Cassia's point of view:
Red eyes bore into me.
Red eyes that don't belong on his face.
Red eyes that reflect madness and animalistic intentions as their wearer holds my friend far too tightly.
"Peter..." I begin, forcing my voice to betray no fear as I try to make it soothing and gentle. "We're here to help you; no one needs to get hurt. Please, just let her go."
But he continues to keep Susan in his clutches, and I find myself terrified by his unpredictability. This is not my friend; this is someone damaged, broken, rebuilt entirely into a stranger, and I'm left with few options to handle the situation.
"Peter, please, listen to me. We want to help," I try again, tone riding a thin line between calm and desperate.
"The time for help passed a long time ago," he muses indifferently, and Susan makes a strangled sort of cry muffled by his hand over her mouth. "You can't save me."
"I can," I push. "I know you better than you now know yourself. I know what they've done to you. Please, just let me try."
But he only smirks, resting his chin atop Susan's head in a sick sort of hug while he slightly sways back and forth, almost as if they were slow dancing.
She tries to fight against him, squirming and thrashing now in an attempt to shake him off, and I find myself rushing forward to help her before Peter outright growls and moves his hand from her mouth to her throat.
"Don't," He warns, squeezing her around her neck for a moment to show me that he means it.
"Please, she hasn't done anything," I plead, terrified of losing someone else. "This isn't you, this was never you! Come back to us!"
"Has it ever occurred to you..." He trails off, still clutching at Susan's throat, "that I don't care? I've had my life stripped away and everyone I thought that cared has turned against me. If you were ever my friend, you never would've let Henley bring me here in the first place. If Julia ever loved me, she wouldn't have been the one to destroy me."
"Julia? What are you talking about?" I ask.
He drops his hand from Susan's neck and returns it to cover her mouth, evidently deciding that I'm not going to come closer as he begins to elaborate.
"Picture the one you love...yes, him, that boy, I see him in your eyes...picture a situation where your health and well being depends on his actions, your life or your death directly falls on his shoulders as you trust him to do what's best for the both of you, only to have him put himself first. To fight back against his oppressors without thinking of the repercussions it will have on you, to bring upon you every torment possible whether he meant to or not. To have him fail you, to have him be the catalyst for people to rip your mind apart and then build you back into a monster. That's what Julia did to me."
And I'm shaking my head the entire time because none of it's true, because he believes in a lie, because the old part of himself truly is dead if he can say such things.
"I didn't expect you to understand," he says in a tone that hides disappointment. "How could you? How could either one of you? You weren't here to stop it."
"We're here now," I urge. "And I promise...you don't want to do this. Just let her go. Keep talking to me."
I'm pleading, begging with everything in me like never before. I sound weak and desperate, but at this point I'd sooner drop to his feet and beg for mercy than let him go through with this. Anything to get that look of terror off of Susan's face, and anything to get that look of bloodlust out of his eyes.
I gaze at Susan, and she's trembling so hard that she's shaking Peter, too. But there's something else, something resolute on her face disguised by her blatant fear. Her eyes gesture down in the direction of her right hand, glued to her side because of the death grip she's locked in. She very lightly pats the pocket of her pants so Peter won't notice, but it's enough to clue me in.
There's a faint outline of a small pocket knife, one she must've picked up from Cade or grabbed before we left this morning, and her instructions couldn't be more clear:
Distract him.
I look back to Peter, paying careful attention to look at his mouth, his nose, the top of his head, anywhere but his eyes so he won't be able to read my thoughts.
"Steven told us they were starving you and that you were likely dead. Tell me what they did so I'll know how to fix you," I tell him.
"You can't fix me," he says in a snarky tone, but it hides confusion. He's not used to people shutting out his power.
"Don't underestimate me, Peter," I urge. "Tell me what they did to you."
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Susan's fingers gingerly reach into her pocket for the knife, and I have to remind myself to breathe.
"They did starve me; they were going to let me die, and I got about as close as you can get. I was hallucinating...having all kinds of weird dreams about letting go..." He trails off, sounding more like he's talking to himself before he addresses me again. "But then they force-fed me nutrients and other stuff to get me stronger. Once I got to that point, they injected me with all sorts of chemicals to warp my mind...to make me like this."
Susan's fingers are slowly dragging the knife out now in increments, but soon enough she's got it clutched in her hand without Peter noticing yet.
"Why?" I ask him. "Why did they change their minds about letting you live?"
