Blaze

3. Red

The air stops.

That's the first thing I notice.

The second thing I notice is the boiling fountain of red blood.

Not a fountain, I manage to think.

A geyser.

The geyser spritzes my bare legs and part of my torso, a liquid fist that punches with heat and wet. Here. There. Everywhere. It feels like every part of me is splattered with trickles of red. The normal reaction would be to stand, flailing, moistening my hands and spreading the stain in a panicked attempt to clean myself.

But I don't.

I mean, I do feel something. Something that makes my heart thunder. Something that makes a rush of heat boil my head. Something awful—but something that isn't panic.

A memory.

The sight of the blood makes a memory flutter at the edges of my mind.

Where it's from and who it involves and even when it happened are much too fuzzy for me to decipher, like everything I need to know is hidden behind shimmering curtains of heat. There's nothing but the one red flash—the certainty that I've been here before, done this before. Or, at the very least, witnessed it.

Déjà vu.

But just as soon as the memory surfaces, it dives, disappearing beneath the feeling of rough hands yanking me up. Then there's something on my face.

Cradling it.

"Lore!" someone shouts. "Lore!"

"Cameron!" someone else—someone much more familiar—shouts.

Suddenly, Austin's face goes from static to crisp. His hands are around my face, shaking me roughly, while his stale, jagged breaths waft in waves. His hair is so messy, I can barely see his eyes. I don't need to see them to know they're troubled, though—I can tell by his voice. By the semi-veiled panic in its undertone.

"Cam," he says, after a heavy sigh of relief.

"What?" Just as before, the voice isn't mine. It's deeper. Huskier. Like a man's.

Like my father's.

I don't know if anyone else hears the change as clearly as I do. I don't know if that's what makes Austin freeze for an instant. What makes his eyes widen and his mouth twist.

He's turned flaccid. I jerk him off and repeat, "What?"

What?

The short silence seems to echo me.

"You killed it," Austin breathes, wet-eyed. "It's dead."

"Why are you crying?" Still not my voice. I clear my throat—and immediately regret it when I taste copper.

Austin wipes his face and nods to Tim, who stares ahead blankly, as if in a trance, eyes so wide they eat away at his forehead. "It's dead." Austin looks down, and I do too. Blood has formed a closed puddle around the stinky animal, and the stench of it—a heavy, metallic funk—would make us all hurl if our stomachs weren't so empty. You'd think the puddle would have stopped growing by now, but it keeps inching closer to my sandal-clad feet, eager to soak them, too.