by Coralee June
Its shadowy presence slammed through my chest, soaking into my body like water to a sponge. I felt it under every inch of my skin. I heard its legs creeping over my soul. It scurried across the recesses of my existence, and every syllable of the continued chant had the creature burrowing in deeper and deeper until there was no way to discern where I ended and it began.
I could feel the moment I wasn’t myself anymore. There was an intense shock of endless pain and then nothing but hunger.
My body lifted up off the floor, and I felt my limbs flail around as the creature assimilated to me. I could feel the stretching of its presence filling me up from the tips of my fingers all the way to my toes.
A sharp jab of pain seared into the skin of my throat, and then my body was tossed to the floor, making me land in a pitiful heap of heavy limbs and shock.
I dragged in a ragged breath and desperately blinked away the darkness from my vision. The chanting had stopped, though I had no idea when.
I sat up with a wince, my whole body trembling with the echoes of pain. I brought a hand to my tender throat and hissed in pain when I brushed against the skin there. It felt like I’d been marked with a searing-hot brand.
“Check them,” I heard Hafferty say. “If a demon successfully possessed them, take them through the portal. Burn the others.”
I tried to get to my feet, but I fell to my knees. I desperately looked around. Everyone was on the ground like me, but some of the students were struggling to get up, some were unmoving, and others...their bodies were convulsing. Black smoke was stuck around their skin, demons hovering over them like they’d been unable to sink inside.
A Spector woman stopped in front of me. Gripping my chin, she looked me over with a nod. “How do you feel?”
Even with the echoes of pain and my drained energy, one feeling was pushed to the forefront of my mind. “Hungry,” I croaked. “So hungry.”
But she wasn’t even listening. She was already moving on to someone else. Students were being picked up and dragged away to a portal, while the others were left inside the circle to writhe on the floor.
I wanted to get up. To run, to fight, to do something, but I was so damn weak, and my head was so hazy that I felt like I was in a dream. All while this unfamiliar hunger was clawing up my throat like thorny vines, a deadly rose garden spreading from my chest. I ached to feed—but it didn’t just feel like my thirst for blood. This felt different.
Gritting my teeth, I shoved the strange sensation away just as Jones came forward and crouched in front of me, cocking his head to the side. His red eyes were zeroed in on my neck, and he smirked before reaching forward to lift me up. “Let’s get you into the portal.”
Before I could even attempt to shove him away, the windows suddenly shattered. Sound exploded around us as splinters of glass rained down.
What the fuck was happening now?
I was too weak to lift my arms to protect my face, and Jones jolted up, shouting. I felt the sharp shards of glass cut into my skin, heard screams and running footsteps all around me, but all I could do was stay huddled on the floor, trying to catch my breath.
Before the glass could finish falling, the violent wind was back, but with it was the sound of angry birds shrieking, their caws piercing my eardrums.
Lifting my head, I looked up and saw shadows streaking into the room, flying in from the windows. The black tendrils converged into hundreds—or maybe even thousands—of crows, their cries echoing off the walls.
The elementals started trying to fight them back with air barriers, but there were too many birds, and they hadn’t stopped them in time. Even when they managed to push back half a dozen through the window, a hundred more were there to take their place.
So many crows flew inside that soon, I couldn’t see past them. I felt them everywhere, every flap of a wing added to the hurricane of wind as their beaks and feathers and claws scraped against me. I was going to be suffocated by birds. I was choking on rising panic and feathers, trying to make sense of what the fuck was going on.
I turned my attention to Stiles, but he was fighting off birds, batting them away with his hands. The moment he swatted them away, they flinched and squawked then dropped dead on the floor.
What the fuck?
At the sound of an agonized scream, I turned to see one of the Spector men being completely overridden with crows. Every inch of his body was covered with them as they dug their claws into his skin and pecked at him with their beaks. His infested body flailed around until his cries turned to gurgles, and he was left twitching on the ground, the crows merciless as they continued to attack him.
