They’ve poisoned me and beaten me down with words and lies. Maybe they’re monsters too, and not because of the powers inside them.
Maybe I’d be right to destroy them.
Shut up!
I just have to get away, far away, and then…
And then what’s left? My whole life has been them, us.
We are blood.
If we aren’t, if I’m nothing to them, if everything I thought we had has been washed away, how can I be anything other than a monster?
My legs pump; my feet pound against the uneven ground. A different sound emerges from up ahead: the rumble of an engine.
The train’s lights flash between the trees. It’s whipping toward me, just seconds away.
Tears blur my sight, and still the hunger inside me to deal out a deluge of pain screams on and on. It won’t let me go either.
Not while I’m still alive.
I don’t think. My body swerves of its own accord, closer to the tracks. To the one simple solution that could kill both the monster and my own agony.
It’s gravel rattling under my feet now. The train roars toward me with a blare of its horn.
I fling myself onward to meet it, and one final cry penetrates the anguished haze in my head.
“Wildcat,no!”
Jacob’s voice. Jacob’s old nickname for me, that he hasn’t used once since I found him again.
It hits me like a plea echoing up from the past, yanking me back to where I always thought I was meant to be.
What the hell am I doing?
I wrench myself to the side, but it’s a little too late.
The full force of the speeding train catches the side of my body. It whips me around, knocking my arm out of its socket, shattering my ribs.
Pain blazes through every particle of my being as I crash into the grass beyond the shoulder. Then my mind fizzles out.
Twenty-Nine
Dominic
Riva looks so fragile with her small frame silhouetted by the train’s headlights. I was worried before, but the image sends a bolt of pure terror through me.
She wouldn’t really— She doesn’t mean to—
Even as my mind makes its silent protests, I push my legs forward even faster, or at least I try to. My balance wavers on the uneven ground.
The others have all pulled ahead of me, but they’re still not close enough. My arm shoots out as if I can grab her across that distance and wrench her to safety.
Jacob’s voice rings through the night, raw and frantic. “Wildcat,no!”
At his shout, Riva appears to swing in the opposite direction. But before even a wisp of hope can rise up inside me, the side of the onrushing locomotive slams into her.
She spins into the air with a spurt of liquid blood and smoke that shocks a cry from my throat. The mutilated form that falls to the ground near a cluster of saplings barely looks human, let alone like our Riva.