Page 70 of An Amateur Witch's Guide to Murder
Certainty swells for a moment, the puddle at his core expanding, deepening and widening into a bottomless pit of fury. As he moves a hundred real hands to sink claws into the prison, rip it from off of him, he hesitates. That doesn’t feel right either. He is made of the wrong things, in disconnected pieces, not properly whole, yes, but …
“Teo?”A voice he would sooner cease to exist than not listen to, whispers. Then hands, sliding to cheeks that he shouldn’t have, direct a face that he also shouldn’t have to focus down on her.
Ophelia.
His Ophelia.
But in a reciprocal way, not that he’s a creep about it.
Basement grime and blood coating her dress, she gazes up at him with a brow creased in worry. He doesn’t like that expression on her face, a sliver of panic thrumming through the destroyed heart motionless in his center.
“Are you okay? I mean, you’re not okay, but … are you okay?”This voice is vibrating with nervous energy, but even so it is accompanied by thin fingers, unerringly finding one of the two meat-arms in his mass of dripping shadow and, frankly, a lot of arms and things like arms, and even teeth.
Topher.
He wants to attach a neat yet meaningful summation to that name, like he’d done with Ophelia, but his meat brain skitters around a few different possessive descriptors that make him uncomfortable and don’t necessarily feel mutually agreed upon.
Luckily, there is blood to focus on.
It oozes from Topher’s hairline, down cheek, chin, and throat, and he can smell it on those fragile hands lost in the pulsing blackness of his body. This blood is Topher’s, and the earlier rage sweeps through him again. The sight of Topher prone, hurt, bleeding, then awake, trying so hard only to go down again, the brutality of the hit, the way his delicate skull impacted unyielding stone—it is intolerable and unforgivable, yet he’s already consumed the cause.
His strange matter pulses in agitation, but he gently moves his face from Ophelia’s grasp, drawing Topher closer to bring bloodied hands to some of his mouths. So carefully he drags tongues around each finger, across each palm,mindful of teeth. Each hand is licked clean before pressing tongue to the sweet mess streaming down Topher’s brow and then cheek. Another laps up shoulder blades and neck, to the back of Topher’s scalp, mindful of where skin has been mashed against bone.
A soft noise from Topher and he pulls back slightly, concerned he’s hurt his frail flesh in some way. Gray orbs quiver, but not in pain or even fear—which is wild because some part of him is aware that too many mouths are in play. The maelstrom of emotion in those storm-cloud eyes drags his attention down to that defenseless mouth, remembering blunt teeth, a questing tongue, and the honeyed press of pale lips.
A kiss he hadn’t reciprocated for reasons more difficult to grasp than the unreality of his form and the fracturing of his memory. Whatever the reason, he wants to correct it now.
Careful to use only the mouth connected to the prison, teeth receding to wherever teeth go when not eating, he presses lips to impossibly soft lips.
Topher’s response is tentative, only lips and breath, soft and hesitant but underneath that, eager. One of his now bloodless hands slides up to grasp at the place between neck and jaw, unerringly finding it in the dripping ichor and shadow. Once Topher gets the hang of it—or the assurance that teeth aren’t going to eviscerate him—he leans in, lips parting, and eyes closed. Like he isn’t kissing a monster at all.
“Hey, I’m totally for this but we’ve got stuff to do right now,”Ophelia says, letting them keep kissing for a moment more before catching his cheek and directing his face back to her. Those eyes are cerulean and beautiful but marred in the unhappiness of her delicate housing. She strains on tiptoes, trying to press her forehead to his but she is only, like, threeinches tall, so he sends a wave of shadow beneath her bare feet, lifting her up so they can meet.“Mateo Borrero, come back,”she whispers to him, lips close enough to brush at least one of his mouths.
This nonsense jumble shocks him, forcing a clarity he hadn’t known he’d lacked.
He knows suddenly that he can do what she asked, but if he does, there is something he’ll miss. A swell of unknown enticement sits just out of reach, and he stands on the precipice. One step and he can understand, but if he steps, he can’t un-step. He will fall.
“Mateo Borrero, come back to me, or I’m going to be mad at you forever. So will Topher,” Ophelia says less softly.
He doesn’t just back away from the edge, he turns around and sprints—metaphorically speaking.
What his body does is shed shadow like he’s one of those inky cap mushrooms on overdrive, a violent expulsion of ichor that leaves him naked and unstable, holding Ophelia around the middle with Topher latched on to one of his arms. He can’t support Ophelia’s weight, so he drops to his ass on the ground, dragging both of them down with him.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“I did what?” Mateo asks, wearily seated in the chair he was earlier strapped to. A horrible combination of the first two things Ophelia alighted on in Ethan’s closet cover his person, which means he’s ruining a nice pair of Saint Laurent pants and a gaudy Prada cardigan—he feels less bad about the cardigan because it’s ugly, but still.
“You ate him,” Ophelia says, fluttering around the depths of Ethan’s magical murder basement like a fairy, shoving ugly curtains aside and studying shelves. He wants to remind her to be careful but he’s not sure he has the right anymore … on account of the eating of a live person.
“But. Like …” he starts, but he’s not sure what he meant to say. His attention keeps diverting to the mess slowly making its way back to him across the floor. Alarming chunks of demon gunk casually worming their way to his bare feet where they just sort of disappear into him. He remembers feeling like he was fragmented, confusion, a lot of anger, and then he so very vividly remembers the eating. But it’s distinctly unreal because that part was exactly like his dreams, but this time it for surehappened because other people around him totally saw him do it.
“He deserved it,” Topher assures him, reaching a hand up to awkwardly pat Mateo’s knee. He’s seated on the concrete at Mateo’s feet, cross-legged and loose-limbed. That hand lingers, and Mateo realizes he’d absolutely had those fingers in his mouth, the memory a sudden fire hose turned full blast directly into his brain. He’d demon-mode made out with Tophersomuch. And Topher’s just patting his knee and not looking deeply traumatized about it. Aside from the fact that too many mouths were involved, Mateo doesn’t feel weird about it either. Which is, itself, extraordinarily weird.
Maybe it’s just exhaustion on Topher’s part. He’s actually in worse shape than Mateo by virtue of an inability to heal—which is saying a lot because Mateo’s got a dagger in his chest.
And, actually, both Topher and Ophelia are taking this whole cannibalism thing really well.
More distressingly, so is Mateo.
