Page 132 of Her Psycho Beasts

Words come to me echoing through time. In our first months at the academy when I’d hardly spoken to him at all and he’d threatened Minnie. He’d remembered those words. Kept them in his heart like a poison.

“No, I didn’t mean— I didn’t know?—”

“You still don’t know,Aurelia.” He shakes me. “Youcan’tknow.”

Chapter 66

Scythe

“We’re not like my parents,” Aurelia urges. “We can fight it. You can fight…”

I’m shaking my head. She doesn’t know that this madness is too strong. For Athena and Eko. For my mother. For either of us.

She peers into my eyes, desperately searching for something. For everything I can’t give her. She’s so earnest, so mesmerising when she’s like this. Gripping me, her eyes angry, her power pulsing. Gods, I wish I could tell her that, but it will just make everything?—

“It’s getting worse, isn’t it? The land psychosis.” Of course she knows. She’s my regina. She can probably feel it. “I wonder if it will happen to me,” she says faintly. “If I shifted into a marine beast often enough. I want to know what it’s like.”

“No,” I say firmly. “I would not wish that upon anyone. Let alone you.”

Something in me tells me that, even with her protections as a Boneweaver, she might be right. Something wild urges me to steal her away in the middle of the night and head to the sea with her. Just the two of us, living our lives in peace and solitude with nothing between us and the endless ocean.

“I wish I could help you,” she whispers.

I can’t resist that look in her eyes. The one that demands I touch her. Be with her. Devote myself to her.

Reaching my fingers out, I graze the softest skin of her cheek. She closes her eyes, drinking in my touch.

“You do,” I whisper.You make everything better, I want to say. And make everything so much worse. I’d made a mistake consuming her blood. She’s a part of me now. In every way that is possible, I am changed. How am I supposed to go back to the ocean by myself and leave her here? Suddenly, every rotten word spoken to me on soft pillows rings true.

Iama vile alien creature. Cold to my core. Dark to my soul. The gremlins circumnavigating me whisper similar, even worse things, their gruesome bodies steadily marching to the beat of the new noise that’s been clacking through my brain for the past week.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

Something purely mad grips me then, and I find myself speaking words that come from the darkest depths of my being.

“Come to the sea with me. Swim with me. Just once.”

Her pupils dilate, and I utterly lose myself in their fathomless depths. My breath feels ragged in my lungs, and the sides of my neck burn with hellfire. “I need to see the moonlight on your naked skin.”

My regina’s eyes glisten and I want her tears to fall so that I may taste her sorrow…and desire.

“Take me there,” she whispers. “Show me what you love.”

Then I would show her own reflection upon the water’s surface. Without another word, I capture her hand in mine and we take the elevator down to the basement carpark. A car is always parked for me here, and I all but carry Aurelia inside and get into the driver’s seat.

From there, it is only a short drive to the beach. This late at night, there are no tourists or locals, and it’s high tide, the waters choppy and rough. When I get out, a violent wind whips at my hair.

A storm is coming.

Chapter 67

Aurelia

Something has taken over Scythe. Some thought or emotion, I can’t be sure. But he has a wild look in his eyes now. A feral energy that I’ve never seen him fall into. That he’s neverallowedhimself to fall into.

He grips my hand tightly as he extracts me from the car and I get a strange sensation like we’re running from something. We jog over the sand, our hair and clothes flapping wildly.

I can’t wait to see him as a shark again. And yet, on the dark of this beach, with a tremor in the air, a wedge of fear strikes my gut.

---