Seven Deadly Smirks

Chapter 5

EDEN

I woke up to the pounding in my head, a rhythmic pattern that made me want to rip my eyes out. The sweat of my body kept me glued to the bed sheets, and the shivers running up and down my spine played each vertebrae like an instrument. I smelt blood, tasted iron in my mouth, russety and metalic. My eyes kept closing and opening, like the shutter of a camera capturing sparse photos of my surroundings, like a puzzle you had to put together. My skin was set ablaze, and the bile rising to my throat burned every muscle tissue in my esophagus.

I tired to fall asleep again, picture the slate granite eyes that I had encountered weeks back. Picture the clouds swirling inside them, and the breeze of his touch against my own. I couldn't. All I could see behind my lids where the images of that librarian on the floor, her dead gaze staked on the domed ceiling...
The crunch. That sound of bone being mauled. A women being shredded into food.

And that monster...I didn't want to encounter anything like that again. Just the thought made me vomit. The morphing slither of a soulless being. Those obsidian gloomy spheres that stuck to the pitch-black skin tendrils of what appeared to be a shapeless face. A face that unhinged it's jaws to reveal rows of uncountable teeth and the treacherous glob of a purplish serpent-like tongue. I was horrified.

Even then, laying in that bed, safe from any harm, I could still replay the feeling of looking in its eyes and knowing that nothing could be darker than the cave this creature had come out of.

I mumbled. Incoherent phrases falling from my lips. I barely remember. Just splotches of half-lived memories and vivid delusions.
I imagined those grey eyes...calming the sick storm that raged my body...that black hair, the one strand of hair falling perfectly across his face...

Gabriel

"Gabriel...please don't leave..."

I felt a hand on my forehead, gently pressing something cold onto it, easing my burning skin. "Please...It hurts..." I mumbled as teardrops sprang from my eyes, leaving a damp and salty trail down my cheeks. Every fibre of my body hurt, I could feel them tightening and loosening under the layers of muscle that made up my figure. My shoulder. I felt the depth of each claw, the absence of skin.

"Eden." The distant sound of a voice reverberated in my ears, but I couldn't bring myself to open my eyes, my lids felt too heavy.

"Eden, angel please wake up.." The voice called again.

My question was barely a whisper when the name fell from my mouth, groggy and slurred. "Gabriel?" I croaked, finding the strength to slowly open my eyes and blink.

The person I found myself with wasn't who I expected. The granite eyes I imagined had been tainted steel blue, the dark hair that I wanted to thread my fingers through had been dyed the colour of blond snow, and the lips that I wanted to kiss had been exchanged for ones that had called my name as if it were a song.

The boy before me let out a small chuckle and brought his fingers to brush a strand of hair from my face, his lips parting to let that melody roll of his tongue. He shook his head and gave me a brief smile, withdrawing his hand back to the proximity of his body and looking at me intently.

"That was a good fight you put up, who knew you had such a warrior spirit?." He spoke softly, the coldness I had felt from the unoccupied side of the bed I laid in now replaced by the warmth in his voice.