spotty as someone grabbed me, dragging me off the path. I floated between bumping across the uneven terrain to sinking inside of myself. There, the monster dove beneath the surface of the well, and when I fell into myself again, it shot into the air. As it flew towards me with its arm outstretched and its eyes gleaming, I reached down.
Everything faded away, leaving pure nothingness.
My heart beat faster. Wait. Do I have a heart?
The searing slice of my flesh greeted me as the monster appeared again. Its claws sank into the scars on my forearm.
I became lost to the blackness once again.
When I came to, my body still bounced, and someone's fingers dug into my leg with bruising intensity. My chin smacked the ground, clicking my teeth together, and my skin itched to the point of burning. I felt as though I were expanding, and my outside couldn't accommodate my insides.
Whispered curses pulled my attention from everything happening within me. Shadow's cool aura no longer rested on me, and when I looked over my shoulder, I knew exactly where she went. I love that weird bat-cat-rat creature.
The cloaked figure slapped at his leg and hissed. Taking advantage of his distraction, I flipped myself over, ripping my foot away from his grasp. With my monster lending me its strength, I jumped up and launched myself at my attacker.
We collided and flew across the lawn, ending with the stranger on his back and me lying atop him. Before he could move, I thrust my hands into his hood and slapped them across his cheeks.
I switched on my Harvesting ability and dove into his memories. Frozen as I rifled through his brain, the Reaper beneath me could do nothing until I released him.
His binal didn't seem out of the ordinary—at least, not until he followed me from the palace. So, I flipped back. There I encountered a letter of sorts that detailed where I would be and when I would be there. It didn't mention what they wanted him to do to me, though, which I found rather odd.
There must have been a meeting or another message.
A growl rumbled through my thoughts, startling me, and nearly making me pull away from my subject. It added one word—more.
“Hey, are you okay?” an unfamiliar voice called out.
I had to hurry before others came because I doubted that I would ever see the Reaper again.
The next few moments were messy as I trashed his memories of the binal and the one prior. Each snippet that didn't apply to me was destroyed quickly. Until I reached a section that seemed odd.
Memories are funny things. They're typically hyper-focused, and the further one goes back, the fuzzier they become. What is chosen to go into our long-term memory banks isn't necessarily important, and it's often missing chunks.
But what I found in him was something I'd only seen a handful of times before. Rather than the natural, diffuse edges, some of his memory blocks had hard stops as though someone took a knife and cut them away. Still, I kept looking.
“Hey, what happened? Are you all right?” A hand shook me, and I sped up. “What are you doing? Are you—”
They didn't bother finishing their question. Instead, they yanked, and I relaxed my hold on my assailant's face. My body rolled to the left, and I laid beside him, my chest heaving, and my eyes closed as I struggled with an urge to keep shredding his mind. Faintly, I heard my rescuer gasp.
“You're bleeding. What happened?”
I cracked an eye open and peered up. A female Reaper loomed over me. She seemed to work at the Housing Office, judging by the cut of her cloak. Nothing else stood out, and she looked unfamiliar. Still, the craving to taste her fear rose unbidden, and I clamped my eyes shut once again.
When I didn't answer her, she stammered out something about getting help and ran off.
The temptation to connect with my attacker again slithered through me, and my hand crept across the ground as it searched for his.
Shadow broke into my mind, slamming me with worry and screeches of frustration. With her infiltration, she sent rapid spurts of images, most of them showing the past few moments when she'd been blocked from entering.
As Shadow's influence bloomed and grew, the monster released me and sank back into its well, unsatisfied. Because its meal had remained locked in my hold during the Harvesting, he only provided it with a hint of fear before I