Page 29 of The Devil Takes

He’ll use you now that he knows, Tommy warned me.

I knew that too.

I did.

I just…fuck.

Sometimes just living was so hard. Like navigating one of those corn mazes that pop up in the fall where every step you take somehow always ends up the wrong one. Forever stumbling upon dead ends. Maybe I really was stupid. But stupidly, I hoped Tommy would forgive me, even if I knew he was never bound to stick around long.

Why would he?

When I was the kind of friend that betrayed him.

I let him use my car though, so maybe I wasn’t all bad.

My thoughts were spaghetti again, only they were so twisted up now I had no hope of untangling them. I hoped somehow when I slept I’d be transported again to that foggy place between waking and sleep. The place where Haden lived. Where I wasn’t…whatever I was here, and instead, I was a Percy who was made of possibility.

There is nowhere I am safe from Percy’s presence. At first, his arrival was easy enough to ignore. The presence of his soul tickled at the back of my mind, like he was searching for the tether between us, though I’d assumed he’d never find it.

I’d been wrong.

In my bed, in the bath, in my office.

He pops up here and there, making small talk with me like his presence isn’t an abomination in my personal space. Like the fact he’s here at all isn’t the most confusing thing that has ever happened to me. He inspires a cautious sort of research to enfold. I need to know how he is doing this. How he is finding me, despite having no magic of his own, aside from a supernatural case of stubbornness.

The feelings he incites frighten me more than his presence does, however.

I had thought I was done feeling.

I suppose I was wrong.

Tommy had yet to forgive me. Sure, he was talking to me, and we still had our weekly movie night. But I could feel this wall between us that hadn’t been there before. I wanted to explain to him why I’d done what I’d done, but every time I tried to open my mouth, the words got all stuck inside me.

I didn’t know how to tell him that running, lying, fighting—that was my life. It wasn’t this…test I had to pass. This mission to overcome. It just was. I dodged bullets. That was what I did.

I’d just never had someone I didn’t want to hurt before.

I shook away the dark thoughts as my pulse fluttered and I waited with trepidation for Dad’s truck to pull up to the student cafeteria parking lot where I’d told him to meet me. The truck rattled. This sound that I recognized before I even saw the withered light-blue paint, or the massive tires. There was this dent in the side from the time I’d driven it when I was seventeen on my way to pick up boxes of Kraft Mac-and-cheese and a six-pack of beer. I’d had twenty dollars in my pocket, an empty belly, and my dad’s drunken gaze on my mind, so I’d been more than a little distracted.

I’d paid for that mistake.

Just as I’d paid for every other mistake I’d ever made. Sometimes even the ones I hadn’t.

The worst thing I’d ever done to my dad, though, was present as an omega. He’d let me know that, too. That I was the first in his bloodline, that his daddy and his daddy before him had all popped out boys with knots. I was an anomaly. A blip on the family’s perfect record.

Realistically, I knew that line of thinking was outdated.

We were in the twenty-first century, for god’s sake. Wasn’t like you could just pop down to your local market, barter a pig or two, and head home with an omega to fuck. We weren’t property anymore and yet somehow, I was still and forever would be lesser in his eyes.

That’s why I couldn’t let him down.

My pulse throbbed.

My skin was sweaty hot, and I could feel a sick sort of churning in my gut as the truck parked and I watched the door swing open with a creak. Dad stepped out, and I moved to greet him, careful to keep a polite distance, careful not to look him in the eyes. Demure, or some shit.

Sometimes, he liked me like that, all submissive.

Sometimes, it set him off.