I waken to the feeling of Habit stroking my hair. I smile and lay there, blissfully happy. Finally, I turn around again to face him. He smiles back, looking sleepy. I snuggle with him for a while before finally, my stomach rumbles.
I'd been so preoccupied last night that I forgot to eat. Well, food anyway.
"Somebody's hungry," he chirps from beside me.
I smirk. "Maybe it's just for you."
He wiggles his eyebrows. Then he kisses my forehead and climbs out of bed, allowing me the full view of him. How on earth I managed to get this lucky (quite literally) is completely beyond me.
"Alright, fucker, let's go get some food," he says as he pulls on a black shirt.
"You know, most people have pet names for their lovers," I say teasingly as I get dressed.
"They do?"
"They do."
"Well, you're fucking a demon, and so I don't think we are necessarily "normal" people," he says.
"True, true."
"Come on, Little Rabbit," he says, wrapping an arm around me and kissing my head.
It's when we are on the stairs, though, that the smell of blood permeates the air. Habit freezes where he stands and looks at me, worry in his green eyes. He presses his finger to his lips and motions me back up the steps. Reluctantly, I follow his instructions, and he grabs the ever-handy Emergency Machete.
I stand at the top of the stairs, and he descends into the lower area of the house.
Fear coils itself around my pounding heart and the sound of it beating is all I can hear for a moment. Then I hear Habit calling my name. I bolt down the stairs and towards where his voice is coming from, towards the smell of blood.
The house is trashed, like there was some huge battle here, which there probably was, and blood and splinters of wood and glass lay strewn about. I'm careful not to step on any of it, but it's hard not to.
That's when I enter the room where I hear someone shouting Biblical verses at the top of his lungs ... And see Vinny, covered in blood, laying before a stranger who has now become the decor of this room.
Bile forces its way out of me, and once Habit sees what I'm looking at, he turns me away.
"It's an Iteration relapse," he explains. "That's not our Vinny."
Then where is our Vinny?
