Year Two: Rebels - Cara Wylde Page 0,5

me and Seth, you would’ve probably escaped.”

“I’m not… strong.” I felt like my head was about to explode. “You’re an incubus. Seth is a sphinx. I really can’t hurt you. Not even if I tried.”

“Well, you did. It was like you were possessed. We even asked Professor Wyvern if you were, and he said no. And okay, I can see that now. You couldn’t have been possessed. You’re normal, you’re fine. But I swear to God, when you were biting and scratching and yelling that you had to jump, I thought that wasn’t you, and a demon must’ve taken over your body.”

He fell silent. I sat with my hands folded in my lap, looking down at my boots. I knew he was watching me, waiting for me to say something. Waiting for me to explain myself. I wasn’t going to. He knew so little, and it was actually for the best. From what I could tell, Adrian hadn’t told him and Seth about the monster in the well. I understood everything now, and yet… I understood too little.

“Yolanda, if you didn’t try to kill yourself, then… what were you doing standing on the edge of that well, looking down into the abyss? What happened back there?”

“I need to be alone.”

“What? No! I’m not leaving until you give me something. Anything. I need to know that you’re alright. I need to know what was going through your head when we found you.”

“Davien, it’s time for you to leave.”

“No. Listen to me,” he leaned over and grabbed my chin between his fingers. “Year two at Grim Reaper Academy is about to start. You’ve been hospitalized for too long. The Karmic Asylum is… horrible. It’s not for you, okay? It’s for mad supernaturals who are a danger to themselves and to others, especially to humans. You’re actually the only human who’s ever been locked up in this godforsaken place. It’s like a prison! And I want to get you out, but I need your help, okay? I need you to tell me the truth. I need to understand.”

I could feel his energy expanding toward me. He was using his incubus powers, and I braced myself for what was going to happen next. Except… it didn’t happen. Normally, I should have felt compelled to obey him, do and say anything he asked of me. But I felt nothing. His energy clung to my aura, and I felt nothing. His green eyes widened slightly, which meant he was catching on to the fact that I was… immune. He pressed on, nonetheless. How couldn’t he see that all he was doing was to make me angrier and angrier? How couldn’t he see that using his powers on a defenseless woman locked up in a madhouse, mostly drugged, was so utterly and disgustedly wrong?!

“Yolanda, come on. It’s me. You can trust me. I know I was a jerk to you, but that was just…” He tried to find the right words and failed. There were no right words. “It’s in the past. All of it. What happened this time is not a game. It’s serious. This is serious.” He motioned toward the room, the locked door, the window. “I want to get you out of here, but you have to do this one thing for me. Tell me the truth. What happened to you, baby?”

Baby. He dared to call me baby.

I lashed out. My mind went blank, the emptiness in my chest grew until it enveloped all of me, until it pushed his invasive energy away, and I lunged at him with all my might. The chair broke under our weight, and we found ourselves on the floor, with me on top of him, scratching at his face, trying to gauge his eyes out. I didn’t think, I didn’t feel. I just acted. There was this darkness within me that grew stronger and stronger. And it was hungry. My darkness and my emptiness were best friends, and they were both hungry. They wanted to swallow him whole, they wanted to swallow everything in their path. Not just Davien, not just this dreadful place he, Seth, and Adrian had put me in, not just the town of Salem. They wanted to swallow the world. There was this void inside me that couldn’t be filled and didn’t want to be filled. It wanted to unleash itself upon the Earth and turn it into a void as well. My void craved more void, until there would be nothing left.

Davien cried