Page 86 of The Blood we Crave

I only remember because when I’d scooped it up, it hadn’t even tried to hiss or scratch at me. Just curled into my chest and began a steady purr. I knew my father had a very strict, no pet rule, but something about this cat called to my seven-year-old self.

The black coat, with the tips of its ears colored orange. It had been so trusting, so unafraid of me even though I could’ve had the worst intentions. I’m not sure why I kept it. Looking back, it would’ve been better off starving to death.

It had been easy at first. I let her roam around one of the caretaker cottages on the property and every day I would sneak food and water out. The cooks knew before my father, considering for an entire month I requested nothing but tuna sandwiches for lunch.

After my lessons, both educational and with my father, I would go to the cottage and read while it played at my feet or took naps in my lap. The only form of lightness I can recall from that time.

I spent evenings listening, watching and cleaning up murders. Scrubbing blood from floors while dead women hung in the background. But for a few moments, I could just live in silence with another living creature. Surely, I was allowed to have this one small piece of joy, right? This secret, tiny,goodthing.

I’d never been so brutally wrong.

It was late when Henry Pierson burst into my bedroom, the moon was high and the sun was far, far away from my home. No light, no good could come close to the doors of that manor.

He’d tossed the growing kitten on my comforter, its little whimper pulling me from my slumber. I’d pulled it into my arms, as he stared down at me with empty eyes.

“You know the rules, Alexander.”

Something inside of me shut down that night. Whatever was left of my human soul disappeared. It was that moment, in the darkness of my room when he handed me a blade, that any good that may have existed within me was snuffed out.

“You’re named after a great king. I expect you to be great. Perfection has no room for kindness, for feeling,” he says, plunging the knife into my small hands. “Caring about people, things, it makes no sense. Why care for something, anything, if it is just going to die? There is no point. Love is pointless, it does not live in you, Alexander.”

The last thing I can recall from that night, is his words in my ears just before I looked into the eyes of that small cat, the one who had trusted with me soft eyes until the very end. Everything went fuzzy the moment my hand curled around the blade.

But I know what I did. What I became.

There had not been a tear shed, not a disagreement on my tongue. Just unyielding dedication to be what he wanted. Desperation to accept the pure evil that coursed through my veins.

I knew what would happen if he found that thing. I knew what he would make me do to it. That was my consequence for a reckless action.

Just as my ghost running into the arms of Conner Godfrey is my consequence for the things I said to her. Yet these repercussions tasted bitter on my tongue.

I hadn’t expected her to be so…intense.

Apparently, I’d forgotten that Lyra Abbott was forged from crimson nights and sharp objects.

Beneath the girl she portrays to the world is a wielder of honed blades and rotten intentions. A viper with a nasty bite. A trauma soldier that still leaked pain and tasted of agony. She is the combination of life and death. The keeper of the reaper. A lovely grim death. A beautiful corpse.

And now, she is his.

No longer belonging to my cruel, cold fingers, instead she will find solace in Conner’s cheap loafers and nauseating cologne. Maybe I was touting myself a little, but I could not keep myself from asking if he would become her new obsession.

Would he feed the addiction in her as I had? Would he bebetter?

“No costume? It’s unlike you to not make a show, especially on Halloween.”

I glance over my shoulder, a flash of leather in my doorway. “Black is the appropriate color to wear to funerals, isn’t it?”

He snorts, not appreciating my humor.

Halloween night, the perfect opportunity for Ponderosa Springs to rake in money for a charity that most likely doesn’t exist. Last year had been a fair. The year before a petting zoo, the board never missed a chance to suck people dry and use the funds for useless town maintenance or were straight pocketing it.

It was a never-ending pit that town citizens were more than happy to toss their money inside of.

The Nightmare Circus.

A combination of swirly red tents and All Hallows Eve. Where the dead are allowed to walk the human lands once again to revisit those pasts and seek vengeance on the ones who wronged their souls.

I’d never gone trick or treating, but I’d come to enjoy Halloween. A night where everyone became spooky monsters and horrid villains. And I no longer required a mask. I could walk as the killer of killers and call it a costume. Free to remove the flesh I wore every day and expose what is decaying beneath.

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