Page 18 of Fallen Thorns
“Yeah.”If that’s even what I want.
It wasn’tlong after Rani reluctantly left that I fished out my laptop and began searching, looking for any sort of connection between these deaths so far and what happened to me. I needed to see if there were any loose ends or parts where Lucy or whoever she was with had not been so tactful and left a crucial detail of their involvement behind. I looked for anything I could use as proof to help these families and debunk it all.How would detectives go about this? Journalists?Surely, they can’t have brainwashedeveryone? There had to have been at least someone out there who still suspected foul play.How does the Manipulation even work?
After reading all publicly available accounts and statements, I flicked through photograph after photograph on every news site. There wasn’t much to go off, understandably, as these were not, and probably never would be,bigcases. However, I did manage to conclude that each victim had supposedly been out drinking the night before they were found.Perhaps meeting someone?I did some more digging and begrudgingly traced social media accounts (which felt so wrong on so many levels. I hated those apps. Primary school had taught me all I needed to know about how dark those sites could get.) The two students were, as far as I could tell, not in relationships and therefore easily could have been set up as I was. Led into falsehood andused.But despite my strained effort, I still had no real links, not a fleck of concrete proof. I was tracking a dead end. They were too good.
Am I going crazy?
I decided I wasn’t. Enough had happened in the last twenty-four hours for anything to be possible, and despite what the media said, all these deaths were linked.Yet why does no one else see this except The Thorns?
My only hope now would have been to look straight into finding potential murder suspects. There was no way the second victim’s death could be passed as anything other than murder — the body had been almost decapitated. But there weren’t any suspects, just posts about how the County Durham police department were ‘doing everything in their power’ to bring justice. It’s a pretty small city and it is highly uncommon for murder to occur, let alone in such a dramatic and performative way.
I touched my neck; the two puncture wounds were mere scabs now, barely noticeable. But if a...vampirewanted to cover their tracks (I was really starting to reconsider my sanity here), they would remove signs of entry wounds. The neck. Decapitation. Cutting through the bites... I shivered.
Could it have been one of The Thorns? After all, I knew none of them, and they could have been lying through their teeth. No. They were good people.People?Marianne clearly stated they were trying to catch whoever is responsible and I remember the truth in her eyes. Nonetheless, I feared Lucy wasn’t acting alone, and for all I knew, there was a whole network of undead murderers gearing to attack.
A searing pain shot through my head, like someone had shot a bullet straight through my skull, and it now lodged there, filling my mind with immense pressure. My eyes had begun to burn a few minutes before, but I brushed it off as screen strain. I’d had headaches before, and while some were relatively painful, this was no ordinary sensation. I squeezed my eyes shut and pushed myself away from my desk, head in hands. Sheer blackness enveloped the room, the laptop the only light source.
My breathing quickened, and my limbs grew weak as pins and needles shot up my toes and fingers almost simultaneously.Am I having a stroke?Pushing up from my chair, the wheels clattered off the rug behind me, and I could barely keep my eyes open. I tore off my jumper, sodden with sweat that now dripped off me in rivulets. It was no use. I was going to pass out, I knew it. The irony of my anaemia crossed my mind, but I had never felt such intense symptoms like this. As my legs gave way beneath me and I clung onto the bedhead for support, I started to picture what the scene would look like if someone were to come into my room and find me lying unconscious, curled up like an embryo in the pitch dark. They’d think I was dead without a pulse...
I already was dead.
‘You’ll know when.’
The blood.
I fixedmy eyes on the crack of bathroom light and dragged myself across the cold, tiled floor to reach it, the transparent package visible from under the faucet.What was I doing? Was I really going to do this? To give in?These were such human symptoms; what if I’d just caught a cold or a fever? Something I could battle away with rest?
‘You’ll know when.’
I grabbed the packet and tore it open in one clean tug. My arms barely supported my movements as I raised the packet to my face. This time it really did smell like blood, all metallic and fresh, so very fresh.
Andsweet.
My canines elongated; this was no human sensation. I was an abomination about to commit an unspeakable act. Tipping my head back, I downed nearly the entire sachet in a few gulps, dropping the packet beside me and letting the remaining contents drip out onto the floor. I slouched my body against the toilet as my vision cleared and breathing subsided. Blood trickled down my shirt and I was certain it was on my face too.
But it tasted sogood.
Tears slipped down my cheeks and mixed with the drying blood on my lips.
I sleptfor a while with my body propped up against the bathtub, recharging. I awoke as the sun crept through the frosted glass of my bathroom window, the fan still whirring and light still on. My back ached, legs slightly numb from the unnatural position I found myself in. I was, for the first few seconds or so of consciousness, completely unaware of why I was there. Then my eyes honed onto the blood splattered tiles, trailing to the sink where two bloody handprints slid down the porcelain. The blood bag lay on the floor beneath it, remnants dried onto the tiles. I glanced down at my hands, palms inked with dried blood, then I touched my face and rubbed my thumb across my teeth.Normal.
I was sat in the centre of a crime scene. I was very conscious of the fact it wasn’tatruecrime scene, but if I let the blood dry any longer there would be no hiding the evidence of what I’d done.
I stripped my shirt off and thoroughly washed my hands, avoiding the mirror in front of me. I went to the cabinet to grab every form of cleaning product I could find and beganscrubbing.
It took forever, my mind abuzz with thoughts and fears of everything I’d found myself experiencing. Still waiting to wake up from the nightmare, muttering words of disbelief.
Once I was satisfied the room looked as it did before, I ran a shower and binned my entire outfit, desperate to erase all traces ofeverything. I stepped into the scorching hot shower and rubbed hard at my face and body, and even after the water stopped running red, I persisted, scraping my bare arms until they were red raw. I needed to be clean of it all.
The room had steamed up and I was struggling to see in front of me, but instead of turning the shower off, I put the plug in and watched the tub fill. I slowly lowered myself until I sat with my head against the side of the tub, where I closed my eyes and breathed.
* * *
“You see,I wrote this, but then I had a bit of a breakdown because I think I’ve interpreted the whole thing wrong. I don’t think that’s what he meant with that line,” Rani said, pointing at her notes over lunch the following day. We were discussing a poem by Shelley, the poet I’d studied at length two nights ago, but was yet to expand upon my knowledge because, well, everything had changed since then.
“You could ask him?” I gestured to the sky, earning an audible eye roll. Successful sarcasm, I think.
“Okay, but seriously, what do you think? You’re normally really expressive with poetry.”
