But then Stiles was in front of me, blocking my path. “Motley, you need to come with me.”
I screeched to a stop, shaking my head wildly. “No.”
“You really don’t want to fight this,” Stiles said, not reaching forward to grab me.
I just needed to get away. To flee. To hide. It was like the walls were closing in on me, and Stiles’s pinning stare felt like chains.
The room was suddenly too hot, my racing breath too labored. The crows were shrieking too loudly, and there were too many moving parts. The demon thing inside of me was rising up, pushing against my skin, the feeling terrifyingly foreign and too powerful to contain. I looked down at my shaking hands and saw strings stuck to my palms.
“What?” I muttered to myself.
I tried to wipe them off, but more came back. Confused, I lifted a hand up in front of my face, zeroing in on a single silky strand at my index finger that looked like a splinter imbedded into my skin. I tugged at it, and my eyes widened when the string lengthened, feeding out from my fingertip in a never-ending spool. They weren’t strings. They were...webs. And I was making them.
“What’s happening to me?” I whispered.
I was too caught up in the fact that webs were falling from my fingers to notice the Spector guards rushing forward. Two of them came up behind me, lifting me away from Stiles’s grasp. “No!” I screamed, flailing and kicking as I was held in the air and led toward the portal. “No, you can’t take me! Don’t let them take me, Stiles!” I cried, but he just watched them drag me away.
I opened my mouth to scream some more, my fangs descending all the way down, but a hand suddenly slammed over my mouth, and then a voice was in my ear.
“Go to sleep, bitch.”
The world went black.
Chapter 4
Hunger.
That was my new reality.
I was something...else now. Something I didn’t fully understand. All I knew was the consuming hunger taking over my soul.
Aunt Marie once told me that the frenzy she felt during a bloodlust episode wasn’t true hunger. It was an uncontrollable craving, and that craving was driven by the fear of starving—the fear of never feeling satisfied.
Fear. That’s what spurred her uncontrollable bloodlust episodes. That’s what made her slip away from reality and fall into an animalistic frenzy.
And for once in my life, I understood.
This craving and fear were new emotions for me, but they crept up my spine with every passing moment. Every step closer I got to death, the more my fear muddled my morals, and the more the craving took over.
When I’d first gotten to Spector, I cried. I wasn’t a crier. I didn’t ever drown in my own salty misery. But I couldn’t stop the tears that came. I was drowsy and confused. Weak and utterly unlike myself. Trapped. Scared. And then the paranoia kicked in. I had no way out. No way of knowing what they’d do to me. No way of knowing what the demon would do.
I’d never felt so lonely in my life. I cried for help, for my aunt, Stiles, the devil—didn’t matter. I just wanted someone to come.
And somewhere between the lonely silence of fear and craving, I lost myself.
I didn’t know who I was.
I wasn’t just Motley Coven anymore. No longer was I a simple Thibault student. I had two beings warring inside of me—my own soul and that of the demon.
I felt the spider burrowed down in the pit of my spirit. It moved and watched—a foreign sensation that was so strange the hairs on the back of my neck would stand straight up whenever she made her presence known.
I always thought of myself as astute and resourceful before, but now, I could barely form coherent thoughts. I was overridden with the spider’s occupancy, and we were both overridden with insatiable hunger.
The dozens of blood bags at my feet were completely drained. My stomach sloshed from all the attempts at nourishment, reminding me that I’d had more than enough, making me question why the hell I was still starving.
And I was starving. It was a slow progression, hollowing me from the inside out with the idea of food while filling me with empty solutions because nothing worked.
Not food, not blood, not water, or pills. I was dying from starvation, and I had no idea what my body needed to stop it. And from the looks of things, neither did Spector, because they kept throwing blood and food at me, but none of it was what I needed.
I rolled around on the floor, pressing my sweaty face against the grooves in the cold concrete while willing my webs to appear at my fingertips. The strange ability had stopped days ago—or maybe it was weeks. I wasn’t sure. Time was just a passing concept that left me behind.
I knew the demon inside of me was dying. My lack of webs was proof enough of that, and her devious presence had burrowed down deeper inside of me. I also knew with complete certainty that I was dying right alongside her. If this hunger wasn’t satisfied soon, we’d shrivel up and cease to exist. Twin corpses held in one tomb.
The trap door to my small cell slid open, and another platter of blood and food was shoved at me with a single command:
Eat.
I opened my mouth to tell them that wasn’t what I needed, but I stopped myself. They wouldn’t listen, and I didn’t know what I did need, so what was the point?
The worst thing about all of this was that a part of me welcomed death. If
