“I was soft back then—beaten into submission. But then I grew up. Dealing with that rage, accepting it”—he pointed his finger at her—“and not in any way I would suggest, created more time between transformations, but not significantly. Not predictably. Not until my father died. Not until I killed him.”
He looked at her, waiting for a reaction she was too exhausted to give, a question she was too tired to ask. He didn’t offer her an explanation, a rationalization. Maybe because he thought she understood better than anyone else would. Not that he would have been right, of course, until she had seen the beast within Mitch first-hand.
He sighed. “Then, I started to know when it was going to happen. I can feel it, feel him. And it’s predictable now, every five weeks. One night every five weeks, I turn into a harder, angrier, larger beast than I am now. As if my nature took those other days and slammed them all together for one night of hell. And the rest of the time, I’m just a bastard. Who can control my urges . . . most of the time.”
His eyes swept over her body, sending a chill through her. Pleasant and unpleasant at the same time. Desire and fear so close together, twisting around each other, moving as one within her.
“So what do we do now?” she asked, shivering.
“We? We do nothing. I’m done,” he said, reclining in the chair. “Now that you know all I do, you’re free to go.”
“Are you kidding me? Now that I know, I’m on my own?” She wiped imaginary dust from her hands. “Congratulations, you’re a monster like me, now go home,” she mimicked. “Knowing the truth is just the beginning, Mitch. Once you know the facts, you figure out a way to change them.” But he’d just accepted it and expected her to do the same.
“I told you about Chastity,” he said. “Showed you Hyde, put bars on your windows, and a hell of a lock on your door. What the fuck else am I supposed to do for you?”
“I don’t know.” Tears of helplessness ran down her cheeks, feeling as if they were slicing her skin open as they flowed. What if there really was nothing she could do about it? About any of this. What if there was no way for anyone to help her? Dear God, what was she going to do?
“It’s okay. I’ll be okay.” She tried to speak with confidence, but couldn’t stop her lip from trembling. “I’ll figure something out. Thank—”
“Stop doing that.” He motioned at her face. “Don’t— Argh! Alright! There’s something else. Just turn off the sprinklers.” He went to the dresser and looked inside the second drawer. “What the—”
“What?” She approached him.
“I thought I had a lot more.”
She peered around his broad shoulders, then gave up and stepped in close to him.
Inside the drawer were two vials of a clear liquid—no labels—and two packages of syringes, one of them almost empty.
She took three quick steps backward. “Oh, no. Not that. I’m not touching that.”
He picked up one of the vials, turning it in his hand. “It will stop you from transforming. I don’t use it—that’s why I have the cage and the cuffs—but I always keep some in a syringe, just in case.”
The shake of her head was more like a shiver than a sign of disagreement. “I’m not doing it.”
“Jesus, why are you so stubborn? I’m trying to help you. Isn’t that what you wanted? Don’t you want it to stop?”
“Not with that.”
“Look, you don’t have to like it, but it’s an option.”
“Not for me, it isn’t. My mom was a junkie.” Her mind flashed back to those days, more than a decade before, days she hadn’t revisited since she’d been placed in her first foster home. Those childhood memories had all been shoved deeply into the section of her mind that blocked out the most painful of her life experiences. But now they began to crash into her consciousness like a tsunami, tucked in between random assaults, faces of those who had sexually-abused her, and even some happy moments with her mom during the rare times she’d be sober.
Mom, dressed like street-trash, giving me a tearful kiss on my forehead before leaving the house at midnight, night after night after night. The sound of a slap I was too scared to feel after I hid her stash. I was, what, seven? The hands of a man the courts had trusted to keep me safe scraping my body. The look on Mom’s face when I found her on the ground, the needle still dangling from her arm. For hours, I’d sat with her, trying to wake her up. Like some terribly cheesy movie-of-the-week sob-fest.
“No, I can’t do that.” Her own voice stopped the images from escaping any further. “I won’t be like her.” She forced them from her mind’s eye, back into the box of darkness she’d do anything necessary to keep them enclosed in. “She’s gone.”
At some point, he’d taken her arm and led her back to the chair. He was kneeling next to her and stroking her hair. “That’s how she died?” There was a softness in his tone she’d not known he was capable of. Sadness in his eyes.
She nodded slowly, hammering another nail into the box with each downward motion. “I was eight. I woke up and found her.” Drugs were still filling her veins. Life was not.
“Do you blame her or the drugs?”
Her head popped up. “What kind of question is that?”
He shifted back onto his feet in a crouch. “Maybe she knew something you didn’t.”
