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As the black pours over him, Keefe knows this is the end.
Please, he lets himself think away from Sophie's prying eyes. Please, Mom. Please let me survive this. Please keep some of me breathing underneath this. Please don't swallow me whole and bury whatever's left.
Sludge pours down his throat. It leaves no space for air. More rushes up his nose as his throat constrictions, trying to breathe around the obstruction.
Please , he prays. Please let me live.
Then, the dark eats him.
Three days later, he rises.
He vomits, the first time.
Burning bile in thick chunks that drips down his chin and clings to his chest. He hacks until he realizes he's sobbing. Then he just sobs. Sourness coats the inside of his mouth and no amount of scraping his tongue against his teeth can remove the sensation of texture. Thick and tough and slippery. Sweaty and hairy. The scent memory makes him gag.
He vomits again. Somehow, it feels better than the meat did in his mouth.
Heavy blood weighs down his hands. It's gummy and goopy and gunky. Under his fingernails and in the webbing. Rolling down to his elbows and crawling up his arms. Pearls slide down his neck and Keefe--
Keefe--
The body before him is a betrayal. Respecting all life was how he was raised. Never to harm. Never to hurt. Ignore the food chain and his place in it. An Elf is above that -- better than.
Keefe is low. Lower than low. An abomination by every metric. If his dad could see him now, scrabbling among humans to desperately fill the aching in his stomach with violence. He would be disgusted.
Then again, maybe he would be proud.
The skin underneath him is wet and sticky. Keefe ignores how it clings to his knees as he stands.
He keeps his face averted from the sparkle in the corner of his eye when he runs away.
Next to the bench, the fox hisses at Keefe. Short and sharp white points jut out as it bares its fangs. Keefe can’t help but roll his eyes.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?” he asks. This early there aren’t more than the occasional jogger at St. James Park. Just him and the birds, fluffing their feathers as they glide on the lake.
And the fox, of course.
It growls again, probably angry that Keefe has nothing to give it. Tough.
Thankfully, it’s quickly distracted from its (misplaced) anger by an errant duckling who wanders onto the bank. Keefe smiles to himself as it toddles along the path, poking its beak at loose gravel and leaves.
Sophie would love this, he thinks.
At the same time, the fox pounces.
It’s hard to tell which cements the pit in his stomach.
Alvar notices when he gets sick.
“I don't know what important secret stuff you're doing all day, but it can't be healthy.” Alvar's legs are thrown over the side of the couch. His bathrobe is covered in crumbs from the discarded plate on the coffee table. Keefe's stomach churns at the sight of the food.
“It's none of your business,” Keefe replies automatically. Having a roommate is so overrated.
What Keefe does all day has nothing to do with his new look. Deep eye-bags. Wane skin. A rasp in his voice from all the vomiting. Hopping libraries and walking around London are the only breaks he gets from his new hellish existence. They distract from the everpresent hunger that makes his knees weak and hands shake.
But he can't eat.
Well, he can. Human food goes a long way in taking the edge off; it keeps him running far past when he reaches his limit. But it doesn't satiate him. Doesn't make him feel like a person again.
There's the catch Keefe can't escape.
How is he supposed to feel like himself again when the process makes him crawl out of his skin?
At first, hunger was a good thing. With the regular weakness came an ability weakness. Even without his new coping skills, his empathy was weaker. He accidentally touched Alvar and didn't scream at the sensation. He was getting better. All he had to do was be strong enough to sacrifice his body for it.
Not that Keefe has ever been the strong one. He broke on the fourth day.
He couldn't keep everything down, but it was enough to start the horrible cycle over again.
Over and over again. Rinse, repeat.
There's hair in his mouth. Long and wet and he thinks it was blonde before it was stained red.
One strand is caught between his teeth. With slippery fingers, he pulls it out, breathing rapidly and choppy. It looks just like---
He can't. He can't.
Sophie's smile is blinding. In the sunlight, her hair glows just as bright. A rival for the Lost Cities' precious gems.
No. No, no, no, no, no, no.
She wouldn't smile now. Keefe would be lucky if her forehead crinkled between her eyebrows. The only thing Sophie would feel seeing Keefe now, kneeling in a pool of blood, is horror. Disgust. Unrepentant fear of the thing that's come to live in the body of the boy she knew.
Because that boy is dead. The one who smiled and joked and believed that there was a way to beat his mom and stay himself -- whoever that was -- is gone. Replaced by an all-consuming void who wants. Wants to be normal. Wants to be someone he recognizes in the mirror. Wants to turn back the clock and never go to that stupid cave in Loamnore.
