Page 21 of The Bleeding Woods

Humanity is so fickle with their flirtations. Again, I remember Mother—Hemlock’s lessons in interpersonal relationships. There must have been a time when she dreamed I’d be a true son to her science, because no detail was left lovelorn.

Slick documents showcased corsets of cordiality.

Hardcover books spoke of featherlight touches and sweet nothings.

Films evolved from leaden to lurid made a spectacle of concepts meant to be simple, instinctual.

Hemlock wanted me educated in these matters.

She was prying for reactions to record on the pale-blue pages of her notepad.

I urged myself into a more acceptable embodiment, but in truth, I couldn’t will myself to understand.

Why dredge boresomely through motions building to passion when it’s already available?

No one in this laboratory knew how to account for the height of my inhuman qualities.

Unlike them, I don’t have the need for words.

Clara and I can communicate through our bodies, but also through our very blood.

We can speak in shared currents, in spaces where one ocean meets another.

I can see through to her innermost self, view her memories in telepathic Technicolor.

I don’t need a textbook to navigate what we have.

Our chemistry is chemistry. What we have is as effortless as the twirl of a double helix.

She may not accept it from the forefront of her mind, but her body knows better.

Beneath my touch, all she can feel is trust. If not for the nuisances in the way of our union, we’d already be one.

They’ve found a path into the EHKI’s dilapidated outer sector, an emergency exit.

I had been meaning to properly furnish it with flora, but I need to now more than ever.

Clara must wait for such revelations. The truth of her origin is a delicate matter, one I’d like to deliver under very specific circumstances.

Also, I can’t have her finding these mysterious pills.

“Clara . . .” I sing to her. Telepathic talk is far more melodious than verbal speech.

Speech is staccato. It is built on blunt, disjointed syllables strung together ever so tactlessly.

The way of my and Clara’s transmission is a legato love letter to the concept of communication itself.

Dr. Hemlock had designed me to be better.

In this way, among innumerable others, I simply am.

We simply are. “Come to me, Clara . . .”

As her barbarian sister inspects an EHKI banner scorched by yours truly, Clara busies herself sorting through canisters, flasks, and every legible file.

She’s desperate. She’s guarding her humanity like it’s the last flickering firelight in a blizzard.

To abandon her true nature would be to abandon me, to abandon us.

Oh, sweet thing, you won’t be doing that.

I lure her with a thought inspired seamlessly enough to be mistaken for her own.

It’s a gentle suggestion to follow the leftmost corridor.

“This way . . . there might be something this way,” I murmur, though in her mind, my voice manifests as hers.

“Don’t disturb the others. They cannot know what you came here for. ”

She slips away without a trace. Wretched Grayson is too busy comforting the young nuisance to notice, and Jade is too consumed by one of Dr. Blaine Milligan’s notebooks.

I remember him well enough to know she’ll find nothing of value in there.

Clara follows me down a passageway obstructed by spiderwebs of thick wiring.

Flickering lights running on the last of their solar power glitch madly overhead.

I stare through each millisecond of darkness.

A few boiling embryos might have clawed their way into the emergency exit, but not many scientists made it.

I don’t have to worry about horrifying dearest Clara with the remains I’ve yet to alchemize into branches and blood roses.

Save for three dented fire extinguishers and some broken glass, the path to our privacy is clear.

Beyond the narrow halls of this escape route, a high-ceilinged cathedral of chemistry endures time.

Muted neon pours from dangling bulbs that have persisted for a garish twenty-five years.

I must find those remaining solar panels.

Burettes, beakers, and Bunsen burners galore tell the tale of our origin.

There is enough glassware to fill a ballroom with chandeliers.

It is as good a backdrop as any for us to daydream.

As Clara seeks her precious pills or a formula relating to them, I slip through her neural gates and scour her memory.

So recently empowered, I have the bandwidth to create a waking fantasy.

I offer her a hallucination, a doorway to things unseen, a path into the past. This is power even I’ve yet to play with to its fullest potential.

Reminiscence sweeps through the space like a wave, and together, we enter a realm of anamnesis.

My little love sits between crimson velvet cushions like a stolen slice of the moon.

She glimmers beneath our dreamscape’s faux sky of incandescent stars, reading the rim of a martini glass speckled with burgundy kisses.

It practically blushes under the weight of her gaze, a tantalizing haze of red iridescence woven through the folds of her irises.

My crimson smoke spirals through the air in gravity-defying tendrils. They encircle her head, a crown.

Everything about her seems designed to tempt. It’s as though she was made just for me, as if her form was manifested for the sole purpose of sickening my heart.

She fits in here well, all things considered.

This is a recent memory. From it, I am learning of the dreadful world she hails from.

She feels like a stranger, but in tragic, withering ways, she yearns to be human.

She’ll realize, in time, that we are so much more than what she once imagined at the edge of possible.

“Another drink, miss?” A phantom waiter adorned in a voguish waistcoat sends an ice pick through her thoughts. I wish I had been there then to protect her from eyes as hungry as his.

She shakes her head. She offers nothing more than a smile that is far too shy, a mismatched button sewn crudely in place.

The waiter disappears into the speakeasy’s maze of velvet, leather, and fool’s gold furnishings.

