I frowned at the screen, reread Max’s text. There were no more horses on the Graham estate.
Sitting alone in the middle of my house at three in the morning with my body covered in the ink of what looked like a thousand Sharpie markers, I figured I could handle an empty field. I clicked the square open.
Then froze at the sound of terrified horses screaming in the darkness.
I stabbed the video off, then turned my sound way down for good measure. No. Way. No way that was actually happening, ghost horses screaming behind a demon-infested house. That couldn’t be real. I struggled to my feet, my hands shaking as I tried to walk to the bathroom and type at the same time.
Are you okay??I texted Max. No way was I clicking on the other two videos.
There was no response. Of course there was no response. The house had probably eaten him.
I flopped into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror.
And froze.
A stark, slashing command marked my face. My forehead. Perfectly executed in block letters backwards, so it reflected correctly in the mirror.GO BACK.
But that wasn’t all. My entire body was covered in Sharpie ink. Pungent fumes clung to me like a second skin, acrid and sweet, making me gag even as my brain scrambled to understand what had happened to me. The refrain of disgusting words that usually adorned my walls was only the start of it.Slut, Whore, Failure, Loser, Freak, Beaststretched down my neck, spilling over my arms, so familiar as to almost be reassuring—except for the fact that these were on my own skin, my own body…
I stepped back, seeing more, and my heart lurched sideways in horror, then started beating at a frantic pace. As the scrawled words reached my breasts, my hips, they became different.
Horribly different.
Now you are a broken seal: A scarlet stain upon the earthran along the curve of one breast.o! that I could play with you myself little sparrowcurled in a wide circle around my hip.Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be…dove deep over one thigh, aiming for?—
“What thefuck!” I hissed, vaguely recognizing the words as something real— something written by poets or scribes or whatever the hell a million years ago. People who knew what they were doing. But these overwrought outpourings of a bunch of emo dead people had no business on my skin, etched like infernal brands.
I lifted my arms to find more text nestled in my armpit.The firefly wakens.Anddown my ribcage,in shakierscript…in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
My face burned as I stared at the snaking curves, the sinuous lines. The words scrawled over my too-white skin werebeautiful. Disturbing and invasive and completely violating, but beautiful. And that made it so much worse. I didn’t want to feel anything but rage, but instead my belly twisted with an emotion I couldn’t name. Something dark, but also gorgeous. Something?—
“What the fuck iswrongwith you?” I whispered.
Even as I said it, I felt a flutter of something in my chest—not quite an answer, more like a held breath. Anticipation. Need.
Then outrage flashed again. This emotion, at last, felt right; purely, finally, unmistakablyme. Boiling rage blasted up my spine like a holy fire, clearing everything in its path. Fury knotted up my guts and radiated outward, pulsing blasts of heat and ice.
For one brief shining moment, I was vengeance and retribution wrapped up in a barbed wire ball of get-the-fuck-gone and I was here tostay.
Me, not the creature inside me.
“Whoa,” I whispered.
I stared at my reflection in the mirror as the moment bled away, my brows climbing so high on my forehead that myGO BACKorder looked like a squashed marshmallow. The words on my face and neck stayed flat and stark—but on my torso andlegs? They shimmered and jumped, scrambling a little on my skin before settling down again, and they looked different now, shinier…almost pretty despite the desecration they represented.
I couldn’t help it. My mouth quirked a little to the side, and a soft, breathy chuckle escaped me. “You didn’t plan on writingthatstuff, did you?” I whispered aloud.
There was no response.
I stepped back from the mirror and squinted down at my legs, grimacing in confusion as the shit covering me switched again—this time to something darker, more desperate. Down the length of my legs to my feet, the writing diverged into languages I couldn’t decipher, but I could tell that I didn’t want to know what these words and symbols meant. They practically pulsed with a wild darkness that, like the words on my torso, seemed like they’d been poured out in some kind of fugue.
I grimaced. How many markers had I gone through? Everywhere I could reach, I was covered in ink.
Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, I could feel the pain, too, a dull throbbing ache that seemed to blossom up from the seat of my spine. I strained to see my back and winced.Ouch. With a sick knot of dread in my stomach, I kept going, curving just enough to see what I’d done.
Black and red bruises snaked down my back, the skin on my right hip half-scraped away. Apparently whatever skin I couldn’t easily reach I’d tried to sand off my body out of spite.Jesus Christ.
Steve better have left some bourbon in the house. Because this shower was going to sting like a bitch.
