Layton looked down at the red liquid spilling down his hand; it had come from her shoulder; his fingers began to shake. He heard Verina coming behind him, so he slowed to a stop on the cliff and turned. Her attention lowered to his unsteady fingers.
She stared into him, trying to latch onto his sense. "Her wounds need care."
He finally met her gaze. How long the two of them had walked, sedated, with each other, and now they both struggled to recognize the other. Sedation was exactly what he needed right now. He turned to leave.
"She will not last until the next night without treatment. The girl will die."
"Then let her. And this will be done."
Would it? She wondered.
As he whipped through the wind, inside he imploded. Flashes of her plagued his head, excavating parts he did not understand, pushing him as fast as he could to wash himself from it, through the trees, through the town, through the lights, through the blood, where he belonged. Where had the silence gone?
The harder he fought all the noise, the worse it became. But he was made of a stronger resilience than this! He dug his feet into the dirt of the park as he came to a stop before two people, slamming into one of them, and their body was sent flying across the field, their bones broken to pieces.
Layton went over to the body slowly, taking in the sight, the flesh mush where the bone had turned to dust beneath it. The structure of its face was unrecognizable.
The other one cried out, fleeing across the field, purse and shoes falling from her as she went. Before she could make it off the grass, he was in front of her — he snatched her by the throat and her voice cut off from blunt terror.
"Give me back my silence," Layton demanded with a thick tongue, his accent leaking from the past like a crack in a dam. His head ticked to the side and back. "Drown my memory from me." His fingers hooked in; the girl writhed in his arms, bawling hysterically and gurgling from suffocation. A small drop of blood lingered on the iris of Layton's eye, where a tear wanted to be. "Take it away..."
He wrapped his mouth around her throat, tearing it open, and before Layton could even begin to suck, his hands had latched so tightly around her without realizing it that he'd snapped her neck and her back. Her noises stopped abruptly and she folded in and dropped to the ground, like an old pair of clothes. His head flew back and the blood spit everywhere with a gnarled scream.
A dark blood fever took him as he came to Lithium, not knowing what he might do, his eyes lifting from their heavy weights. The two sides of him warred like they had done in that fatal beginning, his fatal beginning. No being should have to live through that twice — no being should have to live through that once. Someone would pay for it. The world would.