Page 110 of Psycho Beasts

“Leave!” I yelled desperately, terrified she’d open her mouth again.

She stood still, eyes wide with shock.

“Please leave.” Aran pushed her forward gently. When the girl had crossed the threshold, Aran slammed the door shut in her face and screamed, “And never come back!”

Aran twisted the lock, then slumped against it, breathing heavily.

“Great, more good news, also something about breaking and dying,” I choked as an awful weight settled in my gut. “Do you think they knew we were going to ignore it…so it came back?”

Aran itched at her back, then keeled forward like she was going to throw up. “Fuck, maybe.”

She took another drag of the pipe. “Quick recap, so it doesn’t. One, which I bet is me or you, must join, raise the rear, grow, and lose fear.”

Aran inhaled desperately, like she was drowning in the air.

“Other, whichever one of us isn’t ‘one,’ must break, bring kings, die, and rise with wings.”

Nodding casually, like I wasn’t totally freaked out, I slammed my head into the antique mirror on the wall.

The crack echoed.

Cold glass crunched therapeutically under my forehead as I said, “Odds are I’m ‘other,’ with the whole break and death thing, although I’ve always wanted to be a bird. That could be a win.”

Aran smoked more, not even flinching at the blood dripping from the gash on my head. “Then who are the kings? Jax, Cobra, Ascher, Xerxes? That doesn’t really make sense.”

“Couldn’t Cobra be considered royalty? Maybe the pack by association?” My gut was telling me that was what it was referring to.

Aran shivered. “I don’t know. That doesn’t seem right to me. The last time a poem read itself to us, it said,

“Blood burns red, through the air it’s blown,

Blood pours bright, across the fated throne,

Blood draws truth, and rips apart the mind,

Blood creates pain, it kills the weak-spined.”

Aran snapped her fingers with excitement and pointed at me. “Then you discovered you had blood powers and attacked my mother, who sat on the fated throne. You ripped apart her mind and killed her. Actually, the poem was all very literal.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Wait, how did you remember that poem?”

“What do you mean? Did you somehow forget it?”

“Never mind, I definitely remembered it.” I’d forgotten it completely. I mean, there were a lot of words to keep track of.

Aran grimaced. “That reminds me.”

If there was any more bad news, I was offing myself.

The men were cheating fucks who were interested in one of the prettiest females I’d ever seen in my life (I was confident enough in myself to admit she had the “it” factor, while I had the “are you sure you took a shower” factor), I’d had a vivid hallucination of drowning, and now creepy poems were reading themselves to us again.

My quality of life was nonexistent.

It literally couldn’t get worse.

I inched closer to the window, prepared to dramatically throw my body through it in a display of sheer unwellness.

“You have that damn test tomorrow for the trial, so you have to study tonight.”

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