Her head was between my hands… I longed to pull her closer, to bite into her aura and suck the life force out of her. Or break her neck, at least. But every house had security cameras watching. After all, it is an influential suburban area where it’s unwise to cause a commotion. Even for us. The clean-up is cumbersome, the Alliance has to deploy and mobilise agents – it’s just not worth it. And I wouldn’t have been paid, in fact…
Yet I still almost did it.
Helpless anger tightens my gums, my temples. Everything that makes me human wants to burst… To kill… To rage.
I accelerate. Going from the outer lane to the inner, then back to the outer. Cars, buses, trucks fall behind me. The speedometer reaches 240. But it’s not enough. Nothing is enough…
As long as she lives.
With my nose on her face. Like a grotesque reflection, and I have to strike the surface of the water to make it disappear.
And it will.
Tomorrow.
I could have done it today… When I gave up her glasses, the lenses were covered in fog. I could have taken her anywhere and she wouldn’t have even noticed. I should have thought of it…
How could I be so upset and distracted?
I wanted to change before the trip so that the leather outfit would hide me from the prying eyes of Jev’s fans. Instead, here I am, speeding down the highway in the same pants and jacket I met her in, waiting for the driving wind to rip that memory out of me. But the more I long to forget, the more the whole afternoon burns in my mind. Her smile, her feet under the table, her nose…
260.
All around me the deserts rise into mountains, a pink twilight descends on the landscape. The sky is the same colour as her aura…
Hate thunders with ceaseless fury beneath my skin. I haven’t felt anything like this in years. What has changed?
She’s just a target.
Do you also have a brother or sister?
Sibling, family… Alden has never experienced anything like it, and neither have I. In the elven society where I spent my teenage years, family as a social phenomenon didn’t exist. There, any emotional bond between the sexes was punished by death, and the only time males slept with females was at the behest of a woman. Boys were raised in a state institution almost from the day they were born. Only the code on their necks indicates the blood bond. This does not preclude sexual contact, but only the conception of a common offspring, due to deformities and diseases caused by similar genes.
I didn’t even think about it at the time, but now… How can they be attracted to someone who looks at them with their eyes, kisses them with the same lips, surrounds them with their own aura?
All that sexual energy in Talia, deeply repressed…
It sends shivers down my spine.
And I was afraid that after the bike ride, she’d never want to see me again and I’d lose my chance to kill her.
Next time, let’s make it fifteen.
I clench my partially transformed teeth.
Tomorrow. Same place, same time.