A shot of fire suddenly cut off my view of the dying Spector man, and a blaze of heat licked across my face as a huge fireball landed three feet away from me. I crawled backwards, scrambling away from the flames, only to realize that it wasn’t a fireball from an elemental. It was the necromancer student, and his entire body was ablaze.
He struggled to get to his feet from where he’d landed in front of me, his skin curling up with burned edges before growing back again as the destroyed flesh dripped off his slender body. The crows flapped their wings around him, but they weren’t attacking him like they did the Spector man. If anything, it looked as if they were trying to put the flames out.
That sight, along with the realization that the crows weren’t attacking me either, spurred me into action. I was going to use this interruption to get the fuck out of here.
“Motley!”
Stiles was at my side, pulling me to my feet in an instant, his suit ruined with bloodied holes and tears all over the fabric, and his face covered in nicks and scratches.
“Stiles—”
“We’re under attack,” he said, cutting me off.
I shook my head. “No, the crows are trying to help us. I need to get out of here.”
Stiles looked at me like I was insane. “You’re not leaving,” he said.
I ripped my arms from his hold, staggering back. “You’re delusional,” I shouted at him. “They forced us to be possessed by demons! How can you be okay with this?”
He opened his mouth to argue, but a shrill scream cut him off. I used the distraction to turn and sprint away, only to smack into the red-eyed Jones. Crows were dive-bombing him, their black bodies hooked into his clothes as he kicked and swung at them to get away.
As soon as he saw it was me who’d run into him, he clamped a hand around my arm and started tugging me forward. “Get the rest through the portal now!” he shouted, though I had no idea if any of the Spector people heard him over the wind and birds.
I struggled to pull away from him, but he was strong. Much stronger than I in my current weakened state. He pushed us through the room, using me as a shield so that the crows wouldn’t attack. I tried everything to get him to let go of me. I kicked, I punched—I even sunk my fangs into his hand where he was holding me. But nothing I did had him letting me go.
As we inched closer to the wall, I noticed the doorway had been turned into a portal, and there was a Spector man already tossing one of the other students through it.
Panic seized me. I couldn’t let them take me. I knew that in the fiber of my bones. I may not know who sent these crows, but it was better than the people who had forced a demon possession on me.
Before he could drag me to the portal, I suddenly caught my heels on the floor and then made my entire body a dead weight. The move caught him off-guard, and it was just enough of a surprise for me to slam my foot on his toes and elbow him in the gut. A puff of air left his chest as he flinched and bent over. I wrenched my arm out of his grasp and started sprinting away.
“Catch her!” Jones’s voice bellowed behind me.
The crows seemed to act with one mind, because they immediately converged around my body, blocking me from his view. Then, dozens of crows descended upon Jones, burrowing inside of his open mouth and traveling down his throat. They clawed and stuffed with a flurry of feathers until his stomach s
tarted to inflame like a balloon. I couldn’t stop staring. Not when Jones’s eyes rolled back. Not when crows started pecking out of his stomach, carrying his intestines and bits of flesh.
But then Stiles was in front of me, blocking my path. “Motley, you need to come with me.”
I screeched to a stop, shaking my head wildly. “No.”
“You really don’t want to fight this,” Stiles said, not reaching forward to grab me.
I just needed to get away. To flee. To hide. It was like the walls were closing in on me, and Stiles’s pinning stare felt like chains.
The room was suddenly too hot, my racing breath too labored. The crows were shrieking too loudly, and there were too many moving parts. The demon thing inside of me was rising up, pushing against my skin, the feeling terrifyingly foreign and too powerful to contain. I looked down at my shaking hands and saw strings stuck to my palms.
“What?” I muttered to myself.
I tried to wipe them off, but more came back. Confused, I lifted a hand up in front of my face, zeroing in on a single silky strand at my index finger that looked like a splinter imbedded into my skin. I tugged at it, and my eyes widened when the string lengthened, feeding out from my fingertip in a never-ending spool. They weren’t strings. They were...webs. And I was making them.
