Exactly where he always put it, under the fucking couch, which I still thought was dangerous.
My heart raced, and I tried to sit up but my head swam. No, I wasn’t about to fucking die in this house of horrors. Overhead thunder rumbled, the way it had been off and on all day, and I forced myself to move even as my vision dimmed a little. I crawled toward the couch and fumbled one-handed with the holster. I managed to get the gun out of the holster and put it on the floor to hold it still with my unhelpful hand. I drew the top back the way Tyler had shown me not so long ago in my living room.
Tyler hadlost it, and if this person I was seeing was a demon… or the other way around like he claimed…. Well, I wanted to live. And I didn’t want to hurt my Tyler, the man who had held me and made me feel so good, but….
I was feeling drunk, and it was probably from the fact I’d had my fucking eye gouged out. I carefully picked up the gun and thought I remembered there would be a kick when I fired it. I’d heard that somewhere. I sat down on the couch and rested my arm on the back of it so I could hold the gun steady on the archway, since I only had one hand.
I might only have one shot.
A long time passed. I got tired of waiting. I stood and swayed but kept to my feet. I followed the sounds of a pleasant humming to the kitchen.
Rage began to churn in me. This man had hurt me for pleasure and was fucking happy about it. I edged around the archway to look in on the room. There was a jug of something on the floor in front of the cupboard where I’d found the eyes—that must fucking be real and in no way a joke. The stench of chemicals hung in the air. Tyler dropped my eye into one of those tiny jars. The cupboard door was wide open, and a terror I hadn’t anticipated rattled me as it sank in that those eyes had each been in a head at some point.
Those were a lot of people missing their eyes.
Or a lot of bodies buried around here somewhere.
I raised the gun. “Tyler, I don’t fucking know if what you’re saying is true. It’s nuts. I love you. I don’t believe you would do this, but I’m not about to die tonight,” I said quietly. My hand shook.
Tyler turned toward me, and a sneer twisted his face. And I finally believed the wild ideas ping-ponging around in my head. Tyler didn’t… look like this, ever.Thiswasn’t my boyfriend. I raised the gun and fired as he rushed toward me. The gun kicked, although not as much as I’d been afraid it would. I kept squeezing the trigger, but he flew at me and didn’t stop. I sobbed and fired.
With his shoulder down, he hit me and carried me back through the archway to the floor. Pain rattled me, but I knew if I stopped I’d be dead, and adrenaline forced my arm up. I put the gun underneath his chin. Tyler’s eyes—orwhoeverthis was—widened as I pulled the trigger. Warm blood hit my skin and something stung my cheeks. I wasn’t sure what caused the burn, but my face ached in a few places.
Tyler’s weight was heavy on me.
“I’ll find you. Love you, too,” he said, but there was no way those words should have been able to come from his ruined mouth. New terror twisted deep in my gut.
Heat swirled in the room, which shocked me and sucked at my breath. It felt like sitting too close to a fire—inside flames. As fast as it had come on, the scorching breeze was gone. I was left on the floor shivering. It took all my strength to struggle out from underneath Tyler. My face hurt so bad I couldn’t even cry about it. It was beyond anything as ridiculous as tears. The agony consumed my thoughts.
“I need help,” I said out loud.
Then it occurred to me that… the corpse might have a phone. Gagging and crying, in spite of the fact I hadn’t thought I’d be able to shed tears, I went through his pockets. I pulled out Tyler’s phone. The screen was locked, but there was an Emergency icon at the bottom and I pressed it.
“Clinton County Emergency Services. What’s your emergency?” came a bored man’s voice. “And if this is you again, Evan Smith, I don’t want to hear a damned thing about your goats. Go round them up yourself.”
I laughed, then started to sob. “I need help. Please. I’m bleeding and I don’t know where I am.”
There was a clatter on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry. We don’t get many calls. Where are you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling hysterical. “An old house in the middle of nowhere.”
“Describe it,” he said seriously, so I did the best I could and huddled against the archway between the dining room and the kitchen, staring at Tyler’s body and hating myself just a little. I couldn’t open my right eye because it wasn’t there anymore.
Was this really Tyler’s fault? Demons aren’t real.I crawled over and curled up next to him, staring at his chest, not looking at his destroyed face. I tugged the blindfold up over my eyes and cried while I waited.
Epilogue
Tyler
December 15th
Feeling overlyemotional and fighting off excitement that wasn’t mine alone, I stood in front of a door marked 509, almost one-hundred-percent certain this was the right spot. The holly Christmas wreath with a red-and-gold bow hanging below the number on the door confused me. It hadn’t been Halloween yet, the last time I’d been… awake, for lack of a better word. I hated how different everything looked. The ceiling was far away when I glanced upward.
“You’re too fuckin’ short,” I grumped at my new host, who only laughed inside my head. I’d lucked into him. He was so different from Abe that I’d only been in his body for a few minutes before I realized how stressed I’d constantly been in my last host. I sighed and couldn’t bring myself to knock yet. I touched my new face. Would Noble like it? I couldn’t have picked someone more different from Abe if I’d tried. Sage was slimmer than Noble, though he had my strength now. Blond where Abe had been dark. Younger than Noble—only barely twenty.
I hung my head. He’d never believe me. The last flash of memory I had of him, he was scared and hurt. Why would he ever trust me again? How could I convince him Abe was the one who’d done those things? Not me?
The best thing I could do for him was move on. Maybe this was why I usually didn’t remember my previous hosts. Maybe it was too fucking traumatic.
