Page 78 of Calico Descending

As I draw my palm down his chest, he captures it, forcing my hand into the water, across the ridges of his abdomen, and closes his eyes. As if the touch of my hands alone are enough. “It was sickening to see all those eggs covering her body. All those tiny, faceless things. I don’t know if they came from her belly, or not.” Tipping his head toward me, he opens his eyes, and guides both our hands to my stomach where he touches me possessively. “But it made me think, what if I could put a baby in you. I could watch it grow inside of you. Watch it suckle your breasts and feed from you.”

He’s clearly ill, talking the kind of nonsense that would’ve kept him in isolation until he killed himself, if we were back in Calico. Whatever happened, whatever they did, it severely messed with his head.

Before I can stop him, he leans forward, resting his head in the crook of my neck, and I turn to see Valdys frowning from the shoreline. I wave him over, and when he steps toward us, I push Cadmus away.

Hands reach out beneath the water, yanking me against him. “Please.”

Splashing comes from the right, where Valdys storms through the water toward us. With one hard shove, he knocks Cadmus backward. And just like that, the two of them are splashing around the water, punching and falling, like lions fighting over a kill. However weak Cadmus may have looked before, he’s certainly not lost his physical strength, as he volleys a punch for every hit he takes.

Helpless, I stand on the fringes of their scuffle, searching for a way I can get between the two and put an end to this madness--perhaps as stupid as wishing to step between two rabid dogs.

“Stop this! Both of you!” My screams fall on deaf ears, as Valdys wraps his hands at Cadmus’s throat and shoves him underwater. Bubbles emerge, where the last breaths expel from Cadmus, and in spite of my better judgement, I pull at Valdys’s arm. “Stop this! I don’t want him to die!”

For the first time in the last few minutes, my words have some effect, as Valdys releases Cadmus, pushing him away.

“He’s sick. Whatever they did to him, it’s changed him.” One hand on my hip, I thread the other through my hair and shake my head. “He’s … talking nonsense.”

Cadmus emerges from the water, coughing and sputtering fluids, and I’m caught between wanting to go to Valdys, and wanting to help Cadmus to his feet. Instead, I stand between the two, frustrated when Valdys makes his way back toward the shore. My head scrambles for something to say to him, so that he doesn’t think I’m choosing one over the other, but I won’t risk saying the wrong thing. “Valdys, wait.”

Shaking his head, he doesn’t slow his pace. “You’d have to be blind, or a fool, not to see what he wants.” The words burn past his lips, and I realize what an incredibly complex organ the heart is, that it can draw fire and ice from the same breath.

A slap of dismissal.

“I don’t want to fight you,” Cadmus says, in a voice calmer, more lucid than before. “I know I’ll lose where she’s concerned.”

Valdys halts midstride, but doesn’t bother to turn around.

“You’re like a brother to me.” As Cadmus rises to his feet, the water sinks to his chest level again. “We survived hell together. Do you remember that first night in S Block?” He pauses, and when Valdys doesn’t answer, he keeps on. “The pain? So much pain, we thought we’d die by morning. You told me, Hang on, Josiah. Hang on because we’re going to make it.” That must be his real name, the birthname that was stripped from him when he arrived to Calico. “We’re going to live, you said. And we did.” Even in the moon’s light, I can see the shine of tears in his eyes. “We lived. And now? I feel like I’m dying again, Valdys. Watching you with her. I know she isn’t mine to take. I wouldn’t take from my brother. I won’t take from you.”

Valdys’s shoulders sag, and I know he’s listening.

“But after what I saw down there … it’s like a constant loop inside my head.” Panic rising to his voice, he rubs his hands back and forth over his skull, clenching his jaw, and his eyes are on me. “I just wanted to touch her. I wanted her to know I was there, too. I’d give anything to feel her and have her look at me as she did down in those tunnels. Like I was the only one who could save her.”

I don’t want Cadmus in the way he’s convinced he wants me. I don’t want to be his. But there is an innate and indescribable yearning to help him, as I suspect I’m the only one of us who can. To do so requires the touch he seems to think will erase whatever images play inside his mind. The kind of touch whose absence has made him violent and unreachable, just as Valdys was in the beginning. It’s the masochist inside of me who thinks she can save him, but the pessimist who doubts the outcome.

“It’s my blood that runs through her, too. Alpha blood,” Cadmus says, unwittingly answering the questions to my thoughts. “It’s why she can’t say no. It’s why she promised herself to me that night. Before they sent me down there.”

When Valdys turns to face me, there’s disappointment and hurt swirling in his eyes, which he wouldn’t dare admit to Cadmus. “Is this true?”

The look on his face churns a sick feeling in my stomach. “I … agreed on the grounds that he would release me. That he would no longer interfere with you and me. No matter what they tried to force on us.”

“Do you want him that way? Is that it?”

“I want you, and only you. That’s the only reason I agreed to it.”

His gaze shifts from me to Cadmus. “And you would’ve conceded. You would’ve been content to give her away afterward. After that one night.”

“Yes.”

Valdys scoffs, and his jaw tightens as he shakes his head. “Then, I know for certain you’ve not had her that way. Because there isn’t a chance in hell you’d give her up so easily, if you had.”

Part of me is relieved that he knows nothing happened between us. A much bigger part of my heart is crushed by his words, though, and once again, I hate myself for putting him in this position.

“She is the breath of air, when you’re drowning. The warmth on your skin, when the world feels colder. The sun that draws the universe into her embrace.” Valdys lowers his gaze and frowns, as if he’s contemplating so many things at once, and when his eyes meet mine again, the conflict in them hasn’t gone away. “I suppose it isn’t fair for me to keep you to myself.” He rubs his thumb over the palm of his hand, perhaps needing the distraction. “Women are few and far between in this world. And women like you are even more scarce. I was greedy for you. I’m still greedy and selfish, when it comes to you, Cali. He’s my brother, and yet, I’d sooner watch him die than put his hands on you.” With a sigh, he casts his gaze away then back to me. “But I know part of you would die, too. It’s not something you can help. It’s something that was forced on you through this binding. And that, I can’t live with.” The lines in his forehead deepen, while he stares somewhere past me, perhaps seeing things he can’t bear to imagine. “Is this what you want? To be with him?”

“No. I just want to help him. That’s all.”

“And yet, in his mind, there’s only one way.” At my frown, he continues. “During our tortures, you were given as a balm. The pleasure to our pain. Reward for suffering. We became primed to your face and your voice. Hallucinations designed to make us want you more than anything else. I knew the sound of your moans before I was ever with you, because I’d heard them inside my head. I’d already imagined your body against mine.” His eyes slide to Cadmus. “That’s what he wants from you. That’s the help he craves, and why he can’t let you go. It’s like a drug. A physical withdrawal.”

---