“What’s happening to me?” I whispered.
I was too caught up in the fact that webs were falling from my fingers to notice the Spector guards rushing forward. Two of them came up behind me, lifting me away from Stiles’s grasp. “No!” I screamed, flailing and kicking as I was held in the air and led toward the portal. “No, you can’t take me! Don’t let them take me, Stiles!” I cried, but he just watched them drag me away.
I opened my mouth to scream some more, my fangs descending all the way down, but a hand suddenly slammed over my mouth, and then a voice was in my ear.
“Go to sleep, bitch.”
The world went black.
Chapter 4
Hunger.
That was my new reality.
I was something...else now. Something I didn’t fully understand. All I knew was the consuming hunger taking over my soul.
Aunt Marie once told me that the frenzy she felt during a bloodlust episode wasn’t true hunger. It was an uncontrollable craving, and that craving was driven by the fear of starving—the fear of never feeling satisfied.
Fear. That’s what spurred her uncontrollable bloodlust episodes. That’s what made her slip away from reality and fall into an animalistic frenzy.
And for once in my life, I understood.
This craving and fear were new emotions for me, but they crept up my spine with every passing moment. Every step closer I got to death, the more my fear muddled my morals, and the more the craving took over.
When I’d first gotten to Spector, I cried. I wasn’t a crier. I didn’t ever drown in my own salty misery. But I couldn’t stop the tears that came. I was drowsy and confused. Weak and utterly unlike myself. Trapped. Scared. And then the paranoia kicked in. I had no way out. No way of knowing what they’d do to me. No way of knowing what the demon would do.
I’d never felt so lonely in my life. I cried for help, for my aunt, Stiles, the devil—didn’t matter. I just wanted someone to come.
And somewhere between the lonely silence of fear and craving, I lost myself.
I didn’t know who I was.
I wasn’t just Motley Coven anymore. No longer was I a simple Thibault student. I had two beings warring inside of me—my own soul and that of the demon.
I felt the spider burrowed down in the pit of my spirit. It moved and watched—a foreign sensation that was so strange the hairs on the back of my neck would stand straight up whenever she made her presence known.
I always thought of myself as astute and resourceful before, but now, I could barely form coherent thoughts. I was overridden with the spider’s occupancy, and we were both overridden with insatiable hunger.
The dozens of blood bags at my feet were completely drained. My stomach sloshed from all the attempts at nourishment, reminding me that I’d had more than enough, making me question why the hell I was still starving.
And I was starving. It was a slow progression, hollowing me from the inside out with the idea of food while filling me with empty solutions because nothing worked.
Not food, not blood, not water, or pills. I was dying from starvation, and I had no idea what my body needed to stop it. And from the looks of things, neither did Spector, because they kept throwing blood and food at me, but none of it was what I needed.
I rolled around on the floor, pressing my sweaty face against the grooves in the cold concrete while willing my webs to appear at my fingertips. The strange ability had stopped days ago—or maybe it was weeks. I wasn’t sure. Time was just a passing concept that left me behind.
I knew the demon inside of me was dying. My lack of webs was proof enough of that, and her devious presence had burrowed down deeper inside of me. I also knew with complete certainty that I was dying right alongside her. If this hunger wasn’t satisfied soon, we’d shrivel up and cease to exist. Twin corpses held in one tomb.
The trap door to my small cell slid open, and another platter of blood and food was shoved at me with a single command:
Eat.
I opened my mouth to tell them that wasn’t what I needed, but I stopped myself. They wouldn’t listen, and I didn’t know what I did need, so what was the point?
The worst thing about all of this was that a part of me welcomed death. If I was going down, at least Spector couldn’t use the evil within me. But that felt...horrible. To give up, roll over, to lose the fight in your own spirit. It was so unlike myself, but I couldn’t escape the weighted blanket of depression that covered me.
