“Coming, little monster,” I whisper into the wind as my body begins moving.
Chapter 45
DAMIEN
“But then you killed Theon before the sacrifice could happen. He didn’t have the appropriate sacrifice to appease the blood magic,” Talbot goes on, almost as though he’s reciting this information. “Jack was born to Dr. Harvey Jackal. Shortly after, the tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde started circulating. Hyde isn’t truly dangerous until it learns its name, because that’s when the memories slowly start returning. It drives the host mad, especially when Hyde starts showing the conscious mind all the ways it has tried to make the host’s ‘dreams’ come true. Most of these humans were far too pure to make peace with the darkest wishes they have becoming a reality at their hand. Nor can they make peace with a monster living inside them.”
“Theon’s altar didn’t work. It couldn’t have. It cracked. If it cracks, it means the spell didn’t take,” I argue, remembering that much from our own past.
All that other shit sounds like an entirely new world of problems that I’m most certainly not in the mood to face.
“It worked well enough. Hyde’s like the bloody errant, malfunctioning Jack-in-the-Box that people unknowingly wind up every time they go seeking immortality. It pops out like the devious, deranged spirit it is, and it leeches onto the first host it likes. When Vance killed ‘Jack,’ Hyde skipped into the ghost plane and stalked its next opportunity with an unnerving amount of calculated patience. It hates the box. It’s a terribly tenacious, impatient, and competitive monster,” Talbot continues. “Violet was both perfect and all wrong for it—a constant, cosmic coin toss. But I’d tried everything else, so I figured, why the hell not? Then I got drunk for a while. End of story.”
He throws his hands up like he’s exhausted and tired of all my questions.
This is the worst beta I’ve ever had.
“And you don’t know if Violet can kill Idun without destroying half the town in the process? Also, let’s be outrageously open-minded and say you’re right and Hyde is a match for Idun’s monster…will Violet be able to push Hyde back after a fight of this magnitude?” I ask him.
I don’t like the way he shuts down all his expressions. It makes it too obvious that he doesn’t want to give anything away. He’s too suspicious as it bloody is.
“I’m afraid I have no personal attachment to these people or this place. There is no box anymore. That mark latched onto me in the dead of night, during one of the rare occasions I managed to sleep.”
His hand makes a seemingly unconscious move to rub the spot over his chest.
“What I’m telling you is that I’m here to handle Hyde.”
That doesn’t really answer my question.
I scrub a hand through my hair, glaring over at him, while ignoring my vibrating phone.
“My monster stayed in control of me for the first half of a century after that first battle,” I tell him, giving him a dead stare.
I try not to revisit the early days of immortality, because I was barely a passenger in my mind during those days.
“A weak-blooded Portocale fell in love with an old-blood Neopry Simpleton descendent, giving life to a girl who struggles to stay angry, in a world that never stops being angry, and she became the most powerful monster of them all,” he says very coldly. “A misfit monster found a misfit girl, who could make the monster immortal at last.”
He really does like pausing. I’m starting to notice his annoying tendency to constantly fuel the drama of a situation that is far too tense already.
“I feel like Violet was handpicked by the universe to right a wrong, and with a century of training, she may have been able to pull it off. But not this soon. Not this young. Not this new.”
“Stop leading me to the answer and just shoot it to me straight,” I demand with fraying patience.
“Long after a botched immortality ceremony, a cosmic storm rained across a full nation on the night of a full moon. A Portocale was struck dead. An immortal Portocale gypsy hopped to this dead body, after said immortal gypsy cheated her usual lengthy departure. And somewhere mixed in with all that, the babe survived even after the womb around her died.”
I say nothing, and simply stare at him, waiting for him to hurry this along.
“The Simpleton’s tainted their hope for the first time since eternity started for them,” he tells me. “Yet another cosmic storm, caused by an unnatural child’s birth. The girl was always going to be a monster. Her natural monster would have been useless, and as the first of its kind, would have been ripped apart by the devious, powerful betas. The monster inside her now is about to rule the world with uncontested power.”
He’s done all he can to freak me the fuck out and confuse the shit out of me at the same time, since it all sounds like make-believe. However, he’s yet to answer my question.
“None of this makes sense. Not for the first time, I bloody sympathize with how hard this must have been for Violet when she first landed into a world she knew nothing about,” I decide aloud.
“If I ever find that rabbit hole, my parents will just have to be happy for me and miss me while I’m gone. It’s possible I may never find my way back, if it turns out to be where I belong. But the place the book explains is too similar to the home in my head. Or maybe it’s a heaven I’ll never see, since heaven is only for the dead,” Talbot says, reading from a journal of some sort.
“Could you do something productive?!”
“This is from Violet’s fourteen-year-old journal,” he says, as though he believes he’s explaining something. “It’s what she wrote after reading Alice in Wonderland, and apparently she was the dark, brooding, rhyming type of teenager, who suspected she’d never die, even as she protested the possibility of immortality.”
The sirens that have been wailing in the distance finally come to an end. The fresh and abrupt silence seems to interrupt his thorough analysis of Violet, which is honestly making me want to rip his head off just for knowing so much more about her.
Straining my hearing, I spot a familiar whisper in the wind several miles away.
“The vampire is moving fast,” I say, even as I remain distracted, trying to figure out where it is he’s heading. “He may know where she is.”
I turn and leave Talbot behind, feeling my phone vibrate with a reminder of a text.
Lifting my phone, while darting a look up here and there to dodge inanimate objects, I quickly skim the contents of a text from Vance.
VANCE: Stay on Violet. She’s somewhere in the direction of the old field.
I really should check my messages more promptly. Fucking hell.
Talbot surprisingly catches up, which actually pisses me off. I’ll blame it on the fact I’m famished.
“Violet has a weakness to my pheromones that she doesn’t experience with any other I’ve noticed so far,” I cut in, my feet moving like feathers, barely touching the ground, as I follow the whispered whistle of the vampire’s wake.
“That’s because I forgot you,” Talbot confesses. “When I created Hyde’s defenses, I remembered every Morpheous, including the infamous Dorian Gray. But I forgot you.”