Page 101 of Molt

Her lips part.

“The first Lenora.” I can barely say it. “You died before the molt ever existed.”

Her face empties. “How?”

“I don’t remember yet.”

“And you…”

“I couldn’t let you go.”

The pieces fall together.

Her returning. My immortality. The transfer. The cycles. The thing that feeds every time we love each other.

Lenora whispers “What did you do?”

My eyes burn. “I brought you back.”

Her face crumples. “At what cost?”

I look down at my disappearing hand. Then at the pieces of me living inside her. And finally I understand why the man in my memory had smiled. Why he said I offered him anything. Why I wrote warnings to myself. Why I chose to forget.

Because I was never Lenora’s victim. She was never mine.

I started this.

My voice barely works. “Me.”

Chapter 7- Lenora

August brought me back from the dead. That should be the worst thing I learn tonight.

It isn’t. Not even fucking close.

For a long time, neither of us speak.

August sits on the floor beneath the ruined shelves, his back against the wall, staring at his hand.

Four fingers. One of them is mine now. His collarbone is inside me. His tooth is in my mouth. His heartbeat is beneath my own. Little pieces of him.

Taken. Stolen. Transferred.

I sit across from him with my knees drawn against my chest.

The black writing on the wall has stopped dripping.

NOW YOU REMEMBER WHY I MADE YOU FORGET.

I can’t stop looking at it.

“You loved me.”

August’s head lifts. “What?”

“The first time.”

His face crumples. “Yes.”