"Henley knew you would come...all of you," he responds, anger leaking back into his voice. "She knew you'd come after me, knew I wouldn't let anyone who came close live. To her, that was worth it."
Heart pounding, I see Susan ever-carefully position the knife to angle backwards, aiming so that she'll be able to stab him in his side.
"And you? Was that worth it to you? Are you going to let us live?" I inquire, knowing that his answer to this will be the one to confirm that there's no inkling of a human soul left in him.
Susan's got the knife in place, ready to strike as tears form in her eyes and a look of guilt replaces her fear.
"Of course not," he snarls, and as soon as he moves his hand to strangle Susan in earnest this time, she strikes.
The pocket-knife is suddenly buried in his side in the blink of an eye, and he's howling in an animalistic pain as Susan bursts free of his arms, rushing toward me as I open my arms to catch her.
Susan slams into me and I quickly embrace her, looking over her head as Peter sinks to his knees while simultaneously ripping the knife out of his side.
And as Susan and I back away out of his chained range, I come to the conclusion that I've never seen a look of such hatred on anyone's face like that before.
The tattered shirt he wears is quickly becoming soaked with blood, but it doesn't keep him from speaking in a tone dripping with pain and malice.
"Mark my words Cassia, I'll kill you first," he seethes before turning his attention to Susan. "And you, I'll make sure your death is slow and painful, make you beg for mercy in the last moments of your life, little one."
Susan lets go of me and turns to face him, her expression soft and full of pity instead of vengeance.
"I don't know you anymore," she mourns.
He's still glaring at us as he collapses in earnest now, blood pooling onto the floor as his breathing becomes more shallow, and I'm now gripped with the strange fear that I might lose him now.
I rush away from him and over to my bag of medical supplies that I dropped earlier, falling to my knees and digging through the bag as quickly as possible. I make a mess of everything in there, pouring through it all like mad before I finally find what I'm looking for, buried at the very bottom:
A syringe of anesthesia, the kind that must be given intravenously and enough to put him to sleep for an hour.
I grab it and rush back over to Peter, who is muttering obscenities at me as he tries to quell the bleeding with his own hand over the wound.
And before I can give him the chance to grab me or damage the needle, I inject him quickly before backing away, watching as it takes effect almost immediately.
Peter groans in pain before his hand drops away from his side, the floor soaked now as his head begins to loll back and forth. His scarlet eyes open and close furiously while breathing for him becomes even more difficult, and before long, his eyes are shut and he's ceased moving.
He's unconscious within twenty seconds.
"C'mon, we have to move quickly," I tell Susan, dragging her back over to him as I collapse next to him and ready myself to heal his stab wound.
"We've got about an hour before he wakes up, and I want to fix what they've done to his mind if at all possible within that time frame. I need you to get in his head, give him happy memories to make his pulse slow down. At this rate he'll pump all the anesthesia out of his body before I can do anything," I tell her, pulling his shirt up to reveal the wound in its entirety.
Susan did quite a number; it's not a pretty sight, that's for sure.
I look back at her, making sure she heard me, but she just sits by Peter's head as tears leak from eyes, head shaking back and forth slightly.
"Susan...please," I beg, hoping she doesn't hold a vendetta against him now. "It's not...that wasn't him. That's not Peter."
"It's not that," she whispers as her hands move to his forehead, closing her eyes before releasing a flood of memories upon him. "I just thought...all this time I thought we had it worse. I had no real idea what they were doing to him...what they've probably done to Julia."
She doesn't speak anymore after that, only allowing good memories and soothing thoughts to emanate from her into his mind, hopefully calming his heart rate enough to make the anesthesia circulate more slowly.
I turn back to his wound, placing my hands over it before breathing life back into him, feeling the exact moment the healing leaves my fingertips and enters his body to do its job.
His wound immediately responds, the damage repairing itself enough to allow the wound to stitch itself back together, slowly knitting the skin back into place.
Within two minutes or so, his skin is as good as knew, the blood and wound are cleaned up entirely, leaving no indication that there was ever a problem in the first place.
But he's not finished yet.
He's lost enough blood to warrant a transfusion, and I can still detect a lingering presence of malnutrition and abuse-related internal injuries, the likes of which require a more intensive form of healing. Not only that, but I want to try removing those chemicals they infected his brain with, see if it's possible to get some semblance of himself back.
"Brace yourself Susan," I sigh, looking down at Peter with pity. "This is going to take a while."