His Heart Is Mine

Chapter 6

I sat still on my kitchen floor, my gaze unfocused as I picked idely at a scab on my foot. My hair fell in bedraggled tangles around my face, as well as my nails being cracked and caked with blood. I breathed shallowly, listening to the wind as it whistled through the broken window in my lounge. Stray tears were long past dried on my cheeks, and my bruised forehead was throbbing.

After dealing with the body of the dog that I had owned for the past six years, I had entered my home, only to find my name - my REAL name - scrawled on the wall, in ash. At first I had laughed (slightly psychotically), but upon hearing the name being whispered from somewhere in the house by a voice that I didn't recognise, my mind had slowly begun to fall back into its old manner of thinking; death, blood, anger, him...

I had started to scream, running through the house and demanding that whoever was there was to show themselves. I hated whoever was there. I wanted them dead. I wanted to suck the marrow from their bones. I wanted to watch their blood run over the floor. It had sent me into a rage, and I had attacked the mirror in a brutal attempt to kill the person that was looking back at me, the thing that was my body but not my mind. "Go away!" I had shrieked, scrabbling onto the sink and raking my nails over the reflection as I repeated it again and again. There had been something there. There was something else in the house; my mind had convinced me of it. My eyes showed me shadows that danced over the walls, my ears heard laughter that reminded me of -him- but sounded nothing like a human. I had leapt from the stairs, lurching through the house with wild, animalistic wails as I threw things and knocked over furniture. I had cried, and sunk onto the bloodied floor of my kitchen as I saw the things creeping over the floors towards me.

I had fallen asleep.

I had woken up.

And I had sat there, staring at nothing for so long that I had lost count of the minutes to hours. My flesh was pale, the skin riddled with goosebumps as the cold breeze from my broken window flowed through the house. My torn mind began slowly knitting itself back together, as it always did. It had a larger job than normal this time, though. There was more carnage. More disturbed thoughts. More ripped memories. My eyes were blurred, my clothes torn, as I sat silently on the ground, my eyes wide and unfocused. I couldn't remember blinking. Suddenly, the phone - the old one attatched to the wall - began to ring. The shrill sound jarred me, and I emitted a startled whimper as my eyes started to refocuse, looking at the underneath of my kitchen counter.

I slowly attempted to rise, my legs refusing to co-operate until a certain point at which I almost broke one of them. I staggered over to the phone, my numb fingers struggling to get a grip on the glossy surface. I tried to say hello, but the only thing that came out of my mouth was a choked whisper. The person at the other end of the phone was silent, before saying a single, concerned word.

"Ashley?"

I started sobbing, making a noise that was sort of a confirmation to what Theon had just said. He swore loudly, before he gave a relieved sigh. 

"Where the hell have you been? I haven't been able to get hold of you since you left two nights ago!"

My brain hurt as I tried to comprehend what he had just told me. Two...Nights? "Come...Please..." I managed, my legs wobbling dangerously. 

"I came to your house three times....You didn't answer the door, but your window was broken, and knowing you, you would've gotten it fixed, so I assumed you weren't there, and your car was-"

"Theon..Please just come here..." I inturrupted faintly, before my knees gave out and I lapsed into darkness.

***

I woke up to the feeling of a cool, damp cloth being pressed softly against my forehead, and the cold air from outside stinging the bare skin of my arms and shoulders. The room that I was in was dim, but there were two luminous green eyes looking down at me through the black spots that danced across my vision. 

"Theon?" I croaked questioningly, my throat hurting from that single word. 

"Hey Ash," his voice replied, continuing to gently clean my face, which must have been streaked with tears and blood. "What happened?"

"I have no fracking idea...." 

But of course I did.

"It must have been something pretty hectic, for all..." He gestured vaguely towards the whole room, which had almost all of the furniture overturned, along with scratches that vaguely resembled claw marks that marred the wooden floor. "That."

"Oh well. Messes can be fixed." I sat up slowly, pressing my palms over my eyes as I shook my head to clear the dark dots that were impairing my vision. "Speaking of that, I should probably start cleaning all of this up..." I attempted to turn, trying to get off of the bed, but a jarring pain in my shoulder made me gasp. My head snapped towards it, and I stared. A large chunk had been ripped out of the flesh there, in the shape of a bite mark. There was a small heart drawn under it, in something that looked like black ink mixed with blood. I gaped at the spot, whilst Theon just shook his head.

"That's something that I would like the explanation for, though..."

"Thank you for coming, but I just want to figure some stuff out now. On my own." My words sounded harsh even to my own ears, but my frazzled mind couldn't seem to think of something softer or more appropriate to say.

Theon frowned, but nodded slowly, standing and letting the cloth drop out of his hand. "Alright. Good luck." He turned, and I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, he was gone.

I rose from the bed, ignoring the stinging from my shoulder as I walked past my mirror, sparing a glance towards the reflection of my insanity having taken its course. A woman with black hair looked back at me, her piercing blue eyes staring into mine with so much intensity it felt electric. I shook my head, continuing towards the stairs. I placed a hand on the bannister, starting unsteadily downwards whilst I inspected the damage done to my house. It wasn't what I would have called "horror-movie status", for the mere sake of it being totally lit up. I had ripped the curtains, so they hung unevenly over the windows, and the late autumn light poured in where it could. There was no blood smeared over the floor - except in the kitchen -, and the furniture wasn't ruined; it was simply overturned.Sighing, I started slowly cleaning things up, before shaking my head and trudging back upstairs. I took hold of the wall phone at the bottom step, dialing the number of the cleaning service center that was pretty close to my house.

"Hello? Yes, this is Miss Carrie," I told the perky woman on the other end of the line, using the name I did whenever I called. "Uhuh. Uhuh. Is it possible to send down a few emergency cleaners as soon as possible? I have guests coming around tonight," I lied, wrapping the cord around my finger restlessly. "Yeah. Great, thank you. Forty-four September Drive. There are rose bushes out front. I'll probably be gone by the time you get here, but the keys are under the mat. If you people take anything, I will notify the police, by the way. Yep. Bye."

I hung up, setting the phone back on the holder with a small sigh, before vanishing upstairs to take a shower. Emerging from the glass box around ten minutes later, I heard a soft breath to my left. I froze, my hands automatically snatching a towel from the rack to the right and wrapping it around myself, before turning my head slowly towards the source of the noise. There was a man standing quite calmly there, his smile a seemingly frozen fixture on his face. His eyes glittered with brutal intelligence, and his hands were buried in his pockets.

"...The hell are you?" I asked, reaching for, of all bloody things, the toothbrush behind me.

"I'm what's been in your house," he responded, his smile widening slightly. His eye twitched as his grip seemed to tighten around something, before he pulled out a gun, levelling it at my chest. "And you, my dear, have been stealing my lunch."