Page 131 of Her Psycho Beasts

I chuckle at the name. “I do. Henry is one of my best friends. He loves having baths.”

Hammer beams, stroking Baked Bean’s head with a finger. “I must part from him, though. I have to return to my ocean home and he will drown there.”

“Time for bed!” The nurse returns, carrying a glass of water and a paper cup of tablets.

“My brine!” Hammer says, licking his lips and accepting them. “Goodbye, sir. Goodbye, Lady Boneweaver.”

We bid them goodbye as the nurse guides Hammer down another corridor of rooms.

“Why is he here?” I ask quietly. “Why do some of them choose to be on land?”

“Hammer was reared in captivity,” Scythe says, taking my hand again. “That is why he speaks so well. He always comes back. And when he does, he inevitably gets confused and thinks tap water is plotting against him and runs back to the sea. Paranoia and delusions are a key part of advanced land psychosis. It’s a cycle he may never break from. We are all born on land, after all. And after being a human child, it can be very confusing to suddenly develop a need to be in water all the time. We have an extensive children’s unit to help with orphaned hatchlings and family units if the parents are willing to stay.”

“Did you ever find out how your parents met?” I ask.

“My mother was hardly ever lucid and my father never spoke on it. But from what I gather, she came onto land looking for him.”

It makes me feel sick, knowing that she’d sought him out on primitive instinct and he’d taken complete advantage of her.

“She could have left at any time,” Scythe says quietly. “It took me a while to realise that she didn’t stay for her rex. She stayed for me.”

There is still guilt in his voice. It’s subtle, but I pick it up like a current beneath the water. “She loved you,” I say.

“I wish she hadn’t,” he says. “She shouldn’t have hurt herself just to be near me.”

I swallow through a thick throat. “I doubt she regrets it.”

“You don’t know that, Aurelia,” he says, as if it’s final.

We leave the unit, heading down another series of corridors as Scythe changes the subject, telling me more about the programs here.

“Celeste has been donating phoenix tears, and we’ve been testing it as a treatment for complex PTSD and other severe mental health conditions. I thought since it healed the body so well, it might heal the mind too.”

“Like land psychosis?”

He pauses. “Land psychosis is like a cancer that festers the longer it plagues a beast. There is no treatment.”

“Yet,” I say firmly.

Scythe pulls me to a stop, his eyes searing me, melding me to the spot as he speaks urgently, his grip on my elbow firm. “People like Hammer, like me, are not made for this world, Aurelia. My heart beats for something it cannot reach. Our souls yearn for something that’s so close and yet very distant. Our eyes are too bright. We are too sensitive above water. Sometimes…we can’t even find solace in one another.”

The backs of my eyes burn more fiercely with every impassioned word he speaks. He squeezes my arm. It doesn’t hurt, but I get that he needs me to understand what he’s saying.

I can’t accept it. I want to shake him and tell him he’s wrong. I want him to kiss me and tell me it’s going to be okay. That all of us will be together forever.

“Why did you bring me here, Scythe?” I ask quietly.

A muscle in his jaw feathers out. “I need you to know,” he says slowly, “that I wasn’t raised to be honest or decent, but a part of me is good. It might be a small part, but…it’s there. It’s the part that began all of this.” The part of him that came from his mother. That’s what he means. The part of him that is good is the same part that wants to take him away from me. That’s the part he cannot lose. His eyes bore into mine, the ice chips glowing. I try to blink away my rising emotion. It only makes him stare at me even more deeply. Like he finds my tears fascinating.

“Why are you crying, Aurelia?” he murmurs.

I angrily wipe at an errant tear. “I don’t even know.”

“Aurelia, I can never be yours. We cannot. Not in this life.”

“No,” I whisper, gripping his shirt in a fist. He’d only brought me here to convince me we couldn’t be together?

“You said it yourself,” he whispers, placing a hand over mine. “You said you will never be safe with me.”

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