Page 35 of Welcome Home
“How do you make the skins?”
He raises the other arm, repeating the process slowly. I get the impression he could go much faster, that this is a much more violent process, but he’s slowing it for my benefit. It warms my frenzied heart. “I don’t know what inside us allows it, so nothowexactly. Just when I eat the flesh of the dead, hair, bone, most anything, my form changes. It becomes theirs and with practice, we give it life.”
“And the living?”
“DNA of some form has to be consumed. It’s a similar process but requires more concentration. Unyielding focus to keep up the appearance, the skin stays but the illusion fades easily.”
I take a step back, my breath leaving me in short pants as the detective’s skin goes fully ashen. He drops the illusion… showing me.
Vosz crowds forward. A warning growl leaving the horrible slacken mouth of the detective. “If you run, I will chase you.”
Something swirls in my lower belly, tightening my core as fear and adrenaline start infiltrating my blood in earnest. “You’re very old…”
“Almost four hundred.”
“Oh, my god.”
“Cora…”
I swallow hard as he turns, shedding my clothes from the shell. In any other situation it might’ve been just as erotic as before. It certainly is not looking at the unsettling hue and texture of her flesh.
“Will you need… uhm to eat Oliver again?”
“Don’t… say his name.”
“Right…”
“You belong to me now, Cora dear. Mine is the only name you need to remember.”
I take a deep breath, crossing my arms. “I don’t get any say?”
The back of her head splits. My heart shuddering in my chest as he reaches up, hooking his fingers in the skin, pulling it apart. It’s not gory like it’d imagined, it's oddly… clean. “You lost your say when I felt you come on my cock. Don’t pretend to be put out by it. There’s no one here to lie to but me.”
I huff, feigning indigence, because what else am I going to say right now?
His chuckle rolls through the room, calming my frayed nerves. When he pulls her head down, I can’t stop my hand on its rapid track to my mouth, landing there with a slap. His head is roughly human in its shape but longer in the front, I take another step back as it grows and morphs back to its true form his body stretching and ripping the skin quicker than he can tug it off ashegrows. The brutal sound of snapping and the reforming of bone fills the space between us. His upper body is huge, bulked with corded muscle, decorated with milky white translucent skin showing the intricate network of his veins. His organs sat deeper inside, slightly more obscured, as if they’re protected by organic plates within him.
I’m hyperventilating now as he turns on me, repeating his order in that deep, echoed voice. “Don’t run.”
But I do. God help me, I do.
My feet slap against the wooden stairs as I careen up them, everything in my body screaming danger. I’m useless to fight the urge to flee. The sound of his eight-foot frame ripping up the stairs, splitting the metal banister from the wall as he gives chase. He’s letting me run.
The thought adds another layer to my fear, need.
There’s a monster at my back, his growls rattling the walls of the perfectly clean, professionally decorated cape cod style home. I scream as I hit the hall leading to the upper stairs, the sound of destruction filling my ears. He’s wreaking it, my home.
I love it. Need swirls in my core. He lets me get further, wrecking it further, laying waste to the beautiful prison I erected around myself.
“I can smell your arousal from here, my love.”
My feet skid on the runner on the landing, sending me slamming onto the ground brutally, the stitches in my elbow tugging and ripping open. I don’t get all the way before he’s on me, his colossal frame towering above me as I tremble, my eyes glued to the hardwood.
My core is needy and wet, but I don’t turn around. Part of me is still afraid to face him, all of him the way he’s meant to be. There's no skin, no buffer to take the bite out of his inhumanity.
“Turn around, Cora dear, look at your monster.”
My breath whooshes out as me as I roll from my stomach to my back, staring up at the nightmare before me.My nightmare.
