I meet Shadow’s eyes, and I’m shocked to register apology and regret in his monstrous gaze.
Unable to move or breathe as he comes to me, a tendril slides down my face, cleaning it of blood. He seems to be drinking me in with his white misty eyes as if it’s the last time he’ll see me. He leans in and kisses my cheek with lips I’ve never been able to properly see.
And then he’s gone.
Four years. Four years since the cops escorted a hysterical Jean away. Last I heard, she was still receiving treatment in a care facility that specialized in psychotic breaks. The cops told me she never stopped babbling or screaming about monsters. Even in her sleep, she murmured about shadows and blood. About the monster under the bed goring her husband.
I’d been crammed back into a group home and appointed therapy, but I wouldn’t talk. I was already suspected of having something to do with David’s grisly murder, so it wouldn’t help things to confess I was glad he was dead.
The nature of David’s violent near explosion of limbs and body parts stumped the cops. They concluded it was some sort of animal attack, but none of them really believed it. Their whispers and scared sideways glances let me know they’d seen enough to believe in more than what meets the eye.
The therapist spoke to me like she knew what I was going through, about how I must see the blood every time I close my eyes. She was wrong. That’s not what stuck to my bones.
The horror of the situation that burrowed and scratched its way under my skin was the disappointment radiating off Shadow as he discovered the secret I’d kept. That I’d been complicit in David’s desires.
Shadow didn't come back. I couldn’t explain that I did it to protect myself, to help myself. I couldn’t scream or yell at him that he wasn’t always around, and I couldn’t always wait for him to save me.
That I wasn’t ashamed for wanting a stable home, and that I refused to regret securing that for myself.
That I didn’t need him to save me. Though I can’t deny the immense relief I felt at David being disposed of. An invisible weight inside me lightened with his death.
The years of wondering, contemplating, and theories of why Shadow abandoned me were torture far beyond having to suck any guy’s dick.
Was Shadow disappointed in me? Did he despise me? Did the heart-eating monster from under my bed find me grotesque?
Aging out of the system and being on my own only gave me more opportunities to judge myself through Shadow's eyes. My mind constantly created assumptions and criticisms, leaving me sick and numb with self-condemnation.
I eventually got to the point where I didn’t think of his abandonment every minute of the day. I stopped checking under my bed, or the beds at the houses I cleaned. But his absence caused something to rot inside of me. As time went on, it continued to grow, festering like an open wound that refused to heal. The isolation and loneliness clamped down on me until I was barely breathing.
Until the night I decided to visit the dive bar down the street from my apartment and find an unsuspecting victim. A man to touch me where I didn’t want it. To invoke unpleasant, confusing sexual feelings in the hopes my savior would come.
It might not work. It might put me in more danger than I had planned for, but I didn’t fucking care anymore. I couldn’t live with this open wound on my own anymore. I’d get Shadow back by any means, even monstrous ones.
It worked.
And now he’s here, holding my neighbors captive with the same rage he exhibited toward my foster father, and I find myself instantly soaked between my thighs, unrepentant and hungry for violence and the monster who holds me close and licks the blood off my skin.
Come To Kill
Shadow’s forked tongue darts out, a lightning strike searing my neck with its caress. I tilt my head back, offering my throat, offering everything, as pleasure spreads through my battered body under his rough, velvet touch. His hands, so much larger and rougher than anything human, explore every inch of me with proprietary hunger, his tentacles sliding along my ribs, my thighs, the hollow of my belly.
There’s a word beating under his every action. I hear it like a heartbeat, even though it never leaves his lips.
Mine.
He may not say it out loud, but I know he feels it as much as I do. The need to be together. I’m safe with him, safe with my darkness, my needs.
There is no more shame. Only acceptance.
I sag against him, and he holds me up effortlessly, dragging his tongue along the cuts on my neck, his claws massaging my hips as he drinks me in.
A muffled scream draws my gaze up—reminding me we are not alone. Caroline and Elijah hover overhead, suspended by Shadow’s thick, snaking tentacles. Caroline’s sallow, waxen face shines with sweat, her pupils blown wide with terror. Elijah’sface is purple and bloated, blood leaking sluggishly from his broken nose.
The sight of them, gagged and gasping, ignites a fresh bolt of rage deep inside me.
It writhes through my veins like molten metal.
Caroline makes sounds still muffled by Shadow’s tentacles.
