We Are Monsters 🌕 Book 1 || gxg

Rock Bottom

The sun was in her eyes. Sam's eyelids were that brilliant pinkish-orange, and she could see the thin veins roping across each. She brought a hand up to shield her eyes as the first hints of pain bloomed in her lower back. She arched, eyes bulging, a cry strangled in her tense throat. The impact returned to her in a flash. Other spots ached, twinged, stabbed, but none as bad as the first.

A rocky expanse stretched to infinity directly over her head, blue skies and fluffy clouds sinking from its edge. It wasn't a hill after all, it was a cliff. She couldn't tell how far the drop was from there, but it had felt like forever. Then again, she had also been in a five hour memory, so it was hard to say how much time had passed in general.

Agony peaked and began to level. She wasn't comfortable, far from it, but at least she could think around the disturbance. A stream burbled under the whisper of leaves. The soil under her bare arms was spongy and moist. Cool water soaked through her clothes. She presumed the stream was just by her feet. She couldn't sit up to verify, it hurt too much.

To her right, a deep groan; she started, suddenly remembering her pursuer. Adrenaline began a thin trickle through her veins. She turned her face, but there was a stump there. Right there, just inches away from her nose. Brittle spikes jutted skyward from the ruined birch tree. She began to tremble as anxieties over what could have happened if the wind had hit differently flooded her consciousness.

"Noah?" she called when she was able to find her voice ... silence. "Noah, are you awake?"

The moment stretched out, and she began to wonder if he was unconscious, or perhaps dead, but then he murmured, "Yeah, unfortunately."

She was straining to see past a bulb in the stump. She could just see Noah's wavy hair catching sunlight, gleaming caramel. His breaths were shallow, and he didn't move. To her astonishment, empathy swelled in her heart. She got one elbow under herself and heaved just enough to peek over the obstruction, and blanched.

Noah hadn't been so lucky.

The felled birch was at a forty-five degree angle from her body, angled away from the cliff. On its way down, its thick branches had taken a sapling with it. Maybe a metre away from her, Noah was sprawled on his back in the mud, and the apex of his torso clutched a gleaming protrusion through his lower right abdomen. Blood oozed from the edges, slowly staining his cobalt tee shirt. The sapling was as wide as her arm, its stump just under a foot high. He groaned deeply.

Sam fell hard into the muck, nauseous from the grief and the victory warring inside. In that brief moment she had to take in the sight, what burned into her mind was not the sickening injury, but the expression he wore. Yes, his eyes were pinched shut against what must have been unbearable agony, but he also looked like the boy from that photograph, before his entire life changed. Soft cheeks, full lips curled up in the faintest grin, long lashes fanned over sun-kissed cheeks.

"Can you move at all?" Her tone was soft, warm; she wasn't expecting that.

"Not enough. You?"

"Yeah, but it hurts like a motherfucker."

He chuckled, soft and raspy. It ended in a light groan. "What a way to go."

"I'm sorry," she whispered. Tilting her head to the side, she watched his hair shift in the breeze.

"It's for the best ..." he sighed eventually. "I can't go on like this forever."

Sam wasn't sure how to reply. Her heart ached deeply, but her wounded soul wouldn't let her forget the horrors he had put her through. The combo clashed. Noah was the monster who ended her comfort and safety. He was the ghoul terrorizing her and her loved ones, but he was also a broken young man fighting to control his wild other half. She wasn't sure how much of his humanity remained, how much of it encouraged the deplorable behaviour. She did know just how hard it could be to silence that voice, those urges, but at the same time, she managed not to kill people, so there was a definite line drawn between them.