring at my chest, his eyes pinched around the edges with terror. “Has you, has you? Has you. Under your skin. Crawling like bugs. I can hear them scratching against the metal. Tick… tick, tick tick tick.” He twists the knife, angling it up and making me scream. “Have to root it out.”

Nox had talked about it, how he didn’t touch a human he didn’t kill because seeing him, experiencing his shadows, would break their mind.

One touch to insanity if he left them alive.

He’d left Noah alive, and I’d never thought to ask him what the consequences would be.

I’m learning now.

“If I open you up, he won’t be behind your eyes.” Noah’s voice is wild and a little desperate. I can feel it, even though I can’t feel my own fingertips anymore… the desperation he has to protect me, even though whatever Nox did to him made him so mad that he thinks this is the way to do it. “I can see it squirming just under your skin. Alex… Alex, you were so good. So good, so beautiful.” The knife slips inside me, more intimate than any human has ever touched me. “Still so beautiful.”

Fuck, is this what dying feelings like?

“Noah, s-stop. I’m not. I—” The blade slides into my skin again as he kicks the front door closed and drags me into his living room.

His arm around me is the only thing that’s keeping me upright, and it’s probably the only thing that stops me from fainting when I see it.

All along the walls are drawings—drawings of wings, red and white and black.

Blurry photos of Duskfen Forest with streaks of red amongst the leaves.

Pictures of shadows.

Pictures of nothing.

But I know what he’s trying to see.

“What?”

“My dad always knew,” Noah whispers. When I try to squirm, he twists the knife deeper.

“Knew?” My entire childhood, Ewan Daniels had talked about the thing in the forest like it was a real monster, like it was something he’d seen before. Rory told me how his dad would be pissed if we snuck into the woods, but that made it the perfect place to go because he’d never think we’d go there.