Frayed

by Blakely Chorpenning

  A yellow halo pierced through the crack of Old Abram’s bedroom door off to the right of the entry.

  "How’s your father?"

  He helped me out of my coat and hung it on the rack next to his.

  "Dedicated to consistency."

  Whether out of frustration or rebellion, Blaire rarely entertained conversations concerning his father. It had been months since the leader of our lepe, Abram Blaire, sat up, let alone spoke. He was comatose. The Western Lepe—the group of leopards I grew up with and considered family—was baffled. Other than a pre-existing heart murmur, there was no medically validated reason for his current state.

  I peeked inside the quiet room. Old Man Abram’s hair looked grayer, but he hadn’t moved. My nostrils flared at the light presence of incense. Amita had prayed with her husband recently. The old man wasn’t a practicing Hindu but she was.

  "Come." Blaire wrapped his arm around my shoulders. Squeezing me close, we retired to his bedroom.

  Sleeping used to be so instinctual. I trained and fought all day, so it was easy to fall asleep before the sheet ever had time to cascade around me. But now sleep was a dragon-tailed whip with enough bite to split fear from common sense and enough power to make me not see the difference.

  "Do you want me to rub your back?" Blaire’s voice was heavy as we slid between the sheets. So the Sandman was listening to my pleas. Only, he doused the wrong shifter.

  I let out a long-held breath. "No."

  He rolled over, his head on the satin pillow. In my ear, he whispered, "There are so many things to fight. Why fight sleep?"

  "I don’t know," I whispered back. "Because I can, I suppose. Maybe because I don’t know how else to be right now. I’m sorry it involves you."

  "Don't apologize." Blaire rose onto his elbow, casting his drowsy eyes down upon me. "Don’t ever be sorry for coming here."

  He laid back down. Creeping under the leg of my ratty sweats, Blaire leisurely ran the bottom of his foot up and down my skin. It was a relaxing sensation. So much that I didn’t even remember falling asleep.

  The wave of nightmares, however, didn’t stop just because I was in a different bed. Equally so, the monsters would never stop because they were real and had found their target. Blaire’s comfort was simple. My leopard knew his. After a startlingly realistic dream, I could allow my kitty senses to bathe in Blaire’s dominance with the satisfaction that together we would rip the glorious fuck out of anything coming for me, imagined or otherwise.

  So we slept, we dreamed, and the night almost drew to a close before I woke Blaire with the shrill pleas of, "Help me! Help me!"

  He undoubtedly presumed I was screaming for someone to actually help me. Help me from being caught. Help me from being tortured. It couldn’t have been further from the truth, though I never made an effort to correct him. I knew who I screamed for.

  Jack. Always for Jack. For the boy whose name I no longer spoke out loud. For the pride boy who died for Marisa, one of our own. For the mangled corpse I would never free from the web in my head. The weight of him in my arms was always there. My mind refused to process the sudden loss of someone I had never cared to know before that cruel day.

  Barely awake, I rose on all fours. A metallic hint saturated the air. Malevolence abounded, sucking away any shred of comfort. And the screams, they filled the night with such devastation. I had never heard children scream like that, as if every god in every heart had been murdered. Snarling, I prepared to shift and fight for Jack, the pride boy. Feeling my fingernails thicken to points, I sliced through flesh until the assaulting figures blurred together. My ferocious leopard half was angling for the kill, fur roiling under my skin, but a force knocked me off balance. Once it turned into a persistent, familiar voice, I settled long enough for my eyelids to flutter open.

  Blaire’s weight pinned me to the bed.

  "My hands," I mumbled.

  "What’s wrong with them?"

  "The blood won’t come off."

  "Let me see."

  I held them up between us, my eyelids heavy. Blaire’s warm fingers traced my palms from wrists to fingertips and washed over my knuckles. When I didn’t respond, he insisted I sit up and open my eyes. "There is no blood. See? None."

  Working to break the bond between dream and consciousness, I finally shook my head like a goddamn animal. Voice lazy from sleep, I smiled, but it was twisted and out of sorts. "The blood’s never gone, Blaire. That’s what no one understands. Half the shifters want me to be some type of Messiah. The other half demand more blood, but they ignore the blood that’s already been spilled."

  "They can’t turn you into someone you don’t want to be. You're too strong for that." His hand hovered close, like he wanted to touch me but couldn’t afford my wrath if I lashed out.

  I stared at him. "Who am I now? I’m not a fighter. I quit. If something attacked me, I used to eat it alive. Now I hide, because I remember what it’s like to escape death. I used to be strong."

  "You are strong."

  "Look at me. I run here in the middle of the night and cower in your bed how many nights a week? And I keep trying to make it, to make what happened to all of us, make sense in my head, but my heart"—I beat against my chest—"cannot rationalize it."

  "No!" Blaire raised his voice as he sat up, shifting his weight to sit on his shins. "I should have known earlier of the Dissenters and their plans. I should have been leading rather than embracing prejudices passed down from outdated moralities. You fought that. You brought them back."

  I sat up. "To what?"

  We were essentially screaming in each other’s faces.

  "To a new way of thinking."

  "Well, it’s not enough to erase what happened to them. I let them get broken. I watched one break." Tears rimmed my bloodshot eyes.

  A piece of me never left the shed with Jack. Something important was permanently missing. It was claimed by the freak trolling my nightmares and savoring the moment we met again. I vowed to myself, Jack, and the other kids to gut the bastard. He was the very devil.

  Blaire interrupted my devious thoughts.

  "Do not reject the one way I can help." His voice dropped off, exhausted from more than Dissenters and a father with a mystery illness. "Don’t invent a new way to reject me."

  At that moment, I realized that our arrangement hadn’t been a Dutch meal. Blaire needed some cuddles of his own, a respite from the unknowns in our lepe’s near future.

  "I’m not. I’m just not me anymore."

  "Really? Because hiding behind your anger is nothing new."

  "That’s bullshit." I leapt from the bed, slipping my sneakers on.

  "What are you doing?"

  I pointed to the alarm on his side of the bed. "It’s almost six."

  "Come back to bed."

  "I’ve got to finish packing, jog, and leave, so what’s the point?"

  "Yeah," he collapsed onto the bed, muttering, "What’s the point?" before rolling over.

  Left staring at his back, I was speechless. And royally fuming.

  Of course, it didn’t take long to find my voice.

  "I leave town in less than three hours, Blaire. So you’re just going to roll over?"

  "No." He flung the sheets back and crossed the room, closing the distance between us. "I want to give you something to think about while you’re away."

  Swooping me into his arms, Blaire didn’t just kiss me, he ransacked my flesh with his lips and threatened to boil my blood with his aura. Burning inside out would have been a perfect demise if I hadn't already planned out my day. Also, excavating our lust was dangerous. Reckless.

  Cruel.

  When my lips were mine again, I mumbled, "I'll take that into consideration," and practically ran home. Had I known the rest of my day would turn into a shit fest, I would have stayed in bed with Blaire.

  About the Author

  Blakely Chorpenning lives and loves in the American South with the best family a woman could ask for. When s
he is not writing genre and literary fiction, Blakely enjoys anything shiny, soft, or fuzzy, and has a knack for breaking electronics…with her mind.

  For more, please visit her Facebook page

  http://www.facebook.com/blakelychorpenning

  or her official hub/blog

  http://indiscriminatewrites.blogspot.com

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