“It smells wrong,” I say absently, without thinking too hard.
Reed stays right beside me, his body relaxed but poised for action.
I try to move into the space, but my head won’t let me. Its teeth and claws and dark things full of poison. I think I know this smell, but I can’t remember from where I smelled it.
“Talk to me. Tell me what it is.”
Minutes tick by as I consider what I’m sensing.
“It’s screams and writhing, pain in the bloodstream, skin melting, eyes bursting, tongue swelling.”
Reed inhales sharply.
“Ronit, there’s poison, get out of there,” Reed screams, startling me.
There’s no answer from them. My heart slams hard against my rib cage. I lean forward, straining to hear any sign of them.There’s nothing, how can they just disappear? Reed clamps his hand down on my shoulder. It hurts, but I ignore it.
“I’ll go,” I say softly.
“No! We go together.”
My mind flies across the information and what I know. I have one thing that might work in my favour.
“Reed, you need to stay,” I say decisively.
“No, I-”
“Call. You need to keep talking. Curse me, hate me, say all the words in your heart, just keep making sounds so I can hear the way home.”
I don’t mean to say that last bit, but his fingers on my shoulder tense just for a heartbeat, but then he snatches them off me, leaving me feeling cold and alone.
“Hate me loudly, Siren.”
He opens his mouth, and he starts to sing. The words are so venomous that I recoil back before I remember this isn't personal, it’s just survival.
I dart into the dark, and as much as I don’t want to hear his words, the fact that I can hear him is such a relief. My entwinement with the Sirens happened in seconds. Infatuation that should have died but has instead lasted forever.
A hundred years is a long time to carry a torch for people who tried to kill me.
I stay silent, moving through the house systematically until I find a hole deep in the basement where the stench is the strongest. It goes deep into the earth like something burrowed here.
I hear a scream, but it’s human.
Still, I move towards it, cursing myself three times a fool. I would never have been this stupid on Nightmare. This is suicidal. I had a sense of self-preservation once. I wanted to stay alive. To live.
Now, I’m rescuing the very people who tried to kill me-
I trip over a body, landing hard. I scramble around on my knees and run my hands over the still form. It’s not someone I recognise, and I think it’s human, though youngish. Maybe early twenties. It’s been dead a little while, and I catch the sickly sweet scent of dried vomit.
Poison.
Something deadly in the dark.
Clicking.
Clacking.
Hunting in the dark.
