Page 187 of A Soul to Touch

He couldn’t see the way her eyes morphed into beseeching bows with the ends crinkling. He couldn’t see the way her lips would tighten before loosening to tremble or how her teeth bit into the bottom one.

And when time passed, revealing no changes in him, he didn’t see how she bit back her choke of emotions.

He was covered in claw marks she knew would fade twenty-four hours from when he’d obtained them, but she didn’t know if they pained him or not. He’d roared and yelped throughout the night while he was attacked, and those sounds had beenhollowing to listen to.

There were three dead Demons around him. Two who had eventually bled out and died by his own claws or fangs. The other’s death hadn’t been so slow since it’d started crawling around with its legs crushed in a hunting trap until it crawled headfirst into a second one.

Mayumi had done what she could to protect him from the rooftop with her bow, only once coming to the ground when he encountered a particularly speedy Demon he couldn’t get his claws into.

She had emerged from the night unscathed, thankfully, but she couldn’t imagine doing this for the rest of her life.

Reality was settling in, and it was cold and lonely.

He’s not coming back,she thought as she stared at his gold-struck, ethereal face. Those black eye sockets seemed like pools of emptiness, an emptiness she knew was within his mind.He’s gone.

Her hands shook when she curled them into tight fists, feeling her nails digging into the plump flesh of her palms.

Just as liquid began to fill the waterline of her eyes, Mayumi reached down and grabbed a large handful of snow. She tossed it at Faunus, who twisted his head when it hit him in the shoulder. He made a thoughtful sound as he stood.

“This isn’t what I wanted!” she screamed when a second snowball splattered against his shoulder. “I didn’t want you to turn into some zombie freak of a fucking Duskwalker!”

The tooth-gritted screech that exploded from her as she started lobbing snowball after snowball at this zombie shell was accompanied by a heavy droplet running from her left eye. It didn’t take long for both eyes to start crying, and she barely registered them.

Her loss and grief finally overflowed when she realised she had failed. That Faunus wasn’t going to return, and she was going to be stuck by herself.

And now... now Mayumi was going to have to face the consequences of what her desperate hope had brought.

“I don’t want to babysit a wild Duskwalker like it’s nothing more than a dog on a chain!” she screamed.

She wanted Faunus back. The big, fluffy, arrogant Duskwalker that liked to tease her just as much as she did him. The one that wanted to protect her, not tear her to shreds. The one that chuckled at her and only growled or snarled when he was feeling frisky – and occasionally when she playfully irritated him.

I want my damn friend back!

Her sadness rode the waves of her fury as she finally let it all out after days of holding onto hope and denying this was the end. She’d spent her whole life containing her emotions because emotions were for fools, for people who thought the world was filled with potential sunshine and rainbows and fairies.

All she’d known was the hardness of steel, the blood of Demons and humans across her flesh, and the smell of death. All she’d seen was the terribleness in people and the world.

She hated life but had always been determined to live it – just alone, with the coolness of misery to keep her company or the throaty burn of alcohol to numb her.

Her anger couldn’t be held in. Her tears couldn’t be stemmed as they ran down her face and wet her lips for her to drink the bitter saltiness of them. The trembling she felt had nothing to do with the winter air and everything to do with the ache she felt deep within.

She was tired. Tired from being up for two nights straight because of him. Tired from holding everything in, not just for these past few days with him gone, or the weeks leading up to this, but for years.

Mayumi was exhausted.

“How dare you do this to me!” she screamed with every fibre of her being. “How dare you come here and let me fall in love with you only to fucking die! How dare you save me as a child and start my infatuation with you! You probably ate my fucking cat, you carnivorous jerk!”

Mayumi didn’t know how many snowballs she made and threw or what number it was that caused him to start rearing back at the onslaught in confusion.

She didn’t stop.

“Why couldn’t you just have remained as a creepy monster in the shadows and left me to live by myself!?” She knew her tears were falling faster, flinging off her flesh as she screamed and tossed. “Why couldn’t you be just like the Demons and try to kill me rather than protect me? I never asked you to come here and be so amazing, to change my life and give me hope that I could actually be happy for once. So why?!”

She hated when he roared at her, knowing that she herself would have to cut that sound permanently from the world. She couldn’t leave him like this to be bait for Demons, nor could she set him free to terrorise the world.

This wasn’t the image she wanted to leave of Faunus.

She’d have to kill him, cut off his head and then break his skull again. She didn’t want to, but there were many things she’d done in her life that she’d never wanted to do.

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