Page 22 of Born into Madness
Without a word, he walks over until he’s standing right in front of me. I’ve never been around anyone as big as him. Even when I was standing, he towered over me, and there are enough outside lights on campus for me to see how wide his shoulders are and how solid every inch of him is. My wheezing grows louder, and when I start to whisper to myself, “Cement beneath my butt, bricks at my back, soft fur under my fingers, Chort’s breath on my cheek,” he tilts his head in that creepy way, like he’s trying to figure me out.
“Where’s your inhaler?”
His voice is deep, and there’s no trace of an accent. I stare up at him like an idiot. The question confuses me. It’s the last thing I’d been expecting, and when I continue to stare at him, he asksagain, “I can hear you wheezing. Where’s your inhaler? Do you have it on you?”
I nod and make a clumsy attempt to reach my pocket. When it’s obvious that’s not going to get us anywhere, he reaches out and hooks his hands under my armpits, lifting me up like I weigh nothing. With his creepy mask only inches from my face, I can’t help but let out another whimper and shut my eyes. The thing is covered in blood spatter, and not all of it is from tonight. Some of it looks really old and really stuck on there.
While I keep acting like a toddler who doesn’t want to face the monster under the bed, he lowers one hand and starts to pat me down. He finds it in the pocket of my jacket, pulls the cap off, shakes it, and holds it to my lips.
When I don’t do anything, he says, “On the count of three take a breath.” He doesn’t wait for me to respond. “One, two, three.” As soon as he’s finished, he pushes down on the cartridge, and I suck in a big breath, taking the medicine into my lungs. I keep it inside me, giving it every possible chance to work while I slowly lift my eyes to face the terrifying mask. I slowly let out the breath I’ve been holding when my eyes find his through the deep holes in the mask. They’re light blue and intense in a way I hadn’t been expecting. I assumed I’d see a crazy sort of rage, or wide and unhinged, but his are calm as they hold my stare.
“Again,” he says, and when he counts to three, I take in another lungful of medicine before he caps my inhaler and slips it back into my pocket.
Instead of letting me go, he steps in closer, forcing me back against the brick as he looks down at me. Reaching up, he lightly drags his fingers over my cheek, smearing the blood that I’d forgotten about. I hear his breath catch before he brings his bloody fingers to my hair and slowly curls a long strand around them.
Before I can think better of it, I open my mouth and ask, “Do you want to kill me?” I don’t know why I ask it. I don’t know why I didn’t ask if he was going to instead of if he wanted to, but the words are already out, hanging in the air between us, and there’s no taking them back.
His eyes find mine again, but he doesn’t speak for several seconds. When he finally does, I wish I could unhear the three words.
“I’m not sure.”
Another whimper escapes my lips at the thought of that giant blade sinking into my stomach. The sound of it makes him tilt his head again as he scrutinizes my every move, my every reaction to him.
“That’s not comforting at all,” I tell him, frantically looking around for any sign of someone else, any clue that help might be out there somewhere, but there’s nothing but darkness and silence. Everyone is either inside or at the Alpha party.
“You have no idea how rare it is,” he says, pulling my eyes back to his.
“What?”
“To not know,” he says, and before I can ask him what in the hell he’s talking about, he looks down at his dog. Chort is still sitting by my feet, looking up at the two of us while his tongue lolls out the side of his mouth. “You fed my dog the other night.”
“How do you know that?”
“Very little gets by me.” Stepping back, he puts a few inches between us, but he keeps a tight enough grip on my upper arm to ensure I won’t be going anywhere. “Come on.”
My knees lock as I try to resist moving. “What? Where are you taking me?”
“Your dorm.” When I try to fight him by remaining still, a laughable attempt at overpowering him if there ever was one, helooks down at me and says, “You can’t stay out here all night. I’m walking you back. I’m not going to hurt you.”
I let out a very unhinged-sounding laugh and look at the spray of blood on the concrete footpath. “I just saw you kill three people, and you’re just going to let me go?”
I swear the corners of his eyes lift up like he’s smiling beneath the mask. “Are you trying to convince me to kill you?”
“No,” I quickly say. “I just mean I don’t believe that’s where you’re taking me.”
“Well, I am. You haven’t seen my face, and I only killed those assholes because they were attacking you and my dog was involved.”
“I could’ve handled them,” I try to tell him as he starts to pull me down the path.
“Oh yeah? How do you figure that? Three men against one woman. The odds are not in your favor. My guess is they followed you from the party and were probably going to attack you and rape you. Maybe they wouldn’t have killed you, but they would’ve beaten you up to scare you or to get you to stop screaming. I did you a favor by ending their lives. You’re incredibly naive if you think they were just going to let you walk past.”
A shiver runs through me at his words. I’d assumed they were just going to do the typical jackass thing where they yell a few sexual comments, laugh about it, laugh even more when they see they’ve scared me, and then let it go and walk off, but now that it’s running through my mind, it does sound incredibly naive. They hadn’t been drunk, but they’d been buzzing pretty good or high on something, and the looks they were giving me had scared the hell out of me.
“Maybe I could’ve gotten away,” I say, this time without as much conviction. “You didn’t have to kill them. You could’ve just punched them or something.”
“I could have,” he admits and then leaves it at that.
We walk the rest of the way in silence. Chort on one side, and my masked psycho on my other, gripping my arm and leading me right to the steps of my dorm. I expect him to let me go, but he stays right next to me as I use my ID to unlock the door.
