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My gaze drops to the buzzy bracelet. It would suppress me, he said. Stop what I can do.
I can’t flicker. I can’t reach the one who needs to die. I can barely see the dead—and just seeing them is useless anyway.
But when those other dead gave my Puck and Huck nightmares…
I tremble. I don’t command the dead. I see and hear them, that’s all. But when I needed to protect my Hyde and Jekyll from the ghosts tormenting them, that changed.
Except… the other was the one who was awake when that happened, not me.
In my head, the other stirs as if hearing my thought, and I freeze, shocked. She’s always asleep when I’m awake. She wants it that way. It protects her from what I do to make the world safe, because if she’s awake, she tries to stop me. What I do scares her.
But now she’s waking. She’s still scared, but she doesn’t want to sleep, not anymore.
Not when someone is hurting our men.
Pink energy tangles inside me, like a blush on the night sky that promises sunrise.
More cries rise in the distance. Howls that make me want to fling myself at the bars, pain and electricity be damned.
I can’t lose my Beastly or my Ghastly or my Puck. I just found them, and we need each other. I need them. I was so alone before. The other and I both were, even if she never wanted to think about it. And once we found our Jekylls and our Hydes, that changed.
The pink glow of sunrise spreads in my veins. The other’s reassurance comes with it, like the comforting thoughts she sends when I’m frightened. Because she loves me and protects me too, even if I make her scared sometimes.
“Would you care to tell me your name?” the man asks idly, like my Hydes aren’t shrieking in the distance. “Or should I just make one up for you?”
Her comfort turns to resolve. We won’t lose them now.
We’re going to fight.
Quivers of determination make my hair shake like a stringy black curtain. Make my hand curl into a fist around the bracelet too. The metal is cold against my skin, a chilly bite on the edge of pain that grows stronger with the glow of the other’s power spreading through me.
Baring my teeth, I lift my eyes to where the man in the suit stands. He’s looking at his phone again.
I growl.
He glances up, a calmly curious expression on his face. “Poe-lina?” He shakes his head at himself. “No, that’s too Thumbelina and you don’t look enough like a fairy to make that sell. Emily, perhaps. Like Emily Dickinson. You do have that tragically gothic aesthetic going. Perhaps if we put you in a white nightgown. Buyers might find the allusion amusing.”
“Creepy.”
His brow twitches up. “Your name is ‘Creepy’?” He scoffs like I’ve said something ridiculous.
My fingers close tighter around the bracelet, and my muscles strain as I pull on it. “They call me Creepy Mabel. Maybe you think that’s not so nice. But you just hurt my mates, you ass, so now it’s time to end your life.”
He regards me indulgently. “You’re hardly in a position, Creepy, to threaten?—”
“Kill him,” I hiss at the dead.
The heat shimmers pause in their swirling, and then every one of them quivers strangely in the air. I can barely see the vaguest hints of their presence, yet I know—just know—they’ve turned to look at me.
My grip strains harder on the bracelet and my body trembles with fury as I reach for every scrap of power I can still feel in my veins past the bracelet’s suppressing force.
My eyes never leave the dead.
Chuckling, the man continues in his indulgent tone. “What did you say?”
So many dead. So many innocent lives destroyed. He’s nothing but one among countless other predators in the world, but in this moment, that doesn’t matter.
He’s the only one in this room.
