Psyche

Chapter Fifteen

I went back, back to his cottage in the woods. My heart was no longer beating; it throbbed between cracked, thirsty lungs that weren't even mine. I was so out of it that I wasn't even breathing my own air. I did not even bother knocking. I just walked in.

He was passed out on the couch with an open bottle of tequila on the coffee table. But the sound of me closing the door made him shift and sigh under the blanket. It reminded me of opening a bag of chips in the dead silence of a room. You can try to make it silent, but it's fucking impossible! 

At the first sight of him opening his eyes, I felt his dreams end and I choked. I ran into the kitchen and hid in front of the fridge, where I was sure to be found. I peered into the living room. He got up, stretched and went outside. I went out the back door and swung around half the cottage until I found him sitting on the porch, facing the red-orange woods.

"How old are you?" I asked simply and suddenly. Though it was not my own mind that asked.

"Nine thousand," he eventually replied. 

What was I expecting him to say? Fourteen? Seventeen? Three? But nope, he was in the thousands. Thousands of years old. How can someone even remember the exact amount of years? How do you even start to distinguish one season, one year, one decade, century-from the rest? 

I stayed at his house for the next couple of hours, talking about everything and nothing. The whole time, I could tell that something was on his mind. I didn't bother ask him what, because I knew he would have refused to tell. He wasn't just a nine thousand year old Canem warrior-he was a boy.

I walked back to my house. When I approached my street, I recovered my house keys from my pocket. I rubbed some root beer flavored chap stick onto my lips-to settle myself- and pushed on. I walked up the three steps and onto the porch. 

I stopped in my tracks...

Ticking, I was hearing ticking. I frowned, feeling my eyebrows slide down and listened closer. I shook it off and shoved the key into the hole under the knob, and that's all I remembered . . .

***

Debris, engulfed in crimson flames, was scattered all around me. I felt bits of broken glass embedded into my hair and limbs. I found myself lying on the other side of the street. My house was blown away and all that remained was the foundation. I was covered in gold blood. Wait, why the hell is my blood gold? Everything around me shifted from yellow to purple and from green to blue. I felt tears as thick as blood pouring from my eyes. My forehead glistened with sweat. Blood and dirt were edged into my fingernails. I dipped my trembling hands into the stirring pool of liquid life as it leak from my body. But where was the wound? 

I couldn't feel anything except for my brain jumping off of a high cliff and onto my gray eyes, squeezing every last tear from me. Suddenly, my gaze fell onto my stomach; it was lost an ocean of gold blood. I felt no shadow cast over me. No one has discovered me yet. And I blacked out in the horrors that this was my death.

***

I woke up in a dream, or rather, a look into what is happening around me as I lie unconscious. I am next to dead on his couch. He was pacing back and forth, so I channel into his thoughts.

She's not human! I knew it! She's a . . . 

I couldn't understand the last word-it was in some ancient language that was now dead, but he had been tortured in knowing it now, in this time. What am I? He knows . . . He knows . . . 

My eyelids fluttered and slowly began opening and closing until I could keep them open. "What happened?" I asked in order to get his attention. My mouth felt dry, like sand had been blasted in it. I my throat felt like pine needles were in it. I felt like I couldn't breathe.