Page 94 of Mud

Some believed that Redfire magic was aboutchaos,about letting raw power loose, setting it free to assume whatever shape it was always meant to have, and create order in that manner.

It was an old concept, one very few people believed in anymore, but what ifthiswas what they’d done here? What if the very air we breathed was spelled to bring out the worst in us?

Or maybe…

I looked up at the stage, at the instruments playing themselves, the microphone singing that song. It was that melody that had guided my anger, that had nourished it, watered it, willed it to grow. It was in rhythm with that melody that all of us moved.

No, it wasn’t the air at all—it was the music. They’d put Redfire magic in that music to make us lose control, and they had succeeded better than I could have imagined.

There was nothing more chaotic than this anger that I was feeling. Nothing more chaotic than the scene developing right before my eyes in the front of this stage, of grown people behaving like fucking animals.

The more we fought the angrier we got. The faster the music played, the faster my heart beat.

And I wasn’t going to be able to get out of this place unless I got rid of this anger first.

This time, when I closed my eyes, I was more in control of myself. I wrapped my arms around my knees tighter and I forced air down my throat.

Then I began to talk to myself, to remind myself that this wasn’t real—not any of it. Well, except for the blood and broken bones and the body parts—those were definitely real. But the anger wasn’t.

If I could get it under control, I could walk away from here. I could simply leave, go to whatever was behind this stage, just like that woman had done. Nobody had stopped her. Nobody had attacked her.

That’s because she’d freed herself from the anger. To do that, I needed to be in control of my thoughts, my emotions. And to dothat,I needed to start with my body, with relaxing my muscles, and most importantly, slowing down my heartbeat.

I’d done this before a million times. I did this regularly—it’s how I taught myself to stay neutral when Madeline was around, and then when anybody else was around, too. It was just easier to pretend I didn’t feel anything. If they didn’t know when I was hurting or when I was vulnerable, how could they ever use it against me?

The problem was that melody was full of magic that forced my mind to ignore any good memory I had and to focus only on the bad, on the unfairness of life, of things I’d done that made me angry at myself, too. If I focused hard enough, I could see the magic like dust particles hiding in the waves of sound that came from the instruments and the speaker. It was in my ears, inside my head, and the magic was steady, shooting bad thoughts up my veins like a damn drug.

It took a while for me to accept that my standard process of controlling my muscles, my heart, then my mind, just wasn’t working. With a heavy heart—and a very pissed off and wounded ego—I accepted that it was time to bring out the big guns.

Namely my memories of Taland Tivoux.

Not all worked.

In fact, most didn’t. Most had my pulse racing like wild, much more effective than Redfire magic, but there were some that calmed me down when I was alone in my room at night, going through a panic attack that just wouldn’t let up for hours.

It wasn’t anything in particular, just thinking about the way he was. The way he used to sit in class, one arm behind the bench, the other always busy playing with something. The way he smiled—first, when he found something funny, he’d take a split second as if to think about whether he wanted to react or not, and then when he couldn’t contain himself, he would lower his head and close his eyes, thenlet his lips stretch into a perfect crooked smile every single time. Not the grin he’d had on when I was chained to his basement, no—an actual smile that lighted up his eyes all the way. The way he’d always—alwaystouch the tip of my nose first whenever we saw each other, before he even saidhibecause he was ‘making sure that you’re still real, sweetness.’

And my absolute favorite, the one that worked better than any magic spell, was the way he woke up.

I pictured it now—his hair all over the place, his eyes swollen. His narrowed brows and lips pressed tightly to make the most adorable duckface in the world because he slept like he was angry. The warmth of his skin. The way, even when he was deep into sleep, he never let go of me, never moved away, was nevernottouching me when we slept together.

It was perfect, that entire visual. It was peace. It was happiness.

For me, it was life.

And just like when my panic attacks let go of me when I was all alone in my room, shaking in bed, the magic that had gathered inside my mind, pulling the bad and the ugly to the surface, let off little by little.

Whenever the image tried to slip away from me, I’d focus harder, and it was easy to do. The hard thing was always tonotthink about him so this I didn’t mind at all. And when I no longer felt the pull of the magic, I opened my eyes as two tears slid down my cheeks and found all that anger had been replaced by raw desperation.

Because I’d never see Taland like that again. Because I’d never wake up in his arms again.

And that was indeed the tragedy of my life.

Then someone slammed against the ground right in front of my feet.

A man, skinny and with long limbs, face bloody and eyes red, pushed himself up on all fours, and my heart skipped another beat. I expected him to reach for me, to try to kill me, bite me, scratch me—anything at all.

Instead, he looked at my face and saw right through me, like I wasn’t even there.

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