Page 16 of Drawn to Death
“What do you want from me?”
“To talk.” That is it. “I have questions. I think you do too.”
He is right. I have a thousand questions, all jammed up in my mouth. But one makes it out first.
“I didn’t dream last night,” I say.
Something flickers across his face, a quick, slippery thing, gone before I can pin it down. Recognition, maybe. Or satisfaction.
“No,” he says, agreeing easily. “You didn’t.”
“You didn’t kill anyone.”
He tilts his head, thoughtful. “No. I was busy.”
“With me.”
“Yeah.”
Just one word, but it lands between us, heavy, deliberate. He breaks his pattern. For me. Because of me.
I should be terrified. Should be scrambling for a weapon, or plotting an escape, or at least pretending to fight. Instead, I just… sit back on the bed, the urge to resist gone. Not surrender, exactly. Something more like reluctant acceptance.
“My name is Quell. You probably know that, but I know nothing about you. Except.. y'know, stupid stuff.”
“What stupid stuff?” He frowns as if I've offended him somehow.
“Like how you kill people.”
“Are you asking my name?” He questions, with the hint of a smile creeping across his mouth.
“It would be nice to know, yes.”
“Talon.”
“Of course it is.” That explains the small claw shapes on my apartment drawing where I thought the cameras were. “Is it real?”
“Says the guy called Quell.”
“True.” I chuckle at the irony. My odd name was the only thing my parents ever gave me before they dropped me in foster care. I got in the way of their druggy parties, apparently.
Reason for abandonment: pulls funny faces when I smoke weed.
That was the best my mom could do. Maybe walking away was the best thing she could do for me, but I'd love to ask her about my gift.
Did her magic weed give me visions twenty years later? Did she see stuff too? I wonder sometimes if it was the dreams that drove her to the drugs. That's one thing I'll never know.
“So now what?” I ask.
“Now we talk,” he says. He doesn’t come closer, doesn’t loom or threaten. Just waits patiently, like he can stand there forever. Like he knows I’m not about to bolt.
And the worst part is, he is right. I’m not going anywhere. Not yet. Because somewhere in all this, the quiet, the strange gentleness, the way I haven’t had a single nightmare since he took me, I start to feel something else.
Curiosity.
“Okay,” I state, like I have a choice.
And something changes. I feel it, the way the air shifts, thickening with something new. This isn’t just about survival anymore. It is about figuring him out. About letting myself be seen, and seeing him in return.
