Things That Should Stay Buried - Casey L. Bond Page 0,34
stars as intensely as I needed the air in my lungs. To see them. To watch them slowly wheel across the night sky.
Footsteps came from the narrow staircase and Aries appeared in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. “I didn’t show you what happened with the man. Do you still want to see it?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to see or experience it, but I needed to know why he did it, and I wasn’t sure words could explain in the same way his visions could.
If I was going to support Aries and trust him to keep me alive, I needed to see the good in him. Part of me wanted to know he wasn’t entirely a monster. “I’d like to know.”
“It won’t be easy to watch,” he warned, quietly approaching.
I watched the fluid way he moved. He clutched my face the way Kes did when he healed me of a migraine, but Aries didn’t feel like Kes. His fingers were longer, the claws gently raking my skin and making a shiver crawl up my spine.
Could he feel how nervous he made me? Hear the hitch in my breath? Feel how my heart pounded when he touched me, even innocently?
His face was so youthful, but beneath the smooth surface was something harder. Something that had stood for millennia and never let anything weather it.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
I nodded, unable to form words.
His soft, pink eyes met mine as he brought his forehead down. His skin was cool and smooth, his breath steady and even. I closed my eyes and a vision appeared in my mind.
An elderly Asian man held the arms of a middle-aged man behind his back. The one in custody thrashed, trying to break the older man’s hold. His white shirt was stained with splotches of blood, some of them drying at the edges, the stains setting in, and had eyes as hard as flint. His stringy, long hair hung in lifeless, greasy strands over his shoulders. His belt and jeans were undone.
Someone was crying in the corner of the room.
A girl was huddled there. Blood trickled from her bottom lip, one side of which was swollen. Her eyes were red from crying. Her shirt was torn, and she grasped at the edges to hold it closed. She was around my age. Her eyes were dark brown and wide, where mine were blue. Her face was square shaped, where mine formed a heart, but our hair… our hair was exactly the same.
The same length. The same texture. The same natural mixture of light brown and blonde.
I felt it the moment Aries saw her, the fear that coursed through him. The adrenaline and rage. The power.
“Did he hurt you?” he asked.
The girl shook her head rapidly. “He tried, before that man stopped him.” She looked gratefully at the elderly man still holding the one who assaulted her.
Aries glanced at his Guardian and nodded in recognition of a job well done. Then he turned to the disgusting piece of trash his Guardian held. Blurred thoughts raced through Aries’s mind; when he looked at her, he saw me. The man hurt the young woman. Maybe the assault was thwarted, but she was emotionally injured all the same. Aries was enraged that the man could have hurt me just as easily. He was consumed by the belief that the man didn’t deserve a chance to do it to someone else.
He should burn. Beg. Die.
His thoughts grew red around the edges. He wanted blood. Payment for what he’d done or was about to do. Retribution. Justice.
To prevent any further crimes he might commit; to stop thinking about the man hunting me, trapping me, hurting me; to stop imagining his hands in my hair. On my skin. His rancid breath mixing with my sweet scent…
Almost faster than I could see, Aries threaded his claws into the man’s hair and with one swift tug, an almost effortless move, tore his head off.
I felt his panic, his instant worry for how I would react to what he’d done, followed by a different kind of worry that I’d been harmed because he left me unattended. When he saw me still waiting on the platform, I sensed his relief. I felt the tension fade as he sagged from the turmoil of the experience.
When he pulled away, I was holding onto his wrists. He took his forehead off mine, but only by inches. His eyes locked on my hands clamped onto his skin. “I’m sorry,” I said quietly,