Blood

On the whole, I’m more human than faerie, as I’ve mentioned numerous times. But there’s an exception, every so often. Some days, I think I’m barely human. What scares me about those days is the fact that I just wake up that way, nothing specifically magical has to happen. I don’t need to be around any amount of blood, I just need to be alive.

I know the second my eyes open that today is one of those days.

First is hunger. Hunger, as in a need to eat, which would normally be…normal, but I’m not hungry for typical, cooked human food. No, the only thing on my mind is raw meat, steak, mostly. Red, bloody and beautifully undercooked.

And, being unable to really control myself and say NO like the still rather human part of me wants to, I get up and leave my room, having slept in my clothes.

To the human side of my mind’s relief, Justin had been somewhere with Cynthia last night, and hadn’t come home, meaning he isn’t here to be potentially attacked or something of the sort by ‘me’.

In the kitchen, I tear open the fridge door without finding any meat. I cross the grey room to the big freezer, but it’s padlocked, and I don’t have the key.

Dad first put a padlock on the freezer when I was five. He’d found me sitting on the kitchen floor, my hands and faced covered in frozen gore, trying to gnaw the meat from some ribs.My father had not been impressed, but then again, it wasn’t really my fault that he had a half-child. Well, I guess he still does. I don’t think I want to consider myself a half-man, that sounds a bit lack wit.

In a fit of fury, not matching how I’m feeling inside my head, I punch the freezer, which I had expected would hurt, but doesn’t. Instead, it dents the freezer’s lid.

I storm across the kitchen to the drawer with all the cutlery, yanking it open so violently that the handle comes loose on one side. Grabbing one of the better knives from the drawer, I cross the kitchen again and drive it at the padlock’s arm, splintering the knife in a huge clanging noise.

It still doesn’t hurt when the little steel splinters dig into my arm.

“Mallory! What in hell are you doing?” my father calls from upstairs.

I sneer, although I don’t tell my face to. I haven’t told my body to do anything it’s done after waking up. “Nothing!” I snarl back.

I hear the stairs creak, probably because my father is heading down them.

“I’m fine!” Not-Mallory yells, angrily.

I think that’s the best way to describe my body when I get like this. I can think and see exactly what I’m doing, and how everything around me reacts, but I lack the ability to change what my body does. It’s like I become that nasty little voice in the back of my mind. No, that’s exactly what happens. I just trade places with the cruelest part of myself. I’ve tried, over and over again to control myself, but I just can’t seem to do it. So when I call myself a weak bastard, I’m being totally honest, and literal.

Not-Mallory looks on the table for another weapon, before we both remember that I’ve got my knife in my back pocket.

“Mallory?” my father asks from behind me.

I spin around.

My father starts when he sees me, which means that my eyes have probably gone black. I can’t feel if my teeth are any different, any more shark-like, than normal, which likely means they aren’t.

Tim moves towards the counter on my right, next to the sink, and grabs something from the top drawer.

He looks at me sadly as he turns, although I can’t tell why.

I also can’t tell if I’m—Not-Me—is getting ready to attack my father or not.

“Mallory, sit in that chair.”

He motions at a chair by the table with his left hand, which has a few zip ties in it. In his right hand is a little plastic spray bottle.

Holy water, I think, grateful for something to at least partially subdue me. Only problem is that it’ll hurt like hell.

Like all faeries, I’m highly allergic to holy water, which is part of why I’m afraid to go into the church, I don’t know if the Christ-mojo in the church will kill me or not, so I just stay clear.

Shut up, human, mutters…myself. I don’t know. Not-Mallory thought it in response to what I thought, like I do when he speaks to me.

My father takes a step forward, and I take a step back, although my hand begins to reach for my knife.

“Sit,” he says.

I don’t, so he sprays some holy water at me.

Each droplet is like a hornet’s sting on my arms and hands, causing pain worse than any other I can think of. I can hear myself screaming, shrill and painful, and I feel myself fall against the table, unable to make my hands close around it to catch myself, which results in my clumsy landing onto the chair my father had pointed at.

My father looks sick, but he still walks around me and double zip ties each of my wrists to the back of the chair. I think I’d been nine when he first used the holy water, then thirteen when he had to start tying me to a chair. Before that, he had just locked me in my room and then the attic, but I had put my fist through my bedroom door, so he had needed to lock me in the attic instead. He had to stop after I’d broken the door three times, breaking the doorframe the last time.