Hours and days and minutes and weeks passed by. Or maybe it was just seconds.
At some point, I started vomiting up blood. It was all over my clothes, staining my white hospital gown with bright red rejection. My body was failing, and I was helpless to stop it. So I just closed my crusty eyes and slept.
When I woke up next, I was in new clothes and my cell was clean. Spector liked to subtly remind me that they had complete control—that they were always watching. They changed my clothes while I slept. They decided when I ate and how much. They even pumped the vents with heady fumes, forcing me to sleep.
I wished they would just let me sleep forever.
“Get up,” a gruff voice suddenly said, startling me.
I struggled to open my eyes and push myself up off the floor. My heavy head looked over as a tall man in a Spector uniform with a smattering of black hair falling down his back stepped inside my small room that felt more like a cage.
Well, this was new. No one had come into my cell the entire time I’d been here—at least not while I was awake. And despite the fact that I was sure I hadn’t moved in days, his proximity did something to me. My fangs suddenly ached and dropped down. A single thread of silk fell from my pinky finger. The hunger hit me like a baseball bat to the gut as I pulled myself up to a sitting position.
Whoa.
Hunger slammed through me at his presence, but something else started to boil up right alongside it. Something alien. Something…sensual.
The guard’s nostrils flared, and his eyes snapped over to me. He frowned as he scented me, a look of desire and wariness battling over his features.
My spider pushed out more of the strange power, as if trying to hook him. I was weak, and sharing a body felt clumsy, but the spider still managed. I could feel it coming out of my pores in soft waves of whispering breath. It felt carnal. When I saw the guard falter, his pupils dilating, I realized what she was doing. She was luring him.
The guard cleared his throat, visibly trying to stop himself from reacting to the pull. “Get up and follow me,” he said, his foot shoving at my thigh.
“Where are you taking me?” I croaked, wondering when I’d last spoken.
“Get the fuck up,�
�� he demanded angrily, using his meaty hand to pick me up by my hair.
A yelp escaped me, fiery pain exploding in my scalp as he used his brutal hold to lift me up until I was standing on shaking legs.
I cried out, but my back arched as sudden arousal flooded me from his touch.
What the fuck?
My body’s response to this strange man’s cruelty horrified me, and I tamped it down. It was part of whatever lure power my spider was using. It had to be.
He shoved me out of the cell, and flickering lights in the hallway assaulted my vision. Doors lined each side, and screams could be heard echoing down the long, dreary corridor.
I tried to remember each turn and twist as we navigated the many cells. My exhausted feet could barely keep up, but the man’s thick fingers stayed on my arm as he stomped down the hall. My panties were drenched, my skin was on fire, and my legs shook as my clit pulled at my attention, pulsing with need. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, but my silent demon was aching to take control, aching to be filled, and more power pumped from my skin in waves of dark desire. I fought it so hard I started retching again.
Why was the demon doing this? Why lure him? And why was my body reacting this way?
The man gave me a withering glare as I gagged. “If you vomit blood on my boots, I’ll make you clean it with your tongue. Now stand up straighter.”
Holding a hand against my mouth, I did as he said, and he guided me to a set of double doors. After using his free hand to push them open, he yanked me forward and shoved me inside, closing them after me. I fell to my knees, the hard ground greeting me.
“Get off the floor,” a demand called from across the vast room.
I blinked. Once. Twice. My tired blue eyes adjusted to the dark terror of the bright room. It was like the fluorescent lights overhead were my first glimpse of the sun after months of rain, but I wasn’t disillusioned by the brightness. I knew the storm wasn’t over.
I stood and rolled my shoulders back, like a soldier preparing for battle. I was so fucking weak I could barely keep my feet from collapsing beneath me, but pride was an old friend of mine. She helped me survive the life as a bastard vampire, hated by society, and I knew she’d help me survive whatever Spector had planned too.
