GROWL (Semi-Haitus)

EIGHTEEN

[A/N PLEASE READ: So, as some of you know, I wasn't feeling the name Nicole. Being the unprofessional potato I am, I changed Nicole into Thea. Cole has thus turned into Theo. I'm sorry if the change has messed with you :/]

Lay refused to give me an explanation—the jerk. He was gone before I could interrogate him any further, leaving me with nothing but unanswered questions and disbelief. 

Aidan Cross was killed...

And fingers were being pointed to Levi...

No. It was impossible. Name it, Levi was frightening, intimidating, cocky, ambiguous—but a murderer? 

You've thought about that before. My thoughts said. You had a bad feeling about him. You knew he was bad news. 

But it still didn't make sense. I couldn't believe that, not yet anyway. 

So why was I suddenly so uneasy? 

Maybe it was the blaring red numbers above me, counting down the time I had left to live. Maybe it was the blistering headache and heat that was skewing my thoughts, impaling me with memories and images I've never recalled before. 

What was happening to me? What the hell were these pictures? 

My unanswered questions followed my trail, hanging over my shoulders as I trudge through the forest aimlessly with nothing but intuition and confusion to guide me. 

I came to a rigid stop when I found a body sprawled on the ground, surrounded by a pool of dark red blood.

A girl. 

Dark luscious brown locks covered her face, but it didn't hide her round eyes that were still wide open, blank, empty—dead. Blood still trickling from her mouth, her body completely white, drained from color, from blood. 

I fought the bile that rose up my throat. 

She was Aberrant. Or at least becoming one; so the bell around her ankle told me. She probably had a family. She probably had people she loved, people who loved her, people she wanted to protect...

Would that have been me if I weren't hiding my gender? Had they killed her so easily, purely because of her pretty face? Her beautiful brown hair? 

I dared to step closer to her corpse, crouching down to brush away the strands from her face. 

May you rest in peace. I thought as the heavy weight of reality pounds into me. I might be joining you soon. I feathered my hand over her opened eyes and forced them closed...

Suddenly, a storm of images, cold and terrifying, vivid and thick, engulfed me. 

Screaming. My screaming—No—her screaming. I was in front of some sort of opening of rocks, a glistening force in the shape of a hexagon right in front of me. I felt relieved. Happy. The door. This was the door. But then I was running from something, panting, fear numbing my body to the bone. A blurry face stood over me. I begged for mercy. I was crying, praying, thinking of a child, a beautiful child with the same coloured eyes as her. I was apologising. I was crying. And at the sound of the bullet, I was shot back into reality. I was cut from her memories, having felt a physical snap. 

I fell back hard, as though a second invisible bullet had driven right through me.

And then I was sobbing, crying so hard that I could barely breathe.

Their memories. Matilda's. Lay's. This dead stranger. 

I could read their memories. How? Why? I didn't know. But there was something so horrifyingly wrong about it; something so disgusting that it made my feverishly hot skin start to crawl.