“Like what? How to shoot up? I’m pretty sure I could figure that out on my own, thanks.”
“Maybe she was self-medicating . . . to stop her transformation. Did you ever see her Hyde?”
“No.” It was everything the disillusioned little girl inside her could hope for, and that part of Eden clutched onto the idea. Hoping it was true.
I’m hoping my mother was a monster? “She left me alone a lot. I always thought it was because she was trying to score more dope or . . . I don’t know . . . selling herself to get more cash.”
“Maybe she was.” He shrugged. “But maybe her addiction didn’t start out as recreational.”
No, it couldn’t be true. “Once, in a rare sober moment, she told me that she wished she’d never started.”
Why did Eden trust him? She’d never even told Carter about her mother. Was it because she and Mitch shared a side of themselves no one else would ever understand? Or, because, looking into his eyes, she saw a goodness he’d buried so deeply even he didn’t know it existed? “Originally, it had been prescribed at a clinic—the legal stuff. Then when that ran out . . .”
He leaned toward her and cocked his head. “Prescribed for what?”
“I don’t know. I was, like, seven when she said that. And she’d already been using for years. The semi-apology stuck with me, but the rationalization didn’t.”
“The reason,” he corrected.
“Reason, rationalization. What’s the difference?”
“The difference is why it started. What made it start. If she self-medicated to keep her Hyde under control, when it started is very important.”
Eden shrugged. “I don’t remember and she sure-as-heck can’t tell me, so it doesn’t make any difference now, does it?”
He sighed. “I suppose not. It just would have been helpful to know. There are times when I think that all of this is some kind of sick joke. Or someone’s way of punishing me. It started with my father’s genes, but sometimes—” He shook his head. “I can’t deal with the what-if’s, I can barely deal with the what-now’s. Was your mother good to you?”
“She was high all the time.”
“But was she good to you?”
“Yeah. . . Mostly. That doesn’t mean she transformed though. She could’ve just been an addict like millions of other addicts.”
“True. But it ran in my family, why wouldn’t it run in yours?”
“Why would anyone like that reproduce?”
”Well,” he said, breaking into the sing-song of how a parent would speak to a child, “when a man and a woman love each other, they express that feeling physically. Although, occasionally, the ‘loving’ part does
n’t apply, and they just want to get naked and fuck.” He grinned like he was encouraging her to do the same.
Sure, like I can find a silver lining in this. “I was an accident. Some guy she screwed when she was high. Charming story to tell your kid, right? I think she might have snuck it in with the there-is-no-Santa-Clause discussion.”
“Until I changed for the first time, I never understood my father. I still would never have done what he did to us, but now I understand that he couldn’t control himself. He should have left like your mom, or stayed in a cage like I do. Even when he was human.”
“Did your sister change?”
“No. But she understood. She took care of me when I couldn’t take care of myself.” He looked up and blinked eyes that were shiny.
“It’s okay to cry if you need to,” she said softly.
“I don’t cry,” he said.
“Ever?”
“No.”
“What? You don’t have tear ducts? Or are you just an unfeeling bastard?” she teased, trying to remind him of the openness they’d had just moments ago.
“To my knowledge, I do have tear ducts. So I guess that leaves us with the second option.” As he shifted onto his feet, she saw his wall come up.
“Not even over your sister? Not once?”
“Maybe just once.” Then he muttered, “Or constantly.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She was a good person—same genes, totally different result. Shelly recognized the signs before I did. She found chains we thought would be strong enough and ordered the cage.”
Eden didn’t want to see him cry. One of them sporadically weeping was enough. Why? Because that would make him likeable, understandable. Because it would make this conversation real.
“So, did you buy that off the rack?” she asked.
He looked up and smirked, his eyes shining but not leaking. “It’s built for large animals. Lions, tigers—”
“And bears.”
“Oh, my.” His smile was infectious. So they stood there, grinning at each other, ignoring the fact that neither of them would ever have a normal life again. That both of them were monsters.
“I can’t imagine you watching that movie,” Eden said.
He cocked his head to the side. “I have other interests, Eden.”
“You mean, other than pissing me off and being a total jerk?”
“Well, those seem to be my favorites. But, yes, I do have other hobbies.”
She glanced away, and her gaze fell onto the table where he’d put the vial and where Jolie had placed a syringe last night. Her grin disappeared. “I’m not using that.”
“Then you need to stay here. Or, if that is . . . undesirable to you, at least make sure Carter knows what’s at stake and stops taking whatever he’s on that makes him unable to wake up when you change. Or he’ll be the only one who ever sleeps again.”
