Page 80 of Monstrous Travels as Wicked as Sin

“Then so be it,” the thing growled back at him, teeth clenching on its spiteful words. “He dies slow and horrible. Just like you.”

Percy could see Joe’s muscles begin to spasm beneath his skin, the venom already hard at work on its victim. A sweat broke about Joe’s brow and every extremity began to tremble.

“Leo!” Percy screamed. “The antivenom now or Joe’s death is on you!”

The drawn out and fading yell of “Fuuuuuck!” drifted down the stairs as Leo fled from the house.

But Althea didn’t budge, her voice on a knife edge of dismay. “You’ve really done it this time. You’ve killed Joe.”

“Go,” Percy ground out. “But if I’m dead when you get back, don’t give him the antivenom or you’re next. Run.”

“Percy—”

“Run!”

He heard Althea’s footsteps fade behind Leo’s. When the door slammed safely shut, he said, “That’s it. It’s done, and I’ve murdered you. There’s no coming back unless you do what I say.” For the first time in so long, Percy let his hands fall on Joe’s chest. Joe’s heart beat hard against the venom, his breath hitching beneath Percy’s gentle touch. Percy looked deep into his eyes and begged, “Take me.”

On quickening breaths, the beast rasped, “I’d rather see you dead.”

“Why?” Percy screamed, climbing to his feet. “Why are you doing this? Can’t you see I love him? Can’t you see I’ll do anything? Anything!”

“But you won’t. You’ve chosen that girl over him again and again. You haven’t offered me the boy once. You don’t know what sacrifice is. You don’t know what love is.” Joe’s gaze went to the corpse on the floor. “You give yourself readily because you have no respect for life. You don’t understand love or beauty. Because humans don’t. Because you’re just the same as all the rest of them.”

Percy glowered back at the thing. “I’m not like anyone else.”

“Oh, but you are. You’re all anger and violence, and when you don’t get what you want, you smash it all to pieces. Look what you’ve done to him. This person you claim to love. You could have let him go. But you won’t. Because you’re just as pathetic and selfish as all the rest.”

Pathetic and selfish. Percy knew it, believed it, with every inch of his soul, but he still attempted to argue, “Joe doesn’t want that.”

“And he doesn’t want to be shot full of spider venom, either. Do you think this is how he wanted to die? Here in this stinking room next to a dead stranger watching the man he loves bleed to death?”

“No, I don’t!” Percy shouted, yet all he could see was the red of Joe’s arm, swollen and bitten, the newest, blackening bruise on the ridge of Joe’s eyebrow, the blood from the cut he’d inflicted, and Joe’s bare, beautiful feet on the filthy floor, and all of him chained and taped and shaking with the deathly delivery flowing through his veins.

This was no hero’s death.

This was no lover’s death.

This was no sort of death at all.

He dropped onto the mattress, at the foot of the bed, his hands paled to an eerie white as they rested on his thighs. His fingers tingled, as though he’d fallen asleep on them. He opened and closed them, the cuts on his knuckles smarting as he stretched the wounds. “We were supposed to grow old together. Just the two of us. We were supposed to…”

He drifted off, groping through the unrelenting malady, the impending death of his body, as all the memories he had left narrowed to one thin slit of Joe. “We never did make our plans. Go home, travel Europe, open a pub. Anything. I would have done any of it.” Thinning, thinning, and blackening. “But it’s over now, isn’t it? Our beautiful dream. Or mine. My beautiful dream. My beautiful idea that someone like Joe could be for someone like me. In this life. In this world.” He smiled sadly over at the beast. “Because you’re right. It’s all stinking shit, the whole lot of it. I’ve seen more horror in my time here than… Well, I suppose you know all of that now. And you know Joe, and you do know him, because he’s in there somewhere.”

His voice faded where memories took its place. “God, he’s so beautiful. And I don’t mean his eyes and his hair and his—histouch. Christ… I’m never going to feel that again, am I?” Tears started to Percy’s eyes, and he pressed them against the palms of his hands. “He’s so sweet. He has the most beautiful soul I’ve ever seen. And I never thought someone like that could be for someone like me. Because you’re right. I’m not good enough for him. No one is. No one. This whole world… He’s too good for it, all of it.”

He looked again at Joe, but this time, he spoke only to Joe. “These last few months, this one tiny fragment of my whole life, I got to see what true beauty looks like. What love really is. And it’s every time you look at me. It’s every time you let me rest my head on your chest. It’s every time you hold me and you kiss me…” He raised a trembling finger to his temple. “Right here. I can feel it now. Your lips, right here. And they’re gone. And you’re gone… This thing…” He shook his head, closing trembling lips to control his voice. “Handsome, it’s not going to give you back to me. Not before I die. I thought I could do this. That I could destroy it, or cheat it…”

A single tear dropped from Joe’s eye, running slow and silent down his cheek, his face so quiet and still, almost as though it was Joe.

“Then it’s done.” Percy reached for his dagger, which clanged emptily against the mess of metal and meat and useless research strewn all over the bed. “I’m sorry it had to be like this, my love. And I’m sorry for all the things I did to you today. I didn’t want to let go. But I know better now.”

Legs like lead, a head swimming in black, he staggered to Joe. His thighs straddling Joe’s for stability, he placed his fingers on Joe’s cheek, palm cupping his chin, and the creature raised Joe’s face up to him. Those eyes, faithful and golden through the longest, darkest lashes, that Percy had adored since the second he first saw him. “I never meant for any of this to happen. If I could turn things back and make it that you nevercrossed my path…” A tear fell from Percy’s eye onto Joe’s skin, and that tear ran red with the haemorrhaging of Percy’s blood, in one long, fatal streak down his cheek, and down his neck.

“If I could change that night you came to my house… The way I fell in love with you…”

He leaned down and kissed Joe, dying lips on dying lips, deathly cold against dangerously fevered, desperately loving and lonely and forever broken, against the promise of eternity. He pressed the icy blade to Joe’s neck. “If I could change it all, I wouldn’t trade a second. Because this thing is right. I’m selfish, and I love you. I love you desperately. Obsessively. Greedily. You’re everything. And you always will be. So listen to me when I tell you, it doesn’t end here.” The blade sunk deeper, indenting Joe’s flesh, though it did not break, while Percy’s hand searched over Joe’s cheek, storing away every last sense of Joe’s living, breathing self beneath his touch. “If they take me to Hell, I’ll murder the Devil to get to you. If they send us to purgatory, I’ll find you. I’ll burn the gates of Heaven to the ground and make God my slave if I have to. I will follow you to the end of existence and back again, and I won’t ever stop. Don’t forget me. Don’t you ever forget me. There isn’t a force in this universe that could keep us apart. You go first, darling, but I’m coming right after you. Your blood, then mine, on this knife. I promise you, I’m coming for you.” His forehead dropped against Joe’s, tears of blood running fast, scalding their two faces. He touched their lips together in one last soft kiss. “Goodbye, my love. But only for a time.”

Percy pressed the dagger, Joe gasped an enormous breath of air, then screamed, “Percy, stop! Stop! Percy, it’s me!”

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