The Amaryllis

by Alyssa Adamson

  I didn’t need to see another. His body shook from the trauma of the last, arms pulled to his chest, eyes wide and terrified. “Hey! That’s enough!” I snapped, shoving by them to fall beside his bed. He stared through the ceiling, only barely conscious. “Phil, I’m here. Can you hear me?”

  “Edy?” his voice barely cracked. “I’m scared. And I…I’m cold.”

  My heart broke. “I’m going to fix you, okay? I’m going to help you. And then everything will go back to normal, okay?”

  “Miss, you have to move.”

  “Someone, get her out of here!”

  I ignored them. “Just a little touch. And we can be together again.”

  “Don’t,” he whimpered. “Edy, please. Let me go.”

  I stilled with my hand mere inches from his skin. As my eyes held his, they burned with traitor tears. “You wouldn’t live for me?”

  His eyes unfocused, looking through me instead of at me. “You deserve better than what I would become if I lived.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Despite his clear blindness, I swore he smiled up at him, if only slightly. “I’ll finally be worthy of you.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I demanded. Phil beseeched me with a stare that filled with moisture. Tears brewed and ran over his cheeks. “Phil? Phil!”

  The burn of his life flickered across my brain, like a candle caught in the breeze. Staring up at me, fingers twitching around mine, he tried to speak but words wouldn’t emerge. I clung to him, willing the air that threatened him away. Willing him to live.

  “Eden?” Phil’s grip on my hand only slackened. Nevertheless, he managed to smile at me through the thickness of tears. “Do you think…” he murmured, “if we’d had more time…could you have loved me?”

  I gripped him with all the strength I had left. “I already do.”

  Then, the wind blew a little too hard, and the candle blew out.

  21. Grey

  I stared into those eyes long after they faded from bright crimson to an almost human shade of brown. My fingers curled more tightly around his hand. Tighter. Tighter. I didn’t know why. Because I thought I’d float away without his touch to buoy me? Because I thought it would anchor his soul in this body?

  His skin turned a cement-like shade of grey.

  I outstretched the tendrils of my sixth sense, searching for the taste of his consciousness. “Phil?” I hissed. “Phil!”

  His eyes didn’t shut. His lips didn’t move. He laid there. Still. Silent. Grey.

  And I felt nothing. No pain. No sadness. No fatigue. The bed before me had become a void, as though no one laid there at all.

  Behind me, the chaos of the ER slowed to a stop. A nurse packed away the defibrillator. An EMT backed away from the cot. From beyond the cotton that obstructed my eardrums, I barely made out the sound of a doctor speaking. “Four o’ three p.m.”

  My fingers froze up, rigor mortis seeming to set into my bones. While I blinked, tears making my eyes burn, a sharp, stabbing pain kicked me in the middle and threatened to rip me in two. “No,” I whispered. Shaking my head, I bit down on my lip until I tasted blood. “No.”

  A hand found my shoulder and squeezed. Its owner’s concern wafted over me. “Miss? I think it would be best if you sat down.”

  I chewed on my cheek. It would be best if I took the doctor’s hand and fed until I could bring life back into Phil’s body…no. No it wouldn’t. It would be best if those crimson eyes would blink back into awareness. It would be best if this nightmare would just end.

  But no matter how much I wanted…I couldn’t. Phil hadn’t wanted to live on stolen time. I had to respect that, even if I couldn’t understand it; even if I didn’t agree with it. If the only comfort I could take was in the peace it gave him to die a moral mortal man, I couldn’t take that from him.

  I wouldn’t.

  My shoulders shook with my sobs. I didn’t know how to answer him, so I didn’t. But as the convulsing took over my body, I managed to release Phil’s hand and collapsed backward onto the cold floor. My fingers crept over my eyes. From somewhere deep within the cavern of my chest, I was sure my heart had just erupted into a million crimson glass shards.

  That grip didn’t leave my shoulder. The doctor, heavily bedecked in his white coat and scrubs, stared down at me with a growing look of sympathy. “Please, miss. Let’s get you to a chair so I can call your mom.”

