He looked like he’d been drawn to a horse and dragged for years.
Lytta stepped forward and placed her fingertips to the exposed skin on his hips asking silent permission that he answered with a hesitant nod. Her fingers were delicately slim, feminine, and dotted with scars. She pulled the velcro fastening and worked on undoing the fabric holding him together.
Swollen, raw flesh revealed itself as the bandage fell. Pieces of gauze stuck to the larger wounds and removed the healing flesh. Small beads of blood swelled and ran from the small tears. What was left when the bandages were gone was devastating.
Desperate claw marks dragged across his sternum and chest, the whole area of shredded skin so tattered it was hard to find anything still solidly intact, his arms in much the same condition.
Brooks ran his fingers gently over his marred abdomen. He should have been sorer than he actually felt, he knew, but assumed that they’d given him a pain killer that was dulling the sensation.
He rose onto his tip-toes and gently pushed his stomach and chest closer to the mirror. The breath caught in his throat as his eyes adjusted to the lighting. There was a weird pattern to the gashes his nails had left behind. The more he stared the less random and frantic the tears looked. His brain began to organize a pattern.
Letters? What the fuck?
His eyes drifted to the only set of stitches on his chest and his eyes bulged, saccharine laughter filling his senses like opium as he stared at his ruined chest.
Chaos.
“This doesn’t work without her. I cannot hold him without her song and we are not finished. Do you get that?”
What did that mean?
Xia’s mind drifted back to the conversation she’d overheard over and over again. One of the conclusions she’d come to was that the Devil was collecting and using her song. She hadn’t known it was possible to use blood or tears to steal chaos but supposed it made sense. Chaos was, after all, the magic woven within her essence.
What could hold someone’s essence more truly than the blood they shed or the tears they wept?
And then there was Brooks.
Her broken man who was so brave…
He was there in her red room. Only, he wasn’t.
She could hear and see him, but when she pressed her hands to his body it was… wrong. Like he was half there, and half somewhere else.
She recalled stories the old nursemaid used to tell her and her sisters before darkness fell upon their island. Tales of ancient magic given to their ancestors from the Father of Chaos himself. Each original god was given a gift from their creator to live freely and shape the world as they pleased. Some were given powers of shadow manipulation while others were blessed with creation or the ability to manipulate weather.
All of the original gods with blessings from Chaos were perfectly balanced. One did not out-power another, and their gifts all worked in harmony to mold the world into something of grace and beauty.
But, as they would learn, peace does not last forever.
The gods mingled, creating the next great generation and, as they anticipated, their offspring were born with chaos as well.
Of all the daemons, she had never once heard of someone containing the ability of projection.
Not to be mistaken for casting a blurry image to fool your foes.
True projection. The ability to split the soul and send it somewhere else. To be seen and heard while the majority of your essence is elsewhere.
There was no other explanation for what he’d done, and something shivered along her spine.
The only being she’d ever known to have the power of projection was the Soul Eater himself…
Chaos.
Hisfingerstracedtheangry patches of skin on his torso and down his arms. The biggest mark ran diagonally between his pectorals, a flaming red around the edges with tell-tale signs of a nasty bruise forming around it. A stream of blood ran from the torn stitch down his side and soaked into the lining of his cotton pajama bottoms.
Brooks caught Lytta’s assessing stare in the mirror and held it, attempting to decipher the thoughts running through her fractured mind. Anything was better than having to think about his ruined torso. She was contemplative and a nagging voice told him she was trying to say something. Maybe she couldn’t find the right words?
“Stay here, I’ll be back.” That was all the warning he got before she stepped from the bathroom.
