Page 38 of How to Entice a Fiend

And I can hear him.

He’s laughing. He’s enjoying every minute of this. Fear twists in my stomach as I try to get away, but where is there to go in this darkness? Every way I reach are walls. I can’t even stretch out as the walls close in around me. I’m being driven mad by the realization that the only thing I ever have to look forward to is fear.

“Aren’t you hungry?” he asks, voice jovial as he peels the lid off and looms over me. I’m blinded by the light; I cower down to get away from the monster as he reaches in?—

“Ender!”

I jerk awake and my head snaps back, but I find it hard to hold up now that I’ve managed to escape the darkness of my dream.

“I think you were having a nightmare,” Mads says, voice gentle.

I look over at him and the realization hits me that Abel must have been in here and I never even heard him. A fresh puddle of blood joins the other as I notice the addition of a new blade buried into Mads’s stomach.

Abel entered this very room and I never heard him? I didn’t even wake up. The idea of him being close to me sends emotions reeling through me that I don’t even know how to comprehend.

“It’s okay,” Mads soothes, still trying his best to look like everything is just fine even though it’s clearly not. “You’re fine. I mean notcompletelyfine. But whatever was bothering you in your dreams isn’t here now.”

“I think you need to worry about yourself.”

“Nah. It helps if I worry about someone else,” he says as that blood drips… drips… drips…

I could kill Abel if I could get out of here. I just need the strength to…

“Looking at me like I’m a kebob doesn’t really help the situation,” Mads comments.

“I need to kill him.”

“He’s not my favorite person at the moment either. There’s no way you can like grab the sword out of me and then stab him when he comes in?”

I need to feast. I need to eat. I need…

Darkness is clouding my mind, and I try to tear away from it, but it’s consuming me and I feel like there might be no way out.

“Ender, what’s going on?”

It’s closing in around me, tightening a noose around my throat?—

I lean over and bite my arm, using the pain of my fangs sinking into my flesh to pull me out of this frame of mind I’ve found myself in. No… I can’t lose control. I can’t….

“What the hell are you doing? You think you can just eat yourself now?” Mads asks. He goes to try to give me a kick to snap me out of it, but it must hurt because he cringes and immediately stops moving, instead stirring up the smell of blood drifting off him. “I know you’re hungry, but eating yourself has never been the answer.”

“I need you to distract me,” I beg.

“I swear you were just telling me you wished I’d stop talking? But fine, fine. What do you want me to talk about?”

“Anything,” I say through gritted teeth as the darkness starts to close in around me.

“I nearly kept Rylee’s cat for myself. I’ve always loved animals but never got too many chances to have them. Not always sure I deserved them. At this one place I worked, they used rats for testing. It made me so sad that one night, I broke all of the rats free. I made them a little home at my house and the company went crazy trying to figure out who stole the rats. Of course they didn’t expect it was thevampire,a being created to feast on blood. But there I was with my little rat army. I miss those little guys. Very smart animals. Very intuitive. Of course they only got more rats. And I just stole more of them. I eventually got fired when the boss caught me with seven squirming around in my shirt because the box I’d grabbed to escape with them was nabbed by someone.

“I miss my little rat army, but I gave them to a friend since I didn’t have the time for them. What I’m saying is that I was not above keeping Rylee’s cat, but I needed an excuse to talk to you again.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to know what was so interesting about you. Why does everyone fear you, are convinced you are a monster, yet the VRC allows you to live and doesn’t arrest you? There’s something we aren’t being told. There’s something Iwant to know the answer to. And I really think you should tell me.”

“I don’t trust you,” I say as the smell of blood wafts toward me. It’s destroying my sense of control. I’m losing myself to it and I know that I need to get away.

“How’d you end up with Rylee?”

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