The Real Thing

by Marina Simcoe

  …And then it stopped! The desperate rage, the hopeless terror ebbed suddenly. The feverish flame of panic that consumed me from inside out cooled almost instantly. The sensation of calm numbness was so unexpected that I looked around, half expecting to see a discarded syringe somewhere with some king of a fast-acting sedative, although I was positive I didn’t feel any needle’s sting for this explanation to be valid.

  The side effect of my newly found calmness was the lack of any feelings whatsoever. I just suddenly didn’t care about anything, not even about why and how it happened. I stopped thrashing, and the arms holding me released me almost instantly.

  He scanned the Source for emotions as he entered the cell. She was curled on the mattress with her back pressed into the wall, as if she wanted to push herself into the wall and disappear.

  Her hair was tangled, matted and of the same dirty-grey colour as the surrounding walls, and her eyes were wide and unhinged when she looked up. He couldn’t even tell what colour her irises were because of how wide her pupils had dilated. Her eyes just looked black now, with a wild glossy shine in them.

  He reached inside her mind, and a messy powerful hurricane of her emotions assaulted him. The impact felt almost physical, and he braced himself, digging the heels of his boots into the concrete floor to avoid being knocked over.

  Horror, anger, hate and fear raged in the black pool of pure panic.

  The realization came to him with a crystal clear clarity: it was not going to happen tonight. There was no way she could go through the Feeding in this state. She could not be presented to the Council like this at all or she’d be drained immediately. It was his first day on the job as a fully trained Handler, and she was his very first Source. He had spent three months in training to become her Handler, and he was failing already.

  He knew everything he was allowed to know about her from her file that he’d studied during his last days of training.

  She was taken by the Council just over a year ago and had been used for regular nightly Feedings with mixed success. The past several weeks, she had been getting worse. She had become aggressive and was no longer cooperating.

  He also knew something that was not in the file. The average length of time a Source was useful was for about a year at best, and it looked like her time was up. Her past Handlers got all they could from her, and by now, she could be drained anytime. The Council gave her to him in one final attempt to see if he could extend her useful life; however, nobody would blame him if he didn’t.

  He looked at her again. Scared and shaking, she was too thin and filthy, which only proved that she no longer cared about either her hygiene or her appearance. She was most likely skipping meals too. Janitors were required to bring highly nutritious meals to the Sources regularly; however, whether or not she actually ate them was entirely up to her. By the looks of her, she hadn’t touched her meals in a while.

  Well familiar himself with pangs of hunger, he wondered why anyone would decline food when it was readily available.

  He searched for the light of her life force inside of her and found it enclosed in the dark shell of her current emotions. Deep in the black churning mud of them, her life force was still burning bright and pure, just a tiny sliver of beauty struggling to stay lit. It looked so fragile, so helpless…

  A strong, long forgotten urge to protect rose deep inside him. He felt a need to do something. Anything. He could at least try.

  Without any clear plan in mind, he stepped forward and reached for her. The gesture was not intended to intimidate her; neither was he trying to comfort her in any way. He just wanted to get a reaction, any reaction, out of her. Was she still lucid at all?

  Suddenly, she shrieked and dashed past him in a crouch, with the speed and purpose he did not expect from her. He was startled, but not worried; the Janitors by the door would stop her. That’s what they where there for.

  He heard a loud growl and turned around to see that they had indeed caught her and now held her by the arms as she struggled in their grip like a trapped animal. The frustrated growl was coming out of her throat, turning into a deafening screech a second later, mixed with incoherent yelling and swearing.

  He couldn’t stand it any longer. He didn’t need to scan her feelings to see that she was suffering. His concern about the Council melted into the background, and the overwhelming desire to calm her took over. Just to make her torment stop at any cost!

  A thought came through the ever-present fog of his hunger: he could help her. He could easily stop her sufferings and ease the pain, if only temporarily.

  He didn’t fight the notion and didn’t analyze it. He acted on impulse when he stepped forward and folded his both arms around her middle, pressing her back to his chest, then motioned to the Janitors to let her go.

  The rain of her kicks and punches landed on his legs and arms immediately, but he did not care. She had no strength to hurt him.

  To help her, he needed to touch her skin-to-skin. Unfortunately, his clothes were designed specifically to prevent any skin-to-skin contact between a Handler and a Source. He had no time to think it through. He moved one of his hands under her arm, simultaneously turning her slightly away from the Janitors’ view. They would report him immediately if they only suspected what he was up to, and then he would be punished severely. The thought only flickered in the back of his mind for a fraction of a second before disappearing almost instantly. Even the threat of punishment did not intimidate him enough to stop now.

  Still holding her from behind with one of his hands trapped under her arm, he pulled his hand out a little. The glove slid from his hand, exposing a narrow strip of his skin between the edge of the glove and the bracer of the uniform, and he bent his wrist to feel the bare skin of her underarm. She continued to thrash desperately in his arms and didn’t even notice the touch.

  For a moment, he was afraid he forgot how to do it. It had been so long since he touched anyone like that. So long that he wasn’t even sure if it ever happened at all. He closed his eyes, reached into the toxic pit of her dark emotions, and drank...

  His constantly starving demonic essence opened up hungrily, ready to swallow any nourishment, not caring if it was poison. He drank and drank greedily, reeling from the false sense of fullness, knowing it would not truly sate him, knowing it would only hurt him in the end...

  Yet, he took everything – the acrid horror, the foul anger and the putrid-tasting fear. He stopped only when he reached the sweet fragrance of her life essence. The toxic cocktail of her emotions filled his mind, clamped his brain in a vise of pain and twisted his insides. Bile hit the back of his throat instantly, and he was glad it had been days since he last consumed any human food. Otherwise, he would have vomited it onto the concrete floor of the cell.

  He bent over in pain, still holding his arms around her, hoping he could pretend that he was still restraining her while he struggled to remain upright. He needed just a second to let the poison settle a little in order for him to get his bearings for now. He would have to deal with the consequences later, though, as he would still have to pay the full price for foolishly consuming toxic negative emotions from a human.

  She no longer fought in his arms, he noticed belatedly. He straightened and released his grip on her. She stood upright with her back turned to him, her shoulders relaxed. Slowly, she took a long breath in, as if waking from a long sleep – or more likely a nightmare – then raised her head.

  He scanned her emotions carefully, trying to focus through the pounding ache in his head.

  Nothing. There was nothing there, just a blank empty space. Was it enough to go ahead with the Feeding? Should he take her to the Council now? She seemed to have made the decision for him, as she calmly walked towards the door. He made a sign to the Janitors to let her pass and followed the required three paces behind her, trying not to stumble with pain and keep his pace steady in front of the Janitors behind him.

  He knew the pain would be getting worse and
worse gradually, reaching unbearable levels by morning before it would finally decrease and dissipate. He just needed to make it through the Feeding.

  About The Author

  Marina Simcoe likes to write larger-than-life love stories with characters, who may or may not be entirely human. She firmly believes that our contemporary world could always use a little bit of extraordinary!

  She has lots of fun exploring how her out-of-this-world characters with their own beliefs, values and aspirations fit into our everyday life.

  She lives in Canada with her very own magical man, their three little miracles and a cat, who might be into black magic.

  For more illustrations of her books please visit Marina Simcoe Author page on Facebook.

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