Page 86 of Pareidolia

I didn’t realize he wasn’t just some cheeky old asshole trying to scare his kids into being good—he was a fucking conspiracy theorist, some kind of cryptid chaser who actually knew more than he realized because he’d managed to pick a town where monsters actually lived?

What the fuck. The pictures on the wall seem to say as much, or had it only gotten worse after his son mysteriously disappeared?

Fuck, I’d done a number on him and I’d never realized it. Every smile he’d ever given me, all the times he said it was better that I was out of the forest…

Was this why?

“Always knew the thing in the woods took Rory. I never believed him until I saw it. It has you, Alex. He has you… has you, has you, has you… but I can save you.” He twists me around and presses me against the wall.

“He’s wrong,” I gasp, but I’m a terrible fucking liar. His dad isn’t wrong, and he’s not wrong that he saw Nox, but… “Please, Noah.”

“I have to save you, Alex…” His free hand is still blood soaked when it comes up to cup the side of my face, to stroke through my hair. He looks so strange as he stares at me with a reverence he never let shine through before.

Then again, his eyes were never a soft spiral of red and white and black.

“Noah…”

“Let me help you,” he whispers and twists the knife again.

“N-not helping. Killing me, Noah.”

“Same… same… it’s the same.”

He isn’t going to let me out of this room alive. I dig my fingers into his skin, but I already feel so weak.

This isn’t some movie, some fairy tale. There’s a knife in my gut, and the only reason I’m still alive at all is because Nox put a part of himself in me.

Even that’s not going to be enough—I can tell by the taste of metal at the back of my tongue, by the way it’s getting harder to draw a breath as Noah raises the knife and holds it to my throat, cutting the skin with fingers that tremble.

Fuck, I shouldn’t have kept the damn thing so sharp.

“Noah, please, I⁠—”

He leans in, pressing his mouth to mine in a kiss that trembles.

Crush.

He’d had a crush on me.

One touch and a person would turn to insanity…

I bite Noah’s lower lip as hard as I can, filling my mouth with his blood as he jerks back with a gasp.

He’ll have a scar, but I’ll still be just as dead.

“Get it out,” Noah says, not even bothering to wipe the blood from his chin. “Get it out, get it out, get it out.”

He’s looking at my chest again, at my tattoo. And then he flips the knife in his hand and sinks it into my pec at the top edge of the tattooed wing.

Get it out.

He drags the knife and I realize what he means to do—he’s going to fucking flay me.

“F… fuck.” I spit it out as Noah starts to drag the knife along the moth’s wing and those squirming, writhing tendrils beneath my skin feel like they’re burrowing into my spine. “The whole town is going to die for this.”

Good.

Fuck Duskfen. Nox will kill them all.