Page 69 of An Amateur Witch's Guide to Murder
“What are you?” is the last thing Ethan says before the darkness is shattered by his screams.
They go on for a very long time, and she loves that too.
CHAPTER FORTY
Something is exceptionally wrong. A nagging thought he can’t make sense of as he licks sweet blood off the palm of one hand.
Hand?
Since when does he have hands like these? Not a normal hand made from the formless throng of body, of which he has many, but one of two that are different. Corporal. Constrained by rules of biology that can be bent, as he’s done, but not entirely broken.
That is one of the problems, isn’t it? These two hands contain rigid substance other than that which is nothing.
Solidity.
Meat and bone.
How can he be meat and bone?
And there is more of it. All over. Encasing him.
Him? Is that right?
He looks around the room, which is also wrong, becauselookandroomaren’t things he does. He should notlook, because his perception has nothing to do with sockets andwads of jelly-filled flesh. He should not beinside a room, because he exists in the place where nothing else is.
This is somewhere, and the somewhere sucks.
Along with the knowledge that something is majorly boned about the situation, exists an unease. A fear. A concept foreign to the substance that is both brain and nothing like the soft, salty gray matter he’s just eaten—the matter that he is starting to suspect lives inside the skull anchoring him to this ugly room.
The fear isn’t of the place, which is good because it doesn’t make sense to fear walls and stone. It is an intangible concern, like he’s misplaced something precious, even though he’s never considered anything of particular import.
There. On the ground.
They lie in a pile, which is a very meat thing to do but the sight of them causes a savage fury that hasn’t been felt in units of time he can no longer understand. Careful, because their shells are meat and meat is so easily destroyed, he lifts them off the stone. The tacky floor pillows are as good as it’s going to get so he sits them there, dragging more pillows to frame their limp forms so they don’t slump.
The soft, pale one moans, the thin layer of skin over eyeballs flickering. Opening. Opening more and more. That feels normal, the unease in his gut he shouldn’t have softening, shifting to pleasure at being goggled at.
He focuses on the other one, knowing an empty vessel by scent. Searching around the room, he smells the air, easily catching an essence he knows as well as …
Weird.
The thought can’t be completed.
An absence of memory. Is that what’s wrong? His memory is gone? But gone isn’t right. He knows some things. He knows he isn’t supposed to contain this density of material. Knows these carved off pieces aren’t supposed to be sodden and floating around inside of him. Knows he isn’t supposed to have this silent mass of soft tissue at his center. Knows it isn’t supposed to be stabbed through with a shard of metal.
And he knows her.
Even in another shell, he will always know her.
Reaching a hand—not the clumsy flesh ones but the correct kind—into the Lululemon-wearing meat crumpled on the ground, he ever so gently pulls her out.
Unlike last time, she doesn’t need much to go back to her shell, soul and flesh connected.
Soul and flesh connected? That thought frustrates him. Alarms him. Something is so fantastically wrong and his mind—that he shouldn’t have—feels slippery, a greased egg on a tilted countertop.
A cage.
He’s been caged.