It is a gilded cage nestled beneath the streets of Clara’s old home, a pocket of sensuality and softness in an otherwise loud, cruel, human world.

In some ways, it is an attempt to replicate my fantasies.

It could never. No, it could never satisfy something so magnificent as my Clara, Clara, Clara.

Jazzy tunes tumble off the air particles, all of them hiding hypnotic whispers sung just for her. She rises, her crown of smoke dispersing. She steps toward the dance floor one heel click at a time, each softer and more hesitant than the previous.

It’s been years since she’s danced.

It’s been a lifetime since she’s had a proper partner.

I step in wearing a sleek, white tuxedo and a devilishly crooked smile.

Locks of roguish, jet-black hair fall strategically to my temples, desperate to caress the altar of my lips.

They are upturned like a pair of daggers; sharp, relaxed, and ruthless.

Human. For her, for now, they are still human.

I am beautiful in every sense of the word, my face a mosaic of all things too stunning to be considered normal for her kind.

I am what artists attempt to replicate in reimaginings of lust incarnate, a flawless marble statue lovingly terraformed by rivers of shadow.

I am everything she could want and so much more.

The space goes silent. The tinkles of clinking teardrop glasses and idle prattle of life, work, and the weather surrender to a newfound cloud of anticipatory stillness. Clara’s heart lurches forward, toward me. On the inside, she curses it like a traitor.

I touch a fingertip to her lips, halting every question, every thought.

She’s better off without them. “You used to dance? How long has it been since you danced?” I murmur, one hand coming from behind to coil her throat, the other at the curve of her precious waist. I nip at the arc of her left ear.

My cinnamon-sweet breath slithers into her skull, urging her mind into focus.

“Ten years.” A response tumbles out. “It’s been ten years.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“I . . . My parents enrolled me in ballet when I was young . . . they told me it would be helpful . . .”

She had trouble moving like other children in even the simplest of ways.

Her joints just couldn’t fit into the expected pattern.

She was attuned to an entirely different frequency, like an insect.

Like me. I peer into her lessons, feeling the rigid poses she’d been ushered into.

First position, second position, third position, fourth.

Arabesques, attitudes, and additions to her daily performance.

Her parents hadn’t hoped she’d become a ballerina; they wanted her to pass for a human being.

“That won’t do.” I click my tongue. She shivers. Success. “Dance with me.”

I will free her. Roots descend from overhead to guide her steps and pose her arms. For a moment, the illusion breaks.

The world spins, a blur of green glass, crystal flasks, and dreary blue-gray metal.

My hand descends from her jaw, lingering at her collarbone like a curious tongue.

This touch is a language all our own, each sensation a syllable.

I explore until we are a tangle of limbs positioned to waltz, whisked from the laboratory, returned to the cherrywood floor of our dreamscape.

She breathes. Ecstasy.

We ascend into music and motion. I promise her ephemeral, rhythmic synchrony, and she allows me to twirl her across the space.

This isn’t like the ballet of her past. This is movement that fractalizes into freedom.

We are a kaleidoscope, a whirlpool. Through this, I show her the splendors of chaos guided by instinct, the infinite refined by desire.

I savor each tender crossroad where skin meets skin, inhuman cells collide, and I am no longer alone.

Grayson.

She thinks of . . . Grayson?

Grayson Warner. Through neural osmosis, I discover him to be the only person who’s made her feel .

. . wonderful, terrible things. To him, she imagines, she isn’t a monster.

If he became privy to her secret, he’d accept her.

He’d embrace her. He’d love her. She wants him to love her.

She holds a hand over her heart as though that might protect it.

Such a brave little thing. My ivory fingers ensnare her throat once more, vines claiming the stem of a rose.

I lean in to steal something. I want another kiss.

Again, she thinks of Grayson.

Musical menticide slips from me. A sonic downpour of silk, a deluge of honeyed electricity, a love story fluttering through her like plucked poppy petals. She is mine, and with a song forged in telepathic fire, I will ensure she knows it.

There is blood to be spilled, darkness to embrace, dominion to be demanded.

There are nights to be spent entangled, dreaming in unison.

Let us be their evil. Let us grow our garden, our birthright, our kingdom.

Two thrones for two monarchs. One damned world for two damned gods.

She leans in to me as though slipping through clouds.

I sing to her, for her. I caress her body, mind, soul, and every branch of infinity beyond it.

You will wear malevolence like a goddess in silks. Let me in, Clara. Let me in.

She tilts her head back, a moth to a flame, an iron to a magnet.

She gives me entrance, permission. It is only us, and not just in the illusionary speakeasy.

Not just beneath my forest. Not just on Earth.

Right now, we are the sole inhabitants of a hollow, empty universe.

Right now, the rest of existence is an echo, a wraith meant to highlight the sacred strangeness of all that tethers our essences incorporeal.

Miss. Clara. Lovecroft.

I would die for her. More importantly, and more relevantly, I would kill for her.

Grayson’s voice pierces the veil, an unwelcome visitor.

His hair is disheveled. His breaths emerge in desperate, heaving puffs.

A jacket of worn brown leather hangs from his biceps, ripped off by frantic motion.

He’d been running through the dilapidated hallways.

He’d been searching. The audacity of it all.

“Clara?” he calls; her precious name gets caught between two panicked exhales. “Clara, where are you?”