It’s really a wonder that Justin still hasn’t found out. Really, it doesn’t make sense at all.

“Timothy!” I call after my father as he walks away. My voice is still broken and shrill.

“Dad!”

He still ignores Not-Mallory.

“Dad, please,” I beg.

“Please!”

But he’s used to it by now, so he doesn’t look back as he leaves the eternally grey kitchen.

I scream, trying to break the chair it seems. All of our kitchen chairs are made of steel since I’d broken most of the wooden ones we used to have. So instead of breaking the chair, I end up flipping it, resulting in another round of screaming, my throats starting to hurt from it all.

I remember the knife in my back pocket and reach for it, wriggling my wrists to try and gain enough give to reach that far. This doesn’t hurt as much as it should either, maybe because my hands and arms still sting from the holy water.

I spend at least an hour wriggling my hands back and forth and back and forth, chafing them horribly in the process, to have my restraints loose enough to allow me to reach my knife, which I then use to cut the plastic zip ties.

Not-Mallory is thrilled with “our” progress, while I likely couldn’t feel any sicker.

After the hunger comes the bloodlust.

I can feel every muscle in my body ache for a fight, my throat dry with hopeful anticipation and raw from screaming. In this state, I’ve been responsible for the death of a half a dozen squirrels, a handful of birds and a cat. I think I feel the worst about that cat…since I had eaten it. I still can’t help but think of that whenever I see a cat, which is awful. At least I had the grace to throw up after I got back to being myself.

Worse yet, I haven’t heard my father leave yet, meaning I could hurt him. And I really, really don’t want to hurt him. Spirits, I can’t be responsible for hurting my father.

The house is insanely quiet, which makes my bare feet sound like meteors hitting the floor as I stalk around my own house.

I can hear the ceiling squeak above the living room and footsteps that likely go along with it. As quietly as possible, I begin to pass through the living room, towards the stairwell on the opposite side.

Stop, I try to tell my legs, but they won’t listen.

The footsteps above continue moving towards the stairwell, just like I do. Despite my best mental efforts, I’m moving much faster than my father is on the floor above, meaning Not-Me will be able to ambush him.

I’ve crossed the living room and have turned towards the stairwell when my father reaches the top. He had actually been a lot closer to the stairs than I’d been.

A flush of relief floods whatever part of me is still that, me, until I realise that I still have a knife and my father likely doesn’t.

I freeze and watch Tim’s eyes go wide the moment he sees me. “Mallory, how did you…?” he trails off as we both notice that my teeth are changing.

All of the fey have what would be called a glamour. When the faerie is using their glamour, they seem relatively human, depending on the specific being. Some faeries aren’t powerful enough to look like a real adult human while others can stay like that for days or years, especially the skin changers. Without their glamour, they’re hideous, as I am as well.

Unlike most of the fey, my “glamour” is mostly how I normally look without trying, but it is also a bit of a disguise, since I also have what I guess could be called my faerie face. When I get like this, my mouth is full of shark’s teeth, rows upon rows of jagged weapons ready to tear into any flesh I can get to. My eyes also get worse than they normally are, as a human, my eyes look a lot like my mother’s, but as a faerie my eyes are black as pitch, like all of the lesser fey.

“Mallory, don’t.”

But I can’t stop myself from taking a step up the stairs, followed by another, my knife and teeth bared.

My father takes a step backwards at the same time I do, matching my movement as I ascend the stairs and he backs onto the landing.

Please, don’t, I tell Not-Me as he makes the decision to lunge at my father.

My father tenses, likely sensing Not-Me’s plan. “Please, don’t,” he says, repeating my words almost as desperately.

But I lunge forward anyway.

For half a second I’m plunging a knife towards my father, hoping against hope that I suffer an unlikely heart-attack.

Then my father sprays more holy water into my face from the bottle I hadn’t noticed him holding.

I scream, dropping my knife and covering my face with my hands an instant before Tim sprays me again, and then a third time.

In an effort to get away, I backup, tripping and falling back down the stairs. I barely feel my neck break as it hits one of the steps at a bad angle, then my wrist follows.

I convulse on the ground, my entire body on fire. I can’t open my eyes through the pain, nor can I hear anything other than the pulsing pain within my own head. I roll around, trying to get rid of the fire as we’re taught to do, but I can’t. I can’t.

I can’t even scream as the pain continues, my voice burnt away.

Somewhere, behind the corrosive fire and brute pain, I realise that I’m dying.