The pain hadn’t been this bad a moment ago. Her head had hurt all day, but now the war raging inside her skull flared into her vision. The coffee shop looked too bright.
In one sudden moment all the chaos about school and the world and her mom fell away.
Nausea welled up.
Her mouth opened. Pain-fueled words about how Gavin should stop patronizing her because he just made it worse wanted to spill out. Sentences about the future and the past and how right now in the present she felt like she was going to throw up and she’d get control of her ADHD and he could be as mad as he wanted but he didn’t have the right to—
Blades of blinding light stabbed behind her left eye. Terrible, hideous light coming out of nowhere and burning like she’d looked directly at the sun.
“What the hell?” she gasped. A real gasp, one that, in a split second, forced air all the way down into the base of her lungs. Her hands clutched her forehead.
This wasn’t withdrawal symptoms because she missed her meds. Her brain just exploded. She was going to keel over in this little coffee shop under the Continuing Education Building and that would be the end of everything and she’d die.
Spots popped into her vision and floated like wiggly balloons between her and Gavin. They churned, each one its own burning, liquid universe. The spots didn’t look real but she knew if she touched one, it would ignite and fire would spurt onto her hand.
A spot ruptured. Her nose filled with an acid stench so overpowering she stopped breathing.
One word overrode everything: Aneurism.
“Gavin…” She choked out the whisper. Her gut mirrored the pain behind her eye, squirming with an infestation of the fire bubbles. They burst in her stomach and ate her flesh. She’d have retched but the muscles of her belly and chest didn’t move. They wouldn’t respond. They—
Gavin stood up and pointed at the screen behind her head. He hadn’t noticed her panic. “A gas station in Stillwater exploded!”
Half an hour from campus. Her chair knocked over when she turned toward the screen. The seatback scraped against the concrete floor and a nauseating metallic screech filled the coffee shop. The sound rasped against her ears, solid and touchable, like the spots. It hung in the air around her limbs, a new phantom weighing her down.
Gavin stared at the screen behind her head. The freshman server behind the counter stared at her.
“What’s happening?” Her lips formed the words, but her ears didn’t hear. No vocalizations left her throat.
Gavin’s gaze jumped from the screen to her and his face blanched. He shouted at the freshman. His mouth moved, his words forming, but she didn’t understand. Something about calling 911.
Gavin, the freshman who stared at her with terror-filled eyes, the coffee shop’s ugly halogen lighting, the darkening evening outside—it all spun. The planet got on a carnival ride and left her standing alone in the void.
She blinked. Warm air hit her nose as she pushed through the shop’s door. The spots took on a sharpness that would rip her to shreds if she didn’t get away. Their edges would slice and fiends would eat her whole.
The world fuzzed out as if someone had slapped a dirty bandage over her eyes. Where her feet landed, she didn’t know.
A spot burst and a memory flashed: Her mother this morning at the kitchen counter watching the television. She’d rubbed her knuckles and Rysa had wrapped her arm around her shoulder. “Go to class,” her mom said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Don’t hit me!” Gavin yelled.
Her hand hurt. Her nails dug into the real skin of her real palm. Gavin staggered back into the evening gloom, his nose bloody. But—
Did she hit him? He glared at her like she was some kind of monster.
“I don’t… I d-don’t understand,” she stuttered. They stood on the hill, half way between the coffee shop and the student parking lot, standing under the streetlight where the path intersected the walk from one of campus barns. But she didn’t remember—
Another spot burst. Her vision filled with orange and hot yellow dropping over the world like a curtain.
She stood alone in the yellow bull’s-eye of a different streetlight. This one flickered like a strobe, buzzing and popping like it was about to explode. Her eyelids fluttered rapidly as her eyes adjusted to the pulsing shadows. The pressure in her head ratcheted and—
How the hell did she get into the student parking lot three blocks from the shop? She was losing time. Losing her sense of space. She felt like she was dying. She had to be. Her body dragged her out here to commit suicide and she couldn’t stop it.
A man, tall and lanky like Gavin, walked toward her between the hand-me-down cars, his step bouncing as if he was about to break into a tango. He wore red running shoes and a black nylon jacket over a blaze orange t-shirt—the fabric version of the damned fire-spots eating her mind.
