Page 86 of Riot Reunion
The eerie, mindless smile he wears falls away at this. He scrutinizes me, eyes darted all over my face, jumping from one feature to the next. “What you want isn’t really important, though. Is it?” he barks. “You’re not supposed to be here, anyway. You were supposed to leave ages ago. You were supposed to go on a trip.”
“I—” My back hits the car. I’ve run out of room, nowhere to go. The rain has finally slowed, but it’s still coming down hard enough to run down Fitz’s face. His cheek and his jaw are twisted with a scar he didn’t have when he taught at Wolf Hall. His right arm, too. I knew he’d been mauled by the wolves that live here on the mountain, but I didn’t realize the extent of the damage that was done. It seems that the bastard hasn’t just suffered external injuries since the last time I saw him. He was already crazy, but now he doesn’t even seem lucid. His tongue flicks out over his teeth, wetting cracked lips, his eyes continuing to jump all over the place.
This man is going to kill me. There’s no two ways about it. He’s going to skin me like he skinned the wolf whose hide he’s wearing, and the most fucked up part is that he probably won’t even realize he’s doing it. I have to be very,verycareful. There might be a way to use Fitz’s altered mental state against him, maybe? It’s worth a shot. I’ll have one chance at it, though. One. If I blow it, it’ll all be over very quickly.
“Dr. Fitzpatri—”
“DON’T CALL ME THAT!” he roars, spit flying. Deranged and half-lucid one moment, the man before me shifts, instantly hyper-focused and incensed. “You don’t know that man. I don’t know that man. He’s gone. Gone, gone, gone.Inever even met him. He didn’t like the wolves. I like the wolves. They’re—they’re—they’re out there, following me. They know that I’m their brother now.”
“You’re right! Oh my God,” I say, laughing nervously. “I’m so sorry. I see now. I see that you’re not Dr. Fitzpatrick. That was a silly mistake. I—Ahh!” I yelp as Fitz lunges forward, pinning me against the car; he holds the hunting knife to my throat, baring his teeth, growling just like the wolf he thinks he has become.
“Don’t even say hisname,” he hisses.
“I won’t! I promise I won’t. I’m sorry!”
“Good.” He shoves away from me, but not before leaning on the blade, driving the sharp edge of the metal into my skin. A bright sting of pain licks my skin, followed by the heat of something warm and wet trickling down into the hollow at the base of my throat. He stares at my neck, eyes wide and rolling, too much white showing. I bite back a scream as he dips down, and laps at my skin. When he rights himself, his protruding tongue is bright red with my blood, his nostrils flaring wide.
“I could eat your heart, too, maybe,” he says. “But…” Shaking his head, he screws his eyes closed, staggering away. “No. I can’t do that. You have no soul. I already killed it. You’re null. Null. Null! If I eat your heart, I’ll become null, too.” Wheeling around, he holds out the knife, pointing it at me. “You can’t trick me!” he yells. “I already know all aboutyou, Elodie Stillwater.”
“What about Wren? What do you know about him?” It’s the only thing I can think to say. Perhaps mentioning Wren will break this loop he’s in and make him focus on something else. Distract him enough to make a break for the trees. As soon as I see Fitz’s body language change, I know that I’ve made a grave error. Hunkering down, shoulders rising up around his ears, Fitz adopts a predatory, hungry look. His flaccid cock flops between his bare, scratched and bleeding thighs as he prowls toward me, turning his knife this way and that.
“You don’t say his name, either,” Fitz warns. “He’s not even real. You made him up to get me into trouble.”
“I—I wouldn’t do that,” I stammer. “I like you. I would never try to get you in trouble. We’refriends.”
“Stupid, ugly, hideous girl,” Fitz snarls. He still comes for me, only a few feet away from me now. “We aren’t friends.” The timbre of his voice is low and gravelly, overflowing with the promise of pain. “I’m not friends with girls. You’re a fuckingliar.”
“I’m not! I’m not, I swear I’m not lying. Wearefriends. You like me! You like Wren, too, remember? You’d do anything for Wren, wouldn’t you?”
“HE BETRAYED ME!”Fitz screams.
It was too great a risk. I rolled the dice and hoped for a good outcome, but the ploy backfired. Now I’m going to pay for the foolish gambit in spades. Fitz will split me open from stem to sternum and leave me to bleed out in the mud, and once he’s finished with me, he’ll head on up to the gazebo and kill Carrie and Presley, too. Even as this plays out in my mind, I reject this as a possibility. Wesley Fitzpatrick cannot be allowed to find his way back up to the gazebo. He can’t. Ihaveto stop him, regardless of the cost. Plucking up what little courage I can muster, I take a step toward the psycho, and I hold out my hand.
“Wren didn’t betray you. He loves you. He would never do that to you. Don’t you remember?” I speak so calmly that I almost trick myself into believing that I’m not shitting my pants right now.
Wesley Fitzpatrick adopts a curious, blank look, his mouth working like he’s silently repeating the words I just said back to himself. I take the fact that he hasn’t stabbed me repeatedly to mean that he’s half interested in hearing what I have to say.
“Wren talks about you all the time. He misses you.” I infuse my voice with as much enthusiasm as I can, but my voice still shakes, my nerves getting the better of me. “He told me all about when you two first got together. He said he was jealous when you left him and for—for Mara. He thought you two had something special.”
“Mara?Mara? I didn’t leave him forher. He stopped coming to meet me. He said I was pathetic. I—” Wincing, the man curls his hand around the knife into a fist, pressing the handle against his forehead. Confusion mars his brow, lines forming as he frowns. He’s struggling to remember? Struggling to separate fact from fiction? Reality from fantasy? I have no idea. All I know is that he seems to be questioning what I’m saying, running it over in his mind at least. “I told him that I loved him. And helaughed.”
“No way. Wren wouldn’t do that.” My eyes burn, tears promising to fall if I lose control for even a second. “He can be nervous sometimes. Shy. Sometimes he acts strangely because he’s scared and feels vulnerable. Y—you know what he told me?”
Keep it together, Elodie.
Do not start crying.
Donot!
“What did he say?” Fitz asks uncertainly.
“He said that his greatest regret was never getting to tell you that he loved you, too.”
His response comes immediately and is violent. “You’re lying! Stupid, lying, evil bitch! You’re lying about all of it. He isn’t real.He.Isn’t.Fucking.Real!” As he speaks this last word, he grabs a fist full of my hair, yanking it so hard that I cry out, and then he slams my head backward, into the driver’s side window of the hatchback. A spiderweb of pain fires through my head, just like the filaments of lightning that rippled across the sky earlier this evening. The agony takes my breath away. I try to scramble, trying to work myself free from his grasp, but his fingers snarl in my hair, holding on tight. Forcing my head around to the right, I have no choice but to look at him as he cranes his neck forward, sneering at me.
“Pathetic. You think I can’t see right through you, stupid girl? You’re just like all the rest of them. Making things up, trying to trick me, all trying to get what you want. Well, I’m smarter than you. I can see that you’re afraid. Tell me. Are you scared of me, Elodie Stillwater?”
With every bone in my body, I wish I could spit in the motherfucker’s face and tell him to go to hell. Even better, I’d love to be able to tell him that it’s not only Wren who thinks he’s pathetic—that I think he’s pathetic as well, and there’s no way in hell I’d ever be afraid of him. I know what will happen if I lie to him again, though. That knife will become intimately acquainted with my insides before I can blink. At least if I tell him the truth, I might buy myself some more time.
