How is the dog, by the way?
Okay, last time.
(Last time for real.)
Mercer’s heart fluttered like it wanted to curl up and hide beneath the blanket of his lungs as he opened the image for a better look. It showed a scrap of paper, torn from the distinctive rainbow notepad he kept on the fridge. The blocky text looked so familiar that Mercer’s hands shook before he even managed to read its short inscription.
Love, William
Mercer’s blood seemed to run cold, the chill taking him over from the inside out.
There was a reason Lydia’s bottle had been on the counter, no lid, no pills. A reason Kat had suffered and nearly died. And that reason had signed his name to it and everything.
It turned out, William Douglas knew how to make good on a threat.
15
RAHIL
It didn’t help that Rahil had already been shakingbeforehe found the note.
He hadn’t received that much sun, he kept telling himself, just the jog from the shed and standing in the kitchen for a few minutes before he remembered to draw the blinds. Maybe it was hitting him harder for having missed a meal recently, but he wasn’t really in pain either. So, the shaking was… dread? Fear?
When he’d pulled the little paper scrap out of the unlabeled medication bottle and seen the writing, his heart had lodged in his throat. Then, the anger came.
He’d expected terror—the knowledge that he would be dead the moment William Douglas realized he and Mercer were working together, and the instinct to flee and never look back—but what he felt strongest of all was a deep, unsettling rage at the man who’d dare hurt someone as thoughtful and cautious as Mercer, and as brave and kind as Lydia. How dare this monster threaten either of them.
Rahil didn’t want to interrupt Mercer’s emergency with this, not after how open Merc had been about his capacity towards fear, but his number was on the fridge and Rahil knew it was safest not to wait. When he didn’t receive an immediate response, he forced himself not to panic.
It occurred to him, ironically, how different this wait was from the first two times Mercer had ghosted him. He’d thought he’d felt things then, but it was nothing compared to this: the anxiety, the tension, theneed. He needed Mercer to be okay. He needed Lydia to be okay. There was no way around it.
When Mercer still didn’t respond, Rahil began checking the house for open windows or obvious traps and finding—and locking—the one side window that William had clearly used to enter. Still, he felt uncomfortable hanging out in Mercer’s house. He averted his gaze from the pictures of Mercer and Lydia that were hung around the space, the little personal knickknacks and attributions of a life as a family. Merc hadn’treallyinvited him in, so much as simply not had the attention span to tell him to leave.
He also hadn’t had time to close up the shed.
That solidified it. Locking the back door behind him, Rahil sprinted back to the shed. He checked it over too. There was no sign of William, thankfully, and the holy silver lockbox that Mercer had moved to the benchtop was still shut tight, so he closed the door, then the window he’d been coming through for good measure. Standing in the shed’s dusky darkness, it smelled like everything he associated with Mercer: rich, dark earth and the mouthwatering aroma of baking bread. The same scent as the blood he’d never get to drink.
God, he needed to force himself to go on another random hookup. But he couldn’t even think about opening his dating app right now.
Rahil slumped against the counter, sliding slowly down to the ground. All the energy seemed to slip out of him, putting him right on the edge of something almost like sleep, without enough oomph to push him over into actual, useful slumber. He contemplated straight up calling Merc, but he was probably the last person Mercer wanted to hear from right now. Instead, he pulled up Lydia’s 52hz whale song and set it to play on repeat.
Even that wasn’t quite enough to numb the constant buzz of Rahil’s brain, but it soothed some things. He ended up scrolling through articles about the whale, finding a few sources that claimed 52hz was probably a blue whale-fin whale hybrid. Rahil could understand that—the feeling of not being entirely one thing. Not human enough to live a typical existence and not monster enough to use his vampiric aspects to better his life, not solitary enough to exist without people surrounding him and not functional enough as a member of a family or society to find true community. A father, but not. A widower, but not. Just a stagnant, cyclic outsider, calling a song no one else was able to hear.
He scrolled with a little more frustration, but his finger stopped on a paragraph at the end of the article.
—recordings of what is likely a second 52-hz whale—
A second 52hz whale.
There was, possibly, maybe, asecond52hz whale.
Oh.
Rahil closed the phone, tipped his head back, and quietly, so quietly he might as well not have existed at all, he wept.
Metal Daddy
That’s highly unfortunate
