(FREE TO READ) Bad Moon

chapter 56; Jaylin

"'Don't go in'," Tisper mocked in a less-than-Quentin kind of voice. Her heart hurt watching Jaylin, watching him grimace, watching him bite his tongue to swallow the sound of pain. "How can he think I would just sit here?"

She stepped forward to the door of the cell and felt the rusted metal under her fingers. Jaylin wasn't dangerous. Jaylin could never be dangerous. Maybe it was stupid of her—no, definitely it was stupid of her, but the only person who'd ever truly accepted her for who she was laid inside that cage now, curled up in agony. She couldn't let him do this alone. She twisted the key through the lock and gave the door a pull, ensuring it stayed open on it's own.

By the time she reached Jaylin, she could hear his strenuous breath—each a sharper wheeze than the next, each exhale endlessly deep, not like any sound she'd ever heard from him before. There was a voice in his breath—a feral rumbling, like the abysmal sigh of a wounded lion.

She knelt, slid an arm beneath his neck and one around his ribs and pulled the weight of his head onto her lap and Jaylin laid there, staring up beyond tears and the strange reflective cataracts of his right eye.

"I'm scared," he confessed, but his words were only shambles between tears.

It broke her heart to see him cry. It always had, it always would.

Tisper ran her fingers through his hair and tried to smile, though she felt like crying too. "You've been through worse." She swept away the cool tears on his cheek. "Remember ninth grade? The Freshman hunt? I thought those things only happened in movies, but the seniors chased us down with paintball guns—had us cornered back behind the old bowling alley and you refused to hide like the rest of us so they shot you at point-blank range?"

Jaylin laughed and another tear fell. "I cried as soon as they left."

"You wailed like a baby," Tisper smirked. "But only after you'd proven your point. And if you hadn't done it, we would have all been pelted. And what about Greg Mastenson? Remember how he knocked you out cold in the Starbucks parking lot because you made out with his girlfriend that summer? I had no idea a boy who whipped frappuccinos for a living could hit that hard. You kind of deserved it for what you said to him."

Jaylin laughed again—but sucked his breath in from the pain of it. "You're just pointing out all of the times I've gotten my ass kicked."

"But that's just it, Jaylin." She wiped back the sweat on his forehead and tried not to think twice about the skin underneath. How it didn't feel like skin at all, but gritty like wet stone. "You're a fighter. You always have been. Nothing's changed, Jay. The only difference is that you're facing a bigger bully now than you've ever faced before."

"What if I hurt someone, Tisper?"

"You could never hurt anyone, Jaylin. The thing in you—it might want to hurt people. But it's not you. It's a bully. It's just another bully, okay?"

Just then, Jaylin's eyes went still—frighteningly still. Blood upsurged from his mouth and he choked, let it spill down his chin, pool in his ears. Tisper felt it hot on her lap and fear struck her like it never had before. It hit her like a hammer to glass. One strike and everything shattered. Every security, every pep-talk she'd given herself about this night. It was like the ground fell out from under her.

"Jaylin!" she panicked, holding his face in her hands. "Jaylin!"

"Get out," he growled in that voice again, wet and gargled with blood.

"What? No—"

"Get out!"

And then he started to shake—shivers at first, and then the blood came again, welled in his mouth. And the shivers turned to shakes, and then trembles.