Changing You ✦ The Sequel

Chapter 50 {Z}

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It was dark outside. And it rained. Hard.

I knew because the raindrops landed right before my feet, sometimes even spatting onto my shoes, their noses lined up with the door opening. Barely inches from the outside world.

I knew the late October breeze that constantly nipped at my forearms wasn't the reason for my trembling skin, even though it could had been highly possible. It wasn't the dark, midnight cold creeping inside through the widely opened door that left me shivering; it were the clouds looming in my head, casting shadows across my memories deeper than the charcoal night sky outside.

I didn't know when Warner had left. I didn't know for how long I was alone.

But I was alone. Sitting on a chair. Without restrains. The door of the shed opened at its fullest, and it couldn't had mocked me harder. My escape was right there, in front of my face, and there was nothing holding me back. There was no one standing in my way, and yet something had never felt so far out of my reach.

I couldn't move.

It felt like fighting gravity, urging myself to move a muscle, and maybe that was why I was trembling so hard. I could try as much as I wanted but my limbs stayed glued to the chair, held fast by some invisible force telling them to stay there. I couldn't lift a finger, let alone get up and run.

I wanted to run.

Harder than I ever had from the faces swimming before my eyes. The ones that he made me remember.

His words still bounced off the walls, howled on the wind that swirled around my ears, the echoes sharp and hollow in my head.

"You said you remembered all of them. Every person you killed, everyone you hurt. Every person that's dead, that lost someone, that is in pain, because of you. Prove it. Say their names. Picture their faces. I don't care how long it takes."

I would had chosen any kind of torture, any kind of pain, anything but this.

No one even stayed around to watch, or to laugh at me. Not even Warner, even though I felt his presence, heavy and cold in my head, spreading like a disease. They didn't do this for themselves. This was my pain. And they left me to endure it alone.

Warner hadn't been specific, and my mind wasn't specific in remembering them. It variated between anyone: from a classmate I had made fun of a little too much, or a girl I had once stood up on. To a trigger I pulled. All I knew was that, the more people I kept naming, the harder it got.

It wasn't Warner digging up their faces, to force the long forgotten image back into my head. Their faces followed automatically, with maybe a second delay, and they got so sharply into focus that the image burned behind my eyes, never actually having left.

"Brett Talbot," I gasped, feeling my throat clench shut with every second I remained silent. Another name of many. I had lost count by then.

The guy that appeared before my eyes wasn't much older than me. His dark brown hair fell across his forehead but wasn't long enough to hide his pale blue, glazed orbs. Their stare was empty, colder than his unmoving body.

A born werewolf, from Beacon Hills. Not too long after I moved here.

No different from Riley, is he? What makes her worth saving, why was no one else that lucky?