Page 49 of Vilest Things
With a sudden, barely suppressed noise, Calla yanks her arm back, then presses it hard against her sternum. The moment Anton inches forward to help, he reminds himself to get it together. His eyes pivot to the wall, and he unhooks a bronze plaque instead.
“Take a look at yourself.”
He puts the bronze plaque in front of her. Calla flinches as soon as she glances at the surface. Rather than addressing why there is a yellow tinge to the room, she shoves the plaque away, letting it clatter to the floor.
“Don’t.”
“This is not a friendly request,” Anton snaps. “This is a command: tell me what you did.”
Calla’s grip tightens. She isn’t only clasping her chest—she’s splayed her fingers and formed claws with her nails, as though the skin underneath is bothering her and she wants to tear through it to get at what’s underneath. The burning smell thickens. A vibration has started within the room, and when Anton tilts his head, his ear doesn’t pick it up as a sound so much as a feeling: movement that shakes the walls, the carpet, the ceiling slats until it’s itching at the inside of his mouth. It’s burrowing into bone. He would start plucking his teeth out one by one to make it stop.
Enough. Anton lunges forward. Before Calla can combat his approach, he hooks a foot around her ankle and takes her balance out. She yelps; he shoves her onto the desk.
“Hey!”
“I’m notattacking, god—”
When he squeezes her neck, he’s exceedingly aware of each point of contact between them, each brush between his fingertips and her burning skin, between his palm and her throat. The feeling sears his nerve endings as though he’s actually put his hand upon an open flame. The call to press closer into her is trancelike, near hypnotic. Calla jerks up in an attempt to get free, to push hishand off. She’s unbalanced, and all she achieves is her nose nudging the side of his face. A whole-body shudder runs down his spine.
Anton, going exactly for what she’s trying to protect, yanks at her shirt collar, revealing a glimpse of blood smeared on her skin. She bucks, forcing him away, but he’s found what he was looking for.
“What have you done?” Anton demands. “Why are you messing around with Crescent Society experiments?”
“Not Crescent Society experiments,” Calla manages, heaving. “Just qi.”
“Stop it, then.”
“I’m nottryingto do this.”
He grabs her face roughly with his other hand, keeping her still, flat on her back. “Calla.”
Calla makes a noise, her chest rising and falling. It isn’t the whine of helplessness. It is a siren lure of hunger, and he wants nothing more than to bite down. Put his mouth on the vulnerable triangle of soft skin between her collarbones. There are so many ways to kill her right now, to turn the trap on her. A dozen objects on the table that he could use as a weapon: start with the ink pen and skewer it through her ribs, plunge through muscle and bone and split every important organ open until she’s bleeding and repenting before him.
Her eyes are frantic, swiveling around.
Calla feels each groove of the hand on her jaw. Anton is wearing rings. Cold jade. Faintly, she takes inventory of what else is real around her body: the blue wallpaper, the stale air, the shriek of some alarm whining through the building. Then Anton says her name again, and she hears something else. He shakes her shoulders with a disgruntled “Calla, come on,” and her ears spasm; her eyes go dark.
Sinoa, come on.
Calla blinks hard. “What did you say?”
“I said, you’re trapping it in,” Anton replies, and she realizes he wasn’t the one to speak. At least not the last part she just heard. “The qi.”
“Qi issupposedto be on the inside.”
“Not if you’re reacting like this! Let it out.”
There’s a second voice whispering in the room. Whispering in constant rhythm alongside Anton’s words so that she can’t pick apart what they’re saying, save that they are getting closer and closer to her ear. She cranes her neck, searches through her blurring vision, and when Anton tightens his grip on her forcefully, she isn’t in control of herself as her hand lifts to shove him away.
A pulse beats fiercely from her wrist. It collides with Anton’s chest as if she has taken a wooden mallet to him, and the momentum pushes him hard enough that he skids across the carpet until his back collides with the far wall.
Calla heaves for breath. Anton swears, then stumbles a step, wincing and reaching for his shoulder. He doesn’t look too badly injured.
The room settles. Calla rubs her eyes, and there’s no more burning sensation. No glow. It has been building for the entire journey out—she simply couldn’t have imagined thatthiswould have been the result.
For the first time in fifteen years, she almost felt like she was about to jump.
“You did something,” Anton states. He doesn’t bother posing it as a question. “To cause this.”
