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The lights shut off.
There was a cry of rage as someone attacked Tate.
The cage next to mine rattled once, then twice, and again.
It sounded like the man inside was throwing himself at the bars wildly, and he’d hurt himself if he weren’t careful. The woman in the cage was screaming at him to stop, and Mike was calling out my name. I squeezed my eyes shut, thinking that, somehow, I was going to be electrocuted. Did Tate have a backup? But it didn’t happen. I remained still, soaked to the bone and shivering from fear and cold, but alive. I should be relieved, but I don’t think I had it in me to feel much of anything anymore. This is all too much for someone to take. If it were just Mike and me in a quiet room with only each other’s company, we could talk and sort this out. I could ask questions, and he could reassure me that the monster was not who he really was. But this was chaos, and all I could say for sure was that I was alive.
Opening my eyes, it took me a moment to adjust to the dim light. The building may be a shell, but we were still undercover, and only dapples of the remaining daylight came through.
Inside, my heart was in shreds.
Was Mike the one who had attacked Tate?
Was he okay?
Did I even care if he wasn’t?
Of course, I cared, and I hated that I cared. Part of me wondered if he’d used some demon power shit to make me care, but was that even a thing? I couldn’t ask. There was no time to ask, no time for questions or to adjust. There was me captive and Mike coming to rescue me.
My cage rattled violently as Mike hit the side of it, his eyes a wild yellow, darting around the room and back to me before settling on the lock that held the door tight. With a snarl, he grabbed the lock, his fingers elongated with more joints than they should have, and skin popping with dots of a deep black, a black that could only come from nothingness, the complete lack of light and hope. It was spreading over his skin, creeping through his veins and spilling out, taking over.
He was changing, and I was going to see the monster.
When the lock snapped as easily as if it had been made of plastic, he swung the door open violently, ripping it from its hinges and discarding it to the side. I flinched at the sound of it hitting the floor, the metal on concrete. There were sounds of a struggle behind Mike, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He loomed over me, wild and uncontrolled, and continued to change into the worst part of him.
“Mike…” I whispered. That worked in the movies, didn’t it?You talked to them and reminded the monster that they had humanity inside them.
But he didn’t stop.
For the briefest of seconds, his eyes turned back to gray.
But it didn’t hold, and his elbows popped, the joints jerking the wrong way before slamming back again, and large curved bone-like appendages forcing themselves through his skin from his elbows and the backs of his wrists. I tried saying his name again, but there was no change this time, not even a hint that Mike was in there somewhere.
In coming to save me, he had lost control.
I had done this to him.
Torn between wanting to reach out to him while I could still see his face, the man I knew, and wanting to cower against the bars behind me before I could decide what to do, Mike was slammed to the side.
Tate came at me, brandishing a blade.
I had no chance.
He reveled in the moment the blade penetrated my torso, pulling it out with equal vigor and swinging it over his head in an arc before moving to bring it back down. Droplets of my blood flew off the blade, and I watched them in slow motion, transfixed and barely feeling the second stab.
Where was Mike?He said he would always take care of me and protect me. In slow motion, the blade came down for a third strike, and I wanted to tense before the impact, but the strength of my muscles was waning and beyond my control. The impact never came as Tate was thrown from me, and Mike and Emrick were inside the cage, moving around each other in the space not designed for so many. Mike was back in his human form, back to the man I let myself feel something for.
Back to protect me.
Turning my head to the side, I watched as Emrick wrestled with Tate over the blade. Emrick was laughing, and the sound was dark and disturbing. “I knew you’d be a fighter.” He gyrated his hips obscenely, and Tate cried out in rage.
“You’re such a sick fuck!”
Mike attempted to clamber over Tate and Emrick to get to me, and Tate snatched at his arm. Everyone was a tangle of limbs and violence, and my vision was hazy. I couldn’t make sense of it.
“I’ll never stop, lover. You know that…” Tate crooned, grabbing at Mike and not letting go. His expression was manic, a wildness to his eyes beyond the yellowing, “… and you can’t kill me.”
Emrick snatched the blade from Tate’s grip, and Tate’s eyes widened, ignoring the chaos surrounding him as he realized...