“Oh my God, Carter!” She jumped up. “He must be freaking out right now. I promised I’d come home.”
Mitch‘s lips tightened. “Poor guy. He must have had a horrible evening.”
She glared at him. “Leave him alone. None of this is his fault. He’s been nothing but good to me.”
“There’s that word again—good. He’s good. You’re good. Aren’t we all just . . . good.”
“Not all of us.”
He smirked. “Touché. Well, you’d better hurry home and tell all the good-fucking-news to your good-fucking-man. Oops, make that your good-not-fucking man,” he said, sneering.
“You’ve got the jerk-thing down pat, you know that?”
“Thank you. You might try it yourself—it would make you a little more interesting.”
“Wow. Thanks for all the support and kindness you’ve shown me. But I think I’ve had quite enough of it.”
“Then my work here is done.” He bowed deeply. “You do know the way out, don’t you?” The understanding was gone from his eyes, the kindness. He was a shell. A full-time bastard again. Dumping a bit of his anger out to keep Hyde from appearing. Eden accepted it, not wanting to experience Hyde’s wrath ever again.
“What is the Clinic, Mitch?”
He blinked. “What did you say?”
“The Clinic. What is it?”
“I have no idea. Where did you hear that?”
“Hyde mentioned it. Right before he told me how attractive I was, and how he’d like to see if I was just as attractive without my skin.”
Mitch shivered and then his shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry, Eden. I’m sorry I even showed him to you.” When he met her gaze, his face was tight, controlled. He was so adept at putting distance between them. “It won’t happen again.”
“All of us hate to be caged, Mitch. For Hyde, and maybe Chastity, it’s necessary. But for the rest of us, it’s a choice.” Eden stalked out, wondering which choice she was making.
CHAPTER XXIV
Eden ran over the front lawn, but what she saw waiting just outside of Mitch’s property made her slam on the brakes and skid to a stop. Carter was sitting in his car, tapping his hand on the steering wheel, glaring at her.
She walked sheepishly to the passenger side and slid in. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“Have you been here a while?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You said that already.”
“And I meant it. Both times. I should’ve at least called, I was just . . .”
His hand hit the steering wheel. “You were just what, Eden? Too busy? Too exhausted? Too naked? What?”
She’d pushed herself closer to the door with every accusation. The first two were true, but the last? It hurt just to think he’d believe that of her. Though she knew full-well that only a few days ago, she and Mitch hadn’t been far from what Carter was insinuating. If he hadn’t stopped. If her eyes hadn’t— “I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that!”
“I wasn’t— We didn’t do anything, Carter. I swear.”
“So what the hell did you do all night? Play cards? Do each other’s toenails? Cuz, let me tell you, babe, I have a really hard time believing that dear, ole Mitch likes making s’mores.”
She wished she’d taken a moment before darting off to think about which parts of the night she could tell him. Not that she’d imagined him staking out the house, of course. But Mitch hadn’t told Jolie about Chastity, and she was thankful. So was it fair for her to tell Carter about Hyde? Was that her ‘tale to tell’?
“I talked to Jolie for a while. She was there all night, too.” She swallowed, hoping he wouldn’t ask her a question she’d have to lie to him about, knowing he would.
He stared at the steering wheel. “Did she give you some answers?”
“Yes, some.” She knew he wanted more from her, but dreaded going too far.
“Some. But not enough.” He shook his head and traced the Jeep emblem with a shaking finger. “Did you talk to Mitch too?”
“This morning, yes. But Mitch wasn’t there last night. He left a few hours after you did and came back early this morning.” Technically, that was true—Mitch had stepped out of his mind for the evening and left his body for Hyde to inhabit. But technicalities weren’t what Carter deserved. “Can we go home now? I’m tired.”
He didn’t turn on the car. “Why am I forced to drag this out of you? What aren’t you telling me?”
“Nothing.” The word stuck in her throat. The first outright lie she’d ever told him. “We talked about Chastity. What she’s like, when she appears. There’s a rough pattern, you know, every four days.”
He studied her face, his eyes darting to her eyes, then her lips, then her body. “That’s all that happened? All night?”
“Yes. That’s it.” The lie felt like a dry-swallowed pill, a rock she struggled to swallow, slowly moving down her throat. And even though she could keep it down, she couldn’t stomach it. “Really.” She wished he’d stop looking at her like that, as if he could
see the lies pouring out of her mouth.
He started the engine. “So what now?”
Eden forced herself to smile. Move on. Pretend everything is okay. “We go home, I take a nap, you make me breakfast, and then we mark every fourth day on the calendar.”
“Not until you take that damned dress off and burn it.”