  I blinked, blinding myself with a grey haze in time with another kick to my middle. Arms wrapping around my middle, lungs collapsed, I bent over myself while I waited for this pain to subside but it resisted.

  It felt…cold. Familiar.

  Just like that, Lily’s face surfaced in my mind.

  Across the room, a stand of equipment rattled. Scalpels shook themselves over the edge, crashing against the floor in a cacophony of metallic clinks. The hand slipped from my shoulder as the doctor looked out across the ER. The bodies of staff slowed. Patients glanced about in minor panic. Personal items shook off desks and beds and the rungs of curtains slid from their rods.

  The Earth beneath our feet quaked.

  A high-pitched screech grew in my skull, easily drowning out the cries of, “Earthquake!” I covered my ears, curling into myself in defense. The circle of my own embrace could provide my only safety now. The outside world brought only pain.

  The doors slammed open, leaving rectangular dents in the wall. Before I met eyes with the figure standing in the doorway, I heard his voice, somehow devoid of its usual, mocking overtones. “Eden Graves!”

  Gregory Bronwyn narrowed his eyes down at me. His head jerked either way, scoping out the mortals around the room. With mere twitches of his fingers, strangers rose off the ground, some flying through the doorway and into the hall, others hitting walls. Those of the latter fell to the floor and slid across the tile.

  He strode through the destruction of his own making, unperturbed by the screams that followed his victims into the neighboring corridor. As the last of them, the doctor who’d worked over Phil, vanished, the doors shut and locked. Then, came the silence.

  Crossing the ER in less than ten steps, he shoved me aside, taking my place at Phil’s left hand. He grabbed his chin between his fingers with frantic purpose. The seconds ticked on. Gregory released him, arm returning slowly to his side. “You didn’t help him.”

  The tears made my throat sticky, words garbled as though they emerged through glue. “He told me not to.”

  “And you listened?” He rounded on me with arm outstretched, fingers curling around my windpipe. He hauled me off the ground. “You had to be so honorable? He’s dead now. He’s dead because of you.”

  I choked back my retort. I couldn’t argue what I already knew and the hand he held to my throat disallowed all sound. I gasped for breath.

  Spinning on his heel, he thrust his arm outward, striking the wall with my dangling body. The fragile wood buckled in the shape of my silhouette. Gregory’s lips met my throat, dragging upward until they bit at my ear. My head spun, stars speckling my sight, body demanding oxygen.

  “It would seem that you and I have a mutual goal again, little sister.”

  My body crumbled, fatigue coursing through my veins. Pain pounded behind my eye. The feeling of impending death hit me hard and unnaturally, like a grape drying up in the sun. I kicked at Gregory, rearing back into the wall. “What’re you doing?”

  “You’re going to help me save Philly-boy.”

  Mustering up whatever strength remained in my hands, I pried myself free of his grip and fell, breathless, to the floor. In the same fluid motion—as fluid as I could be, given the muddled state of my brain—I jumped to my feet and out of his reach.

  Gregory snickered. He laughed hard and loud and humorlessly, pacing away from me with head dropped in his hands. “I knew I should’ve killed you. All would be as it should be if I’d just killed you.”

  “Phil made his own choices,” I muttered, though I d
idn’t know if I meant it.

  “If not for Phil, I would’ve left you to die in that wreck,” he said without inflection. Without feelings. Without remorse. “It would’ve been a lot easier than listening to the brooding and the shame and the disgusting wish for mortality. It would’ve done him better to let you die, but he wouldn’t have it and I should have known it.” He hesitated, a haunted look coming over him. “I should’ve stopped that nonsense when I heard him mention you at that damned flower shop.”

  I backed away. Gregory had always looked somewhat crazed, but, at the moment, his eyes screamed unhinged.

  “’So unlike all the others,’ he told me. The light at the end of the tunnel. A drop of sunlight.” He shook his head. “Now you’re walking around and he’s dead.”

  “Killing me isn’t going to save him, Greg,” I squeaked.

  “And if it could? Would you?”

  My back met the furthest wall. Probing with my hand, I found the door handle and seized the opportunity for escape. The locks held tight. “Let me out.”

  “Lost interest so soon?”

