Spasms shook me to my core. Everything hurts. Aches rippled through my body.
My lungs dragged in shaky expels of air. Breathing should come naturally, but I had to tell my mind to breathe and catch up on how many breaths I'm lacking to normally take in the air.
"Remarkable," A man spoke as I blinked the pain away. It didn't help. I was still agitated as fuck.
"That you're gawking at a naked teenage boy?" I sarcastically replied with a bitter edge. "Yes, that is remarkable." I masked the faint confusion as I rubbed my temple. Not to relieve an oncoming headache. To remove the fog currently etched in my brain. Even my hand movements felt jerky and forced. I recognized the pattern of doing these motions, but my movements didn't feel like my own.
I grabbed a thin sheet of linen and tied it around my waist as my reflection caught the floor.
I felt my face, and the reflection mirrored my reactions. One and the fucking same. Feeling every inch of my face felt foreign. No part of me felt real or tied to an intrinsic version of myself.
The reflective surface captured my face, but didn't capture an attached memory or identity with it.
I lifted my hand. It moved correctly. That was the problem.
A mirror.
My body is a reflective mirror.
My mind is emptied.
Gone.
No memories existed within the metal frames of my existence.
Everything is an unraveling coil snaking around my throat and tightening every time I catch a glimpse of myself.
I moved farther back as my body hit something soft and squishy. I lifted my hand, feeling static pinpricks as it came back red.
Startled, I pulled back as my head spun around fast enough to give anyone whiplash.
A pile of bodies tangled together in unnatural heaps rose behind me.
Familiarity sunk in my chest. I know these bodies, but I don't remember them. I held onto my head as I forced logic to meet my brain.
Blood smeared into my black hair from my hands.
The man took a handful of the blood from a young girl with long black hair and cupped it around my cheeks.
"Remarkable." He repeated as he marked my face sacrificially. "We will do remarkable things together, Killian."
I backed up as my head pounded to a drumming sensation.
"That's not my—" my voice cut off.
"Then what is your name?" The man finished for me.
I held my head as curls of dark hair wrapped around my fingers.
Gasping breaths raggedly beside me.
"I know who you are, Killian Parrish."
The man tipped my chin up harshly as he dragged me away from the carnage of dead bodies deliberately. A massacre. I was a part of a massacre.
I may be breathing, but I don't think I survived. At least, I don't think I was meant to.
I backed into the teen girl whose blood was smeared across my cheek grotesquely as our hands met before I recoiled my extended arm.
The man took out a gun and as I heard light gasping breaths of the teen girl coming back to awareness, the man took one bullet and aimed it directly towards my chest. The safety was never on as he used that bullet and tore it through my chest cleanly and succinctly.
Death isn't the end, it's a spectrum of presence and painful universal awareness.
The impact should have dropped me instantly. My body jerked backward from the force, breath ripping violently from my lungs as warmth flooded down my stomach in thick streams.
Blood poured through my fingers as I pressed against the hole in my chest. My knees nearly buckled beneath me while something sharp and electric crawled underneath my skin.
The bullet dislodged itself from my skin, leaving a hole and marking me temporarily. My body healed itself as the bullet fell like a stone that did not belong in my body.
"Not all things can be erased, but they can be molded." The man spoke with a slight pleasantness that made me sick to my stomach.
The bullet dropping was the only clear sound beneath the screaming static in my skull.
"But some things are simply meant to die."
Another bullet was released from the barrel as the girl beside me, dead one minute and alive the next, was sent back to a grim fate.
I tried to reach out for the girl as she fell, but I was yanked backwards by a greedy forceful hand.
My fingers itched with gold until the gold stained red.
And the red faded to maddening black.
YOU ARE READING
Sympathy for the Devil
Fantasy*Trigger Warning* This book depicts suicide and mental illness. Some souls are born to break the cycle. Others were never meant to live at all. Seventeen-year-old Ellie Lucas never asked to inherit a legacy of death. But after her mother's mysterio...
