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CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
❝ East Of Eden ❞
Esme screamed. Simon's ears rang with her wretched, ugly cry — the whole boat rang with it. She wailed so loudly that even Maia stopped twitching and stared. It felt as if a limb had been ripped from her body with bare hands. Simon fell. She threw herself across the floor to reach for him, to touch him, to hold him. He was bleeding profusely from the wound but he was not dead yet — not dead dead, at least. Valentine seized his collared and started to drag him.
Esme threw herself over Simon's body, holding him to himself as she screamed at Valentine madly. Her throat ached and she tasted blood, swallowed it, and bared her bloody teeth at Valentine in a snarl. A feral animal clutching its soul.
Valentine, unbothered, kicked at Simon. "Show her what you've been hiding, dead thing."
"You don't have to do anything he says, Simon," Esme said it so quickly that she knew at once that she both believed Valentine and feared the truth of him. Simon, Simon, Simon, just open your eyes, open your goddamned —
She held herself in place, catching his fangs now extended over his lips. Her head jerked back, Valentine had pulled her by her hair. Her hand reached instinctively towards it. He snarled, "You see the truth, mundane girl? That's the truth! You think he can wear a man's skin and walk around, just like that — "
Esme cut him off by leaping at him as if she meant to bite his nose off, and he let go and stepped back at the sudden movement, the sword at her throat. She said, "I've known a monster in man's skin. Simon is nothing, nothing like him."
"Look at him," Valentine snarled.
Without wanting to, she did. His eyes were hollow and dead and fang-bared lips and whitening skin as the blood drained off him. He looked like he had not been alive for years. It was impossible to not see how white his skin was, how removed from humanity, how stretched thin from time away from a pulse.
Simon Lewis had died.
This was all that was left. That was the truth.
Esme's body was a riot of shivers. She had loved this. This thin, cold memory of a human.
Because it was Simon, he read her silence as easily as her words. She felt it haunt her thoughts and then pass out the other side.
He hissed, "I love you."
She took a deep breath. "Don't you go. Don't you dare go away. I love you."
And she meant it.
Esme didn't care that he — it — Simon — was strange and inhuman and frightening. She knew that he — it — Simon — was strange and inhuman and frightened, and she knew that she loved him anyway.