  “Let me out!”

  “Now that you can’t bleed him dry, you can forget all about him?” An invisible force gripped me like a giant hand around my waist, lifting me off the floor and into open air. I clung to the door handles as the pull grew, wanting very much to fling me across the room. “Well you’ve done just enough damage, little sister. It’s about time you face the consequences!”

  My fingers lost their grip on the cold metal, arms flailing to reaffirm some grip. Instead, the wind whipped through my hair, journey ending hard against the wall. My lungs collapsed. My knees met the ground.

  I gasped for breath, looking up at Gregory. “What the hell are you doing—?”

  He convulsed, body twitching and contorting around crunching bone. The ends tore through flesh, sending it falling to the floor in tatters. Gregory reached through the openings in his bloody outer shell like the sleeves of a t-shirt. With mouth growing steadily more agape, I watched as limbs like a corpse swathed in reptilian scales stretched out in my direction, fingers curling toward me in beckoning.

  His face stripped away, second skin peeling off the true, dark outline of his skull. Aside from the glowing, red orbs hiding within the dark abyss of his eye sockets, nothing remained of Gregory. At least, not the Gregory I knew. This creature resembled something more akin to a seven-foot-tall emaciated dog than anything close to human.

  I couldn’t get a grip on the floor, so engrossed in trying to bolt. “Dear God!”

  Bony fingers curled around the material of my shirt, lifting me easily off the ground. Gregory fit me into the Eden-shaped dent in the wall and thrust me against the hard tile. Once. Twice. Three times.

  Drool dripped over my busted lip, mingling with blood courtesy of my splintering teeth. All around me, the blue wall swirled into a haze. The world spun. If not for the smell of lilies, of comfort, of Camellias, I wouldn’t have known that he’d turned me to face him.

  “If you close your eyes, you won’t feel a thing.”

  It was probably the concussion that told me to listen to him. After all, what was the point of fighting anymore. I couldn’t match up against a creature like him. And a relief from the pain would feel…nice.

  My body slackened, more ragdoll than person. My ears retreated into ringing. I waited for the dark, and then the dark came.

  From somewhere beyond the ringing and the muttered words, came a metallic clang.

  The world around me returned in bits and pieces. First, the cold of the floor under my face. The smells: rubbing alcohol, linens, and death. Then, the monster of what was Gregory, doubled over beneath the towering figure of one Lily Bronwyn, armed with a bent, metal bedpan.

  She looked nothing like herself. The Lily I knew was detached. Emotionless. I might’ve imagined I’d see her watch Gregory choke the life out of me with no care either way how I met my end.

  This Lily sobbed. With face streaked with tears and chest heaving, her agonized wails echoed against the walls.

  She chewed on her lip, whimpers easing between her teeth as she tried to calm down. By the time she spoke, it was only in a whisper. “Phil is dead.”

  Gregory shook his head like a smacked dog. “Lily?”

  She reared back with bedpan still held tightly in hand. This time, when she hit him, he fell, crashing into two beds that, then, collapsed in a heap of linen. “And you still can’t find an ounce of humanity in you for all of your years spent eating it!”

  He sat up, a multitude of bruises across his ghastly temple healing up before my eyes. He bared his teeth. “Humanity isn’t going to save Phil, Lilith.”

  “Humanity would be understanding that he doesn’t want to be saved.”

  She tried to strike him again but one of his clawed hands caught her wrist, holding her over the floor. “Your defect doesn’t change my mind.” He smiled up at me. “You both must be truly weak, after all. Falling for pretty words from the King of Lies. For all his talk of sacrifice and morality, do you think any of that matters now? Phil is dead. He can’t benefit from this crusade from the abyss. He might not like that I have given him life, but he will get over it. He will be just as he was before this place.”

  He shifted his monstrous gaze to Lily, but she didn’t look afraid. She didn’t even flinch.

  “Would you rather give your life for him, sister? I suppose it doesn’t matter which of you does.”

  “You could kill me,” she deadpanned. “But you won’t.”

  “Oh?” He leaned into her face until his breath blew wisps of hair over her shoulders. “That is news to me.”

