Beyond Blood

Mousetrap

What would you do if faced with the impossible?

Chapter 7: Mousetrap

I didn't remember getting home, just like I didn't remember drinking an entire bottle of wine when I did, but I must have. My stomach churned and squirmed, gurgling obnoxiously loud, and I had to swallow hard to stop myself from throwing up. Only, when I did, I gagged. My mouth tasted like I'd been sooking on old pennies.

Groaning, I tried to roll to my side but my wrist was caught on something. Too exhausted too untangle myself from whatever it was, and finding even the smallest movement enough to inspire my stomach to heave, I remained on my back.

My bed smelled strange too.

Turning my head to bury my face into the pillow, I was met with a pleasant woodsy scent, and another, clearer, like the smell of snow in the air. My mouth watered, my throat began to itch, and the sensation of my neck and shoulder being pricked by a thousand, deep piercing needles grew until the area from my jaw down to my chest felt like it was being scalded in acid.

Before a scream could pass my open mouth, something soft yet firm pressed against my lips, something dripping a warm liquid that spilled onto my tongue in steady pulses. It hurt to swallow, but the second I managed to choke down the first mouthful, it acted as a cooling balm soothing the fire.

I only managed two more gulps before what I'd a first registered as a sweet honey flavour, turned to horrid copper again. Pressure tried to urge me to turn my head back, but I was already drifting off again.

The next time awareness returned, it came back in pieces. Voices disturbed my slumber; broken bits of conversation between two men, sometimes joined by a woman. Laura?

"I should take my belt to your ass first, never mind hers," the deeper of the two men growled.

"That's not my thing as well you know. She did nothing wrong. Neither did I, for that matter. I walked her right to the steps checked the area for any sign of something out of place. There was nothing. I didn't sense so much as a witches charm besides the one Laura uses at the front door," the other said, his tone weary, like he'd had to repeat it a few times already. "I watched her just as you asked, I heard her get to the door, heard her put the keys in the lock for god's sake. I went back to check on her, even after she basically called the both of us socially inept by the way. That fact I went back is the only reason she's still alive, Taran. That thing would have just waited for me to leave otherwise and scatter her from her bed."

The horror ignited by what I heard was enough to make me forget to breathe.
I tried to move, to open my eyes, to take in enough breath to ask why Taran and Wren were in my room and why they were saying such gruesome things. I couldn't. Maybe this was a vivid dream. Too vivid. I had the vague sense of someone walking around my bed.

"I told you to watch her walk through the door. That charm only works once they're over the threshold and Laura assures me it's legitimate. This is on you. You disobeyed me, and look what happened!"

"I was there to hear her make so much racket the police showed up not long after I managed to get her away. If my presence were to have flouted it this time, and Laura's cheap charm really works, then whoever sent that rabid thing would simply send it again. It could have waited for her to drive home from her next shift, and it would have killed her before she could have taken a step from the car. Besides," Wren hissed. "This is as much your fault as mine. You brought an unsuspecting human into our world and let her get mixed up with Frank, for what? You like the smell of her? She smells just like every other human to me. So what is it? You enjoy that irritating naivety, the lost look in her eyes, you want her kneeling at your feet so you can say you broke her, had her, win whatever challenge it is she poses to you that seems to be turning you witless, then get rid of her