AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Like dogs desperately lapping the remnants of moisture from a bowl, we press our lips to the floor and start sucking the water from its surface. How fucking degrading! The entire time I drink from the floor, my tongue licking the tile like an animal, I curse Vonnegut and The Order and that wicked bitch sister, Lysandra, who Niklas told me all about, but I never stop drinking.
Niklas does the same, and neither of us can bear to look at the other, too ashamed to meet each other’s eyes. There’s no need to say, “Never speak a word of this to anyone,” because we both already know.
16
Fredrik
Willa had made it back to her chair with her dainty little teacup hours ago, where she sits now, watching me with those preternatural eyes, taking in the information I give her with a purpose of her own.
I told her everything I could about Seraphina: our time together, the dark souls we tortured, the lives we took, the people we fucked, and the dark love we shared. And during the story, Willa revealed another human emotion buried for so long: ambition.
I can see it in her seemingly vacant eyes, a growing need for change, something in her existence that could help her to feel human again.
She had begun to envision herself in Seraphina’s place—this became clear to me in the beginning when she told me that she, too, was immune to love. The pieces slowly began to come together. Willa wants to know about Seraphina because she wants to become her. It’s what my instincts tell me, and I learned long ago to trust my instincts and never look back.
“Then vy did you kill her, Freedrik? If you loved her so much and she loved you, the two of you who shared this…connection, vyvould you kill her? I do not understand. Make me understand.”
This is the part of the story I least want to relive. But I’ve gone this far in the telling, so I suppose I should get it over with.
“Do you want the truth?”
“Vyvould I vant a lie?”
Because the truth might kill your ambition; it might change your mind about wanting to change yourself.
I think on it for a moment, licking the dryness from my lips.
“Because, ultimately, the way it does with all of us who are human,” I begin, quietly insinuating that she is not, “Seraphina fell too far in love with me, and her weaker half won. It took over to control her. She became all the things she fought so hard her entire life to reject: jealous, desperate, confused, distracted, attached. Seraphina began to imagine her life without me in it and the fear of that ever happening consumed her and all she was.”
“I wanted to hurt you,” Seraphina had said the night she tried to kill me.
“Why did you want to hurt me?”
“Because love is pain,” she answered, and I swallowed down the truth of her admission. “Because love is the greatest scam of all time. And because as much as I fucking love you, I hate you for inflicting it upon me!”
I did not make Seraphina insane; I only brought the madness back, the madness that had been there since her birth. The little blond-haired girl who had been molested and beaten by her father all her young life. That little girl was the madness within Seraphina; she was the weakness that Seraphina worked so hard to choke. And I unintentionally removed the hands from around that little girl’s neck.
“But how can loving someone,” Willa asks, “make a person all those things?”
I don’t know how to answer her; I know the answer, but I’m not sure how to convey it to someone like Willa, who is, deep down, not human; someone who has never in her life experienced love. How can I explain to her the loss of something she’s never had?
“I don’t know, Willa,” I whisper into the darkness of the room, “but it happens to all of us, on some level or another. But for someone like Seraphina, to love is was death sentence.”
And to someone like Willa, who I’m beginning to realize isn’t so different from Seraphina, after all.
But she is not Seraphina. And no matter how hard she tries, she will never be.
17
Niklas
Two or Three Weeks Later…
The bastards have kept us hydrated and alive, but always with a gush of water underneath the door.
We haven’t eaten in…I don’t even know anymore. All I do know is that I’m too far beyond the point of helping Izabel out of this place. I’ve lost a lot of weight, and my muscles are so sore that just moving to adjust my position on this hard floor is almost enough to kill me. I’d hate to see my face if there was a mirror in this room, but I can imagine what it looks like just by looking at Izzy’s.
She’s as weak as I am, if not maybe worse. Her cheeks are sunken; dark circles have set underneath her eyes and all around them like a raccoon. Her lips appear shriveled, despite at least having water to keep them somewhat hydrated. She looks like shit. And so do I. We’re starving to death, slowly but surely, so I don’t know how else we’re supposed to look.
