The Catch
On the one hand, I’m not as bad at reading people as I thought. On the other hand, I kissed a fucking cultist. So... win some, lose some, I guess. But hey, at least I’m consistent at making awful decisions, right? I got that going for me?
Gods, I’m a dumbass.
As soon as I stepped in that house, I knew something fucked was going to happen. No one normal decorates their house with skulls, or weird blue lights that look obnoxiously like moonlight. But I guess no one normal keeps hanging out with someone they know is a werewolf, do they?
I could have made guesses on my own about half of what Lucien was going to tell me. The first kiss was cold, and that was passable as just being because he got out of the fountain. But when touched my hands to calm me down (twice, I might add, remember what I said about normal people not hanging around werewolves? You have to be real fucked to try and calm a werewolf actively shifting in front of you), they were cold too, like thick ice-cycles clenched between my fingers. Then the way he talked about giving in to the monster inside, the way he refused to remove his helmet in broad daylight... I mean, he wasn’t keeping it very well hidden, not from me at least.
So when he told me he was a vampire, I kind of knew it was coming. Maybe part of me didn’t want to accept it, didn’t want to think that the only kind of person who could give a shit about me was also a monster, but I knew. When he said it, that little voice in the back of my head, the only piece of the old me left alive, whispered at me, reminded me that I was just a monster walking around in her corpse, and that the only people who would want to date a corpse were corpses themselves.
But the second bit... that was more surprising. I knew vampires needed to feed on people; I’d killed enough of them to figure that out. But Lucien... he’s a bit extra, in... well, everything. He skins his victims, feeds the meat to his dog, keeps the skulls around his house. It’s... well, horrifying, obviously. Those alarm bells started clanging as he explained it to me, the wolf howling that he could die on the spot and no one would know. At this point, Aestaril might have even thanked me.
She flooded my head with images of ripping his head off, eating away at the flesh to add his own skull to his collection, coating the floor with his blood and feeding his lungs to his own dog. She begged to get out. Maybe I should have let her out. Honestly, if Lucien had kept dodging my questions, maybe I would have.
But then he finally answered me, finally told me why he killed. The cult he works with? They’re the ones who turned him. He serves Molag Bal, works with cultists he fears, and doesn’t think he has any other choice.
A tear stains the page here.
He sounds a lot like me, doesn’t he? Gods, the *fuck* did I do to end up feeling less human than a fucking vampire cultist of Molag Bal?
I don’t know how much of what he said was true. I don’t know if he truly doesn’t have a choice, or if he’s laughing to himself as he carves up his victims. I don’t know if he can’t leave, or doesn’t want to. But I know what he said.
“I’m tired of running, of being hunted.”
I...
A few more tears stain the page, along with several crossed out sentences that are too hard to read beneath the tears.
I can’t believe that a man who could look at me the way Lucien did when he asked me to stop stabbing my palms with my claws, who held me as every bone in my body screamed at me to rip to him shreds and swallow his friends whole, who knows what I am and still fucking accepts me is as irredeemable as I am. There’s no wolf in his head screaming at him to devour everyone he meets. He still has a choice.
I… I don’t have the right to judge him, to make him pay for anything he’s done, or even to force him to let me help. That would be fucking rich right? The mass murdering werewolf being high and mighty with a vampire who’s killed fewer people than I’ve forgotten I ate. No… I can’t, and I won’t. But I care about him, whatever the fuck that means these days. Maybe I can help him escape Molag Bal.
More tears stain the page mixed with a few drops of blood, evident from the way the pen strokes shake that she was digging her claws into her palm as she wrote the last sentence.
