Damsel[ed]: Rescue Required (#3 of the Damsel[ed] Series)

Chapter Twenty-Four: Threats and All

"Angelos? Bud? Good news."

My hands are dashed with small, shallow cuts. I'm lying on the couch with my face pushed into the pillows. My breath is gasping and a new bruise wells up under my eye. Blue or black, I'm at least partially sure. When I try to speak, my tongue is heavy and suckers to the roof of my mouth. "Hrrm?"

"Aaron texted me. The cast lists are up."

"Ugh." I chew my lip, playing broken skin between my teeth. I'm less speaking and more whistling, attention drawn to a creaking forearm under armored hands, numbing. "G-great."

Someone is stroking my hair. The fragrance of vanilla lingers in the air, pulled in with my every gasping breath. "He's gone," she says against my skin. Her breath is a warm puff on my cheekbone. "You didn't hurt anyone. You're okay, hon."

Somewhere, Jaylin grunts. I squeeze my eyes shut, thinking only of the blackness that overtook me, the sound of my aura's thoughts. Darkness strung into poetic cadences, the rush of strange emotions. Kill. Reign. My own panicked shouts of equations and multiplication tables in a quickly smothered attempt to push him out. How I held my eyes shut and pressed my face into the crook of my elbow so he couldn't hurt my brother. And how, seconds later, I lost control. My thoughts, whisked to some dark, hidden place as his raced, loud and pounding.

Brains are gray globs of slimy meat. They shouldn't break.  "Why is this happening to me?" I say. "What did I do to deserve this?"

Fear rattles inside me. My breathing is still quick, and the sounds leaking from my mouth are soft and squeaky.

"You want to guess who's Romeo?" Gats asks, but I'm not listening. I'm trying to still my shaking. To breathe again.

Jaylin grabbed me by a fist full of shirt and pushed my face into the cushions. I don't remember what I said to her. All I remember was fear, Luce's and mine, and how I so vividly thought of her cackling laughter, her ropes around my wrists, her strips of tape on my face. I must've hit her, because under the sweet vanilla of Heaven's perfume, I can still smell blood. I must've hit her because she dug her nails into the back of my neck and pressed my face so deeply into the couch, I stopped breathing. You ever been smothered by a cushion? Your lungs wheezing desperately for air, big black spots welling up in front of your eyes? Words become gasps. Thoughts become screams. You flounder and cry as you drown in a room full of air. And then? Then, there's only darkness.

And it sucks. 

"You." Gatsby's claws tap gently on the crown of my skull, sheathing and unsheathing, so I feel the cool talons and then the hollows of his fingertips. His voice is a happy croon, gentle and quiet. "You're going to be a lead."

"Oh," I murmur through a clumsy tongue. Heaven releases my arm, leaving the bone creaking under slashed skin. I don't remember her coming. Just the searing wounds on my hands and her ever-tightening grip on my arms. I turn over, blinking up at my friends. Heaven, with the visor of her mother's armor slid up. Her eyes fluttering, then falling tacitly shut again, shoulders slumped. Soot stains her armor. Gatsby, blue eyes big and round, smiling sympathetically. He touches me again, and I only glimpse Jaylin by a locke of black hair and an ice pack over her eyes. I bolt upright, and pain uncoils deep in my chest cavity. My hands grope at the arms of the couch. My brains ooze and ache behind eyes I blink, once, twice, but my eyes still seer behind burning eyelids. I'm a lead. Freaking-whip-ee. I mean, yeah. I wanted a role. And it aches, that something I cared about has, suddenly, become nothing at all.

He says, "I'm your understudy." A smile creeps across his face, and his eyes, which I'm used to seeing perpetually rounded, have fallen back to their normal width. With his cheeks flushed bright and that small smile lingering on his smug face, I'd almost say he looks happy. Makes me sit up a little more, though my ribs sear. For weeks now, I don't think 'happy' and 'Gatsby' fit in the same sentence.