I’m good.For now. An instant switch is very rare. Usually, it can take hours, days, before you even become a carrier, Touched… Before the blood darkens, before the senses sharpen and their doom is written in their veins. And to become a zombie, a Walker, after that… It can take months, years, as the virus slowly spreads.
Opening my eyes again, I shove the panic to the side because I have to focus on my man now. Not my ultimate demise. I force my breathing to slow and dart up the stairs to his room. His sanctuary.
My eyes find him immediately.
He’s on the big balcony that hangs over the ocean, the red rain sluicing over him. For a second, I freeze. He looks wrong and perfect all at once, like some fucked-up statue: skin stained red, wet, hair pasted to his forehead, standing like he’s letting the world punish him.
It’s as if he belongs to the ocean, the storm, and it almost hurts to look.
“Max.”
He doesn’t turn. He doesn’t look at me. He just stands there, letting the rain eat at his skin as if it’s something he’s been waiting for.
“Stay. There.” His rough voice cuts through the hiss of rain. “Do not step a foot forward. Don’t let even a fucking drop touch you.”
I grit my teeth, forcing my face into something harder than the fear bubbling in my chest.
“Max—”
But his next words cut me off, cut straight through my thoughts, low and quiet, almost lost in the downpour.
“I don’t want to send you to the afterlife as well.”
The afterlife. The word punches me in the gut.He might have to.
My head tilts as I watch him, standing there in the open, arms loose at his sides, his chin lifted like he’s daring the rain to strike him down.
“The afterlife?” I echo, my voice sharp but uncertain. “Do you believe in that kinda stuff?”
He shifts then, not just looking but offering himself to it, arms spreading wider as if the storm belongs to him. The crimson drops spatter across his skin, streaking down his cheeks, tracing over the sharp lines of his jaw like war paint.
He just… stands there. Soaking it in. Untouchable. Immune.
Beautiful.
Not that I’ll ever tell him that. Not out loud. I like to keep my head where it belongs… on my fucking shoulders.
“I need to believe it’s real,” he mutters finally, the rain swallowing his words. So quiet, I’m sure they weren’t meant for me.
But I understand. I know exactly what he means.
Tass.
It’s been mere days, and the ghost of her is here. She was the only one who could match him, the only one who could drag him back from the edge when he spun too close to the abyss. Until the infection finally got her. Until the virus in her veins finally snapped, and she turned. Exactly what now will happen to me someday.
And Max… Max was the one who had to end it. Who had to drive steel through one of the few people that ever counted as his family.
Now he stands out there like he’s daring the rain to take him too. Like he’s begging it to take him to her.
And me? I can’t move. I can only watch.
My heart bleeds for him, for her, for this. It bleeds for the empty space she carved out of him. She was the light to his dark,and I’m so fucking afraid of what this loss’ll do to him. What this could do to us… to whatever thread keeps us from unraveling.
If he doesn’t have her, if he loses that thing that kept his demons at bay, what happens then? Can I be enough for his darkness? For his monster? Can anyone be?
There’s just this sense of wrongness that emanates from him sometimes.
Of wickedness. Of wildness. Of wrath.
