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“Do you feel regret when those memories grip you?”
I nodded. I was so cold, my breath was forming clouds of condensation as I exhaled. Zane stood behind me still, his presence warm on my back, and some silly part of me longed to lean back against him. Losing myself to memories was draining, like all my energy was being sapped away in those hard, painful heartbeats.
“I wish I’d run,” I said. “I wish I’d fought harder. God, I…” I stopped myself. I had to. I knew better than this, I knew better than to spill my guts. A demon like him would just use it against me, so I bit my tongue. “Of course I feel regret.”
He circled around and stood in front of me. The blade vanished from his hand, dissolving into the air, and for a moment, I was terrified that he’d changed his mind. He was going to reject me, he was going to refuse the deal, and what the hell would I do then?
Instead, he asked, “Would it ease your mind if you ran this time? If you fought? Would you feel better if I took your willing offer by force? If you run now, and I catch you…” He reached out, and I braced myself. His claws traced lightly over my throat, following the lines of my throbbing veins. “It will be exactly what you want.”
It made no sense towantto be overpowered, todesirebeing taken by force. But I knew what he meant. I’d sought out rough, kinky sex long enough that I understood it. I found comfort in being overpowered, so long as I’d chosen to be. I could pluck out the horror in my memories and reimagine it, make it mine.
Maybe my brain was even more shattered than I wanted to admit. But sometimes survival was fucked up, sometimes it was messy and broken. This world was full of strange things, full of pain, fear, and viciousness. I’d learned to take those things as my own.
“You want me to fight you,” I said. “But you know you’ll win.”
“As do you. You know how this game will go. You know the stakes. You know how it will end. But right now, you’re tangled up in knots of the past. You’re fighting your memories far more than you’ll fight me.”
It was as if hewantedme to feel safe. As if he wanted to find some way to make this comfortable for me. But that made no sense.
“You’re not trying to do me a kindness,” I said. “This is for your own gain.”
“Do my reasons matter? We’re both here because we want to be.” His pupils had swollen as he looked at me: the golden color of his eyes was merely a slim ring around a black void. “Giving up your soul is a form of destruction. Ripping yourself apart so that something new may come of it. That’s what you’ve chosen to do. I’m very fond of destruction, Juniper. When you belong to me, I get to destroy you again and again. Destroy the pain...the fear...the regret.”
How could I kill what couldn’t bleed, what I couldn’t grasp? I didn’t face my memories; I buried them.
I smiled bitterly. “You can’t fix me, you know.”
He shook his head as he stepped back into the shadows of the trees. “Fix you? Ah, little wolf, I have no desire to fix you. I just want to see all your broken edges shine. I want to feel how sharp you are.” He was shrouded in darkness now: all I could see of him was his eyes, and his sharp grinning teeth.
Slowly, I took my knife back out from its sheath. I didn’t trust him; the idea was absolutely ludicrous. Yet I was still here. I was still offering my soul. Was there trust in that? “I can’t pretend to fight. If you tell me to fight you, I will.”
“I hope so. I want to see my little wolf bite.”
I’d been alone for years. Not once, in all that time, had someone reached out to my disastrous, broken self and said, “This one is mine. This one is what I want.” I was only fit for Gods and monsters, and I’d always run from them.
But this monster was something different. Something strange. This one I couldn’t escape from, because I didn’t want to.
So I ran.
Running opened the floodgates, and panic swept in.
It gripped every inch of me. It took my muscles and squeezed them, like cruel fingers digging into me, painful and unshakeable. It placed an anvil on my lungs, so every breath was too shallow, and the air wasn’t enough. My head was cold; cold and light like a balloon on the verge of popping.
Panic is a strange thing, when you’ve felt it for so long. It never feels normal; it feelsfamiliar. It becomes an unpleasant friend, one I wanted to leave behind but was also alarmed by the absence of. To not feel panic would have been suspicious. It would have meant I’d let my guard down too much, I’d let myself get too comfortable.
Panic kept me safe. Panic kept me angry. Panic kept me fighting.
It wasn’t even Zane I feared. It wasn’t the deal I’d asked for that filled me with terror like this. It was hooks in my flesh dragging me back through years, back to a place when I’d had no power nor choice...
I was trembling with exhaustion as I grasped the muddy wall of the shaft again, sobbing as I tried to pull myself up. But my arms were shaking so violently that I slipped back down. Down into the dark.
I wasn’t alone down here. There should have been no life, no sound, no movement...but I could hear their rough breathing, their growling. Their hulking forms moved in the dark, circling me. I clutched my arms around my bleeding chest, shaking violently, whispering to myself, “No. No, no...no…”
There were white eyes in skeletal heads, black tongues, and sharp fangs that dripped gray, putrid saliva at the sight of me. And in the deepest shadows there were creatures as pale as the moon itself, skin so translucent the throbbing red membranes of their insides were visible through it.
That awful voice was calling my name. Calling me deeper into the dark.
I paused. I pressed my back against the thick trunk of a tree and ground my fist against the rough bark until my skin burned. This wasn’t the same, I had to remember that. I was here by choice. It was like my brain had been split in half; one half fighting for reality, the other striving to drag me back into memories.
