I didn’t.
Lenny stepped forward, our mutual hatred charging the air. A sudden warning rang between my ears when he shifted his weight. “You really thought you could just show up here?” Lenny snatched my camera off the counter with his free hand and drew his arm back. “I know what you did, Connoway!”
He’s going to hit me.
I ducked a split second before Lenny slammed my camera into the cabinet. The hard crack it made at contact was so loud it bored into my ears, and as splinters of wood and shattered glass sprayed over the counter, the woodsy aroma of oregano burst in my nose.
My camera.Shock was a delicate blade to my heart.He broke my camera.
Lenny pinned me against the wainscoting and slid the blade of the knife against my throat. “I saw it all,” he growled.
The monster flared.“Don’t touch him!”
But Lenny couldn’t hear the voice in my head. Adrenaline pounded in my veins, and I pushed Lenny off me and tried to scramble away, afraid of what we might do to stop him. What I might do.
Lenny had to be lying. He’d been black-out drunk that night.
Glass crunched beneath my shoe, and I tripped over the pieces of my camera and lost my balance. For a split second, I went airborne.
Then my face slammed into the counter’s edge.
My brow split, a shock of pain stealing my breath. My ears whined with a harsh tinnitus, and hot blood ran down my face, blurring my vision in one eye and pooling on my upper lip.
The monster licked the blood away.“Enough,”it gritted out.
I struggled onto my knees. “Please,” I whispered as more blood dripped onto the woven rug beneath me. “Don’t do this.”
I didn’t want to hurt him.
The monster poured into my hollows, furious and cold.“Yes, we do,”it snapped.
As it stole my will, I felt myself become a passenger in my own body. It was always strange how loud the silence felt.
Numbness crawled up my fingertips into my palms. Into my forearms. My chest. Soon, my tether to my senses fell away entirely. Gone was the ache in my knuckles from punching the mirror. Gone was the floral-scented air. Gone was the taste of copper from where I’d bitten my tongue. Weightless, I shifted from a man of flesh to a creature preserved in ice.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.
I could only witness.
Lenny’s chest rose and fell in angry bursts as he leered over us. “I know your girlfriend’s secret too. No one believed me before, but now—Ah!”
The monster yanked on the cuff of Lenny’s pants, forcing him to throw out his hands to catch his fall. Trapped inside myself, I could only watch as the monster leapt onto Lenny, throwing a clumsy punch to his jaw. Lenny’s head snapped back, smacking the tiles.
The monster growled—not in my head but in my very throat, a hoarse, unpracticed sound that shocked me to my core.“Why are you here?”The monster’s demand slipped past my own lips, feeling strange and foreign on my tongue.“Why are you in her house?!”
Horror collected inside me. It had never stolen my voice before.
“Arthur?”
Lenny’s eyes darted toward the sound of Eva’s voice, and he tried to call out for help, visibly alarmed. The windows exploded inward, thorny vines pouring in and knocking the basil plants off the windowsills.
For a moment, I was seventeen again. I was a killer, and I didn’t care.
Eva appeared in the doorway, hair unbound and wild eyes bright with alarm. At her feet, the floorboards cracked and moss spilled out quick as flowing water across the kitchen floor. The sight of her filled me with shame. I didn’t want the bee girl to see me like this, but I wasn’t in control of my body anymore.
The monster licked more blood off my lip, but I tasted nothing. Iwasnothing, just a husk to be molted.
Eva rushed toward us. “What are you doing?”
