Page 93 of Chaos
“Take care of me, apparently.”
She looked up at me with those big blue eyes and smiled faintly before sorrow overtook her expression.
The still-wet tracks of tears on her cheeks beckoned to me. She hadn’t done a very good job of drying her face. Merri wasn’t very good at taking care of herself at all. Which I supposed made her earlier comment correct. If she wouldn’t do it, I would.
“What has you so upset?” I ask, brushing a gloved finger down the side of her cheek.
“I...” She flicked her gaze down to her hand, which held what I now recognized as Mal’s ungiven gift to his son. “I messed up.”
“How so?”
“I pried where I shouldn’t.”
“Ah. Well, you do make a habit of snooping,” I murmured, recalling that evening she’d ventured into my greenhouse.
She carefully slid the poppet into the other pocket of her coat before heaving a defeated sigh. “This is different. It’s not me being curious or bored. It’s me forcing myself on you all. I take and take from everyone in my life. I’m basically a human-shaped parasite.”
“You’re only just now noticing this? I mean, you are half demon. That is the core part of their nature.”
She glared at me. “You have a terrible bedside manner.”
It took a second for her ire with me to make sense. All I’d done was state the obvious, but she’d seen it as me being dismissive. Shifting my approach, I added, “I only meant that this is part of who you are. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. That would be like telling the flowers not to drink up the rain, or the waves not to lap at the shore. You can’t and shouldn’t hide that part of yourself.”
She looked away from me, her cheeks suddenly a deeper pink than they’d been simply from the cold.
“Don’t hide from me. I’ve witnessed firsthand what you look like when you allow yourself the freedom to let go and be who you were meant to be. There is nothing more sacred on this earth than watching a piece of the Creator’s art become what it was designed for. There is true beauty in purpose, even if that purpose is destruction. That’s what it means to be part of the natural order.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew the truth.”
“Try me,” I countered.
Snapping her gaze back to me, she stared into my eyes. “How would you like it if I told you I could crawl into your mind and witness your most hidden memories?”
“I’d tell you that you are not the first with that ability, nor will you be the last.”
“Or that I can choose to step into your dreams whenever I want and feed from you without you ever knowing?”
Her emotional confession unlocked a long-forgotten memory from the recesses of my mind. Dreamwalking. It had been so long since her kind had dared to do it, I’d completely forgotten about the possibility. Unexpectedly, the puzzle piece that I’d been searching for slipped into place. She’d just unknowingly provided me with the explanation for the series of dreams the four of us had.
“See? You’re speechless. It’s horrifying. I’ve been hurting you all, and I won’t continue doing it.”
So this was why she’d started to pull away once again.
“You were there in my dream?”
“If I’d known that it was banned, that there were consequences...” She bit down on her lip so hard I worried she might draw blood.
“Don’t do that,” I murmured, freeing her lip.
Merri blinked up at me in surprise. It felt like the moment stretched between us before she returned to herself and took a step back. “It won’t happen again.”
“What won’t?” I asked, too distracted by the feel of her plump lower lip to recall the thread of the conversation.
“I won’t take advantage. I’m not going to allow myself to dreamwalk with any of you again.”
Well, that just wouldn’t do. I could touch her in my dreams. And not just the idea of her, but the piece of her that joined me there. There was no chance in hell I would give that up.
“What if I want you to?”