He stopped a few feet away, a deep inhale bowing out his chest. His hand swept in front of his nose and he sniffed the air like some cartoon character breathing in fancy perfume. Another inhale and his head tilted at an angle that should have popped every vertebra in his neck.
“Who…” she stammered. Where was Gavin? “What…”
“Right where you’re supposed to be.” The man’s thick British accent made his words sound almost unrecognizable.
The same caustic stench from the ghost spots rose off his skin.
Real stench. She gagged, her lips and nose curling in a futile attempt to keep the chemical sewage rolling off this creature out of her lungs.
His teeth gleamed in the dim parking lot light. “The hubris of your kind.” He shook his head, tisking. “Calling yourselves Fates. You see the future but you know nothing.” He grabbed her arm.
“Let go of me!” The man made no sense and she hyper-focused on his fluorescing mouth, ignoring everything else. His teeth glinted, sharp and too bright. They’d rip her apart if they got near her skin.
She really was dying. Will die. The weirdness in her head bled into the real world and this man was its manifestation. All the spots, all the phantom smells—they were about to kidnap her. For real.
Her vision jigged like she’d changed the channel for a microsecond and then switched back to what she had been watching before. But in that microsecond, in that very brief flash when she saw something she knew wasn’t really there, she saw the man lean forward to bite her shoulder.
Bite and rip flesh and take himself a right good snack.
Her chest tried to fill with air and her throat tried to constrict to make as loud a high-pitched noise as it could, but only a whisper came out: “Ghoul.”
He grinned at her with his razor-sharp teeth. A loud sniff rushed into his nose. “You smell tasty, luv. I might take myself a nip now, before you finish activating.” He licked his lips.
“Activating?” She wasn’t dying of a brain aneurism. She didn’t know why, or what it meant, but the word held truth.
Ratty fingerless gloves clamped over her mouth and nose. “You’re a bit of a freak, aren’t you? Can’t hold still. Stay normal for a moment longer, darling.”
“Let her go!” Gavin jumped the lot fence, his feet pumping as he landed.
New panic flooded in, different from what she felt for herself. The ghoul will kill Gavin. The scene played through the pressure behind her eyes: He’ll lock onto her friend’s throat. He’ll feel a surge of hunger and he’ll salivate like an animal. Then his hands will cook Gavin’s flesh.
Run! she signed. Go!
The slow dread of certainty fizzled through her consciousness, as heavy as the stink wafting off the man. Something bad was about to happen. Something as terrible as this ghoul.
Gavin halted like he’d run into a wall. He gagged, bending forward. The stench must have hit his nose.
“He your boyfriend?” The hand over her mouth loosened.
“Please don’t hurt him.” The ghoul could take her, but Gavin had a life ahead of him. He’d do good. Become a wonderful do
ctor.
The ghoul’s eyes narrowed and his head tilted again as he peered at Gavin. He flicked his chin toward campus. “You better listen, little normal. Better run. Before my mates find you.”
Gavin stepped back, both his mouth and his hands working but not making sense.
“Run!” Rysa screamed. He had to get away. She’d make sure—
Then the world flickered hot yellow again and Gavin was gone. The ghoul stood on her other side, anger dancing though his eyes.
“Do not do that again!” He slapped and caustic chemicals burned her cheek. Yanking hard, he dragged her toward the break in the fence framing the walk to the road. “Claw me one more time and you’ll be lucky if you keep your arm, you stupid cow.”
She didn’t remember clawing him. She didn’t remember Gavin running away, either. What did she do? She’d had another blackout and lost more time.
Nothing made sense.
The man dragged her through the lot gate and into the street. He pushed her forward with one hand, the fingers of his other tapping in the air as if he played an invisible piano. The tips glowed and smoldered one at a time, turning on and off as he pressed each imaginary key. “Quiet now, luv.”
A dark-gold hatchback with rusted side panels and blistered paint weaved down the street. A blue van, just as ratty, rushed from the other direction.
The man inhaled, his chin up. “Time to meet the family, princess.”
Games of Fate
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Honey to Soothe the Itch Page 4