Just to make itstop.
Jaw clenched, I reach for my monocular and focus on the comet’s coma, a striking halo streaking through the night.
Like a falling angel.
“Fuck.” I toss the scope aside. Collinsmay be able to string enough psych jargon together to craft a diagnosis that explains my evolution into a deviant, serial-killing psychopath. But I wonder if that will bring her any sort of comfort in her final moments, to offer some excuse.
Or if the horror of what I am will only make her despise me all the more.
In truth, I wasn’t born with this deficient lack of empathy. Although I experience a rush of endorphins every time the oscillating blade slices into bone, the high is a consequence of the act, not the attraction to it.
My transformation wasn’t immediate. It took time, a process. The first kill was a brutal battle with my conscience. I can still taste the bile at the back of my throat as I drilled through the skull.
The second, I gave in a bit more easily. My resistance a degree weaker. My revulsion a fraction more desensitized.
The shadow a shade darker.
By the third, I understood my morality wasn’t just being eroded—it was being overwritten. Replaced by something violent, insidious.
Wrong.
These psychological voids have a pull, a force with its own gravity. At the moment of death, of conscious collapse, something passes through me. Call it awareness…consciousness… Memories. But these gravitational echoes leave a stain, a residue.
Killers. Rapists. The most vile dregs of humanity. How can I not be tainted?
Where I used to fear pain, my neuropathways worn to avoid it, a deep fault has cracked. Connections crossed, rewired. Pain brings pleasure.
And inflicting it is fucking orgasmic.
“Since we have all this time,” I say, reaching into my pack. I remove my gloves before I uncap a syringe and plunge the needle into the crook of his arm. “Let’s talk, Cassian.”
He gasps in a cool shot of air as the stimulant hits his bloodstream. “Oh, fuck… You fucking?—”
I trap his mouth with the syringe. “Don’t waste the breath you’ve got.” Slowly, I lower the barrel.
“Hell. At least…cover my dick, man.”
My gaze wanders to the flaccid dick in question. His exposed skin is blotchy, covered in dirt and blood from where his arms and legs have been skewered to the earth.
“You’re minutes away from death, and that’s your concern.”
Tears leak into his filthy hair. A sob shudders through his chest. From the collarbone down, he’s immobile.
I make all my victims immobile.
The way I’ll make her?—
A flash of Collins pinned helplessly beneath me surfaces, and I slam my eyes shut against the intrusive assault, forcing it back into the dark, thrashing abyss.
“The thing is,” I say through gritted teeth, “you might be able to help me figure something out.” I rarely have the chance to question them, and I never want more of the vile details than necessary.
He swallows, Adam’s apple hitching with effort. “Figure out that you’re sick?”
I let the corner of my mouth turn up. “There’s nothing I can do to stop what’s going to happen,” I tell him honestly. “You’re going to die. I can’t prevent that.”
“Shit…” he stutters out.
“But before you do, I’m going to take that drill”—I tic my chin toward the compact cranial drill next to his head—“and open your skull.”
