His gaze lost focus and slipped away, but he managed to blink once. I clenched my jaw, storming off without another word.
I entered the cottage and closed the door behind me. My fingers trembled as I pulled my knife out of its sheath. I needed to get a grip. The creature on the mattress wasn’t going to die.
I should kill him.
The sooner the better.
He had absolutely been drowning. I’d heard that sound many times and could identify it in my sleep. But now he wasn’t justnot dying,he was healing. Fast. If he healed that fast, there was no way I could kill him if I waited.
I kicked the wall with a snarl.
How dare he not die on his own? The onus was on me now to choose his fate. Indignation rose like bile in my chest because I knew which I preferred for the sake of my own self-preservation. I’d kill him in a moment if it weren’t for that constant nagging feeling. Like buzzing under my skin when I looked at him. The vertigo when I’d opened that shed felt like something had shifted sideways in my soul, making room. Running into this creature changed the course of my life, and there was nothing I could do now to stop it.
It terrified me.
Knife’s hilt gripped tight, I knocked on my forehead. Think, think, think.
The enemy of my enemy…
I held onto that little nugget of wisdom like a life-ring because it was the only angle I could exploit. If that thing was something far worse, I could use that to my advantage. He was like a stolen rifle. I didn’t know what calibre bullet was cocked and loaded, but I knew the direction it would shoot.
As you could tell, I knew nothing at all about guns. Perhaps that made the metaphor even more appropriate.
The cheap, half-empty bottle of water I’d left on the table caught my eye. I picked it up, thinking back to late fall nights in an ambulance, laughing and listening to music, teasing shoves and shared snacks, naps on benches in the hospital commissary. I thought of my partner’s angelic good looks, that mop of tightly curled hair and big, open smile.
I missed Reed so much.
He wouldn’t like looking down on me right now.
“Alright,” I told his ghost in gentle defeat.
The creature was still lying on his side when I returned, the labor of breathing causing his chest to rock at a subtle cadence. I sat on the bucket beside the mattress and cracked open the bottle. His nostrils flared as he opened his eyes, stare swimming in an effort to find me.
“Just lay there,” I ordered, filling the bottle cap with a tiny amount of water. “You drink water, right?”
He hissed, but I think it was meant to be a yes.
“I’ll lift your head up. Don’t use your neck or shoulders.”
His lips parted, but he remained still. I knelt down next to him, then hesitated when the glint of white teeth embedded in black gums caught the light. What impression of his teeth I saw didn’t look human. Still, I pressed the bottle cap to his mouth. The water trickled across his lips, half of it running down his cheek to his ear. I filled the cap again as his throat worked.
“How long have you been here?” I asked, counting to twenty. His eyes cracked open, crusted with blood, foggy with the onset of death, and fixated on the warbling surface of the water.
“Ich noot knowen,”he rasped. His stare flitted to my face looking for recognition. When I creased my brow, he tried again. “I…”
“You don’t know,” I offered.
He blinked once, and I pressed the cap to his mouth again. He sucked at it this time, catching my thumb with his lip. The digit was numb and dirty, scratched up and calloused. A jolt of worry shot up my hand, like the first time I held a hamster, thinking it would nip me instead of the treat in my palm. I let the instinctual fear run its course and mulled over what to say next while I refilled the water.
“I killed the fiend,” I told him, taking a swig of water for myself. When I pressed the next cap of water to his lips, he stared at me instead of the offering.
“Human?” he asked.
“Me? Yes.”
He dabbed his tongue against my blood at the corner of his mouth. I followed the purple appendage as it split in two to mop up the flavor, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. His jaw kept opening, wider and wider. The skin beneath my trail of blood split open on a membrane stretched taut between his jaws, exposing rows of needle-sharp, curved teeth. The kind that grabbed onto something and didn’t let go.
Something scraped against the ground and I jumped to my feet, wide-eyed. His tail coiled behind his knees in a pile on the mattress.