  “Why do you care to bring him back, Gremory? You’ve never cared before.”

  All the while I staggered to my feet, gripping the wall for support, I wondered what she thought she would gain by trying to convince him. It was as she had said: Gregory had no humanity. He wouldn’t be swayed.

  But as her hand came up, closing around the bony wrist that held her, things began to click. Was she—could she be—feeding on him?

  No. Her grey skin proved that she got none of the sustenance that was sure to be pulsing so potently through his inhuman form. So what was she doing…?

  “Phil’s death weakens us all. Can you not feel it through your Fade?” he sneered.

  “Of course I feel it. I feel loss. The loss of my brother.”

  “Brother,” he laughed. “What have you become? Nothing of my kind. Nothing of my kind would bow like some worm. Loss? How do you even know what this loss would feel like?”

  “I know it well.”

  Gregory shook his massive head. “You are ruined, Lilith. Evolution says I should stomp you into the ground. Another pathetic mortal.”

  The tears made her eyes shine. “For all of our time together, you would end me so quickly?”

  His spit coated her cheeks. Arm twitching, he snapped her wrist. “With the snap of my fingers.”

  She didn’t cry. Barely a groan rumbled in her chest.

  “Leave her alone!” I whimpered.

  He dropped her. Lily crumpled like a Halloween store skeleton.

  “Little sister,” he croaked. “I’m sorry. You must feel awfully left out.” He glanced between us. “Perhaps I should kill you both. Save myself the trouble.”

  Through the massive headache clouding my mind, I found the metronomic tick of the clock on the wall pressing forward. If I squinted hard enough, I could make that short hand point ever-closer to five. No windows gave us view to the outside world, but I thought that meant sunset had to be closing in.

  A plan clicked into place.

  “You know you can’t kill her, Greg,” I snapped. “If one sibling dead weakened you so badly, what would make you want to kill another?”

  I tried to walk, keeping both hands on the wall and my gaze on Lily’s motionless body.

  Gregory’s body shook with chuckles that sounded more manic by the second. “The dog barks. She barks
and she barks but what is she saying? What does she know? This thing,” he gestured to Lily’s limp form, “has weakened me far longer than I should’ve allowed.” Turning the full force of crimson eyes on me, he continued, “Will you do the same?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw it in life and I see it in death. You love Phil. Which baffles me. Why, if you love him, are you leaving him to rot?” he giggled.

  “He asked me—”

  He held up a long, clawed forefinger to stop me. “But I won’t sit here deciphering the thought processes of pups. I don’t care why you do what you do. I’ll do what I came here to do. And you will help me do it.”

  Lily lifted her head, eyes meeting mine across the room. She nodded.

  “It’s not happening.”

  She grabbed his ankle with her unbroken hand, pulling him backward so he looked down. In the same moment, I threw myself at him, arms winding around his neck so I could haul myself to his level. My mouth fell over his, lips meeting…whatever blackened flesh bordered his mouth. Surprise made him stiff, claws wrapped in the back of my shirt. Pulling me away or holding me to close, I didn’t know.

  Kissing him made me sick. Mostly because it didn’t make me sick when it absolutely should have. This was Gregory beneath me, fingers curled into my shirt. Not Phil. Not a human.

  A monster.

  But my demonic sensibilities didn’t care. They didn’t even notice. All they wanted was the delicious taste of power that Gregory had in spades. Power that flowed into me like a waterfall. Power that filled me from the swell of my lip to the tips of my fingers.

  With that power came the acrid taste of rage. His was a palpable sort, more akin to battery acid in my veins than any feeling I’d ever known from another.

  But in many ways, it felt…right. This was who I was supposed to be. The monster. The devil. The Gregory.

  And, for this one moment, I relished in the guiltlessness. I relished in the potent taste of my self.

  I relished in being the devil, instead of his helpless victim.

  He shoved me back, weakening limbs forcing me into the wall with a force that barely put a dent in the wall. Unlike before, where flying through the air felt too fast to see, I pinpointed every dust mite in the air. Every movement he made looked almost human. By the time my back struck tile in a spray of dust and broken shards, I expected it and dropped harmlessly to my feet.