Inside him is a giant, gaping appetite. Apparently, the only thing he can't eat is the past.
At another time, the thought would make him laugh.
The drawing is ugly.
Harsh, messy lines with the dull hotel pencil. Graphite bleeds across the page where his hand drags through it. The face is cast in shadows and the mouth is a trailing maw. The teeth are sharp and lethal.
But the eyes are always sad.
Somehow Keefe can’t fix that, no matter how many self-portraits he does.
He can feel it. Even with his empathy, an amputated limb that occasionally jerks with sensation, Keefe can feel it.
Terror spins in his stomach. Dread drags down his arms as it races through his veins like poison. Sadness catches in his throat, making it hard to breathe. Resignation makes it possible for him to open his mouth and dig in.
It’s easier to focus on these feelings. Her feelings.
Don’t get him wrong, it’s still torture. He never thought he’d share feelings with the dying in all his empathy lessons. It wasn’t conceivable. Hardly enough elves died as it was to consider what would happen if an empath shared their final gasp. Keefe can imagine all the blood draining from his mentor’s face at the concept. It would probably be enough to shake a hair out of his father’s perfect gel helmet. The only consultation they could likely offer him was that he’d shatter instantly. Overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of emotion.
Keefe isn’t that lucky.
He waits for his mind to break. Every time he thinks, this has to be it. But it never is.
Story of his life. Nothing bad ends and nothing good lasts.
Maybe he’s not guilty enough. How much guilt does it take to break, anyway? Is that something that could be measured? Did they calculate it when Alden’s mind broke? Take a peak and say, yup, that’ll do it.
Alvar would know, not that Keefe could casually ask, “Hey, no follow-up questions, but why can’t my mind break already?” That conversation would be sideways before it began.
It doesn’t matter. Keefe’s drowning in guilt and the only thing that shakes are his hands.
The last bits of feeling slither out of the body. There’s a warmth in Keefe’s toes he doesn’t know how to read. His eyes burn.
He tries to remember the sensation the whole walk home.
Touching Alvar is electric. Heat surges through his chest, down his arms, and shoots out his hands. It pours out of his body, a vein sliced and spraying wide. The warmth pounds between them. Alvar’s pulse jumps to beat in time with Keefe’s.
As he scrapes the energy out of himself and into Alvar with raw, bloody fingers, somehow he just knows.
The energy is his. The shaking in his hands and the spinning of his head tell that much. But it’s also theirs. Life sucked out of all his poor victims.
Their energy into him.
His energy into Alvar.
He should drop his hands. Let go and apologize to Alvar that he can’t fix abilities after all. What’s one more disappointment in the long list that Keefe has already written? Who cared anyway if one murderous, kidnapping traitor didn’t have his abilities? It wasn’t like Alvar deserved them. The world would be a safer place without Alvar sneaking around, invisible and eavesdropping. Keefe would be doing everyone a favor.
He would also be selfish. It wasn’t like the energy was going anywhere now. Just sitting dormant, waiting to be cannibalized by Keefe’s starving body. At least now, Keefe could help someone with all this awfulness. Put it toward something other than misery.
The argument feels solid. Like a wood plank over a river, waiting to be kicked out from underneath him.
He couldn’t stop. He couldn’t revoke this from Alvar, playing with Alvar’s life like putty because he’s afraid.
And isn’t this what he’s here to do anyway – learn more about his abilities, fangs and all? Maybe it was time to dive past the grotesque and see if anything good came out of his new perversion.
It wouldn’t balance the scales. Not even close. But it was as close as Keefe or Alvar could come.
That had to be enough.
On the opposite side of the street, a mother hustles her son to the crosswalk. Her hand is wrapped tightly around his, pulling him forward as his little legs jump to keep up. If Keefe stretches himself, he could probably feel the excitement in the boy’s step. Maybe the exhaustion in the mother’s.
Her face is kind, though. Beyond the crease in her brow and the hair absently falling in her face as she tries to wrangle her kid, she still looks kind.
She’s so distracted she panics when her son tugs ahead toward the street. She throws her body forward and pushes him back, only realizing a second later that the road is clear for pedestrians to mingle through.
But she would die for him. That much is clear.
Maybe when the boy is older, he’ll get the chance to die for his mother, like Keefe did.
“Okay, I have to ask. What are you? And please don’t say alien.”
Keefe laughs.
The woods are dark.
In the Forbidden Cities, it’s easy to forget how different the Lost Cities are – how foreign. The forest is alive, whispering and chittering in his ears even in the dead of night. Flori leads Keefe down the winding path, over foliage and sticks and weeds that scream with each step. Animals scurry in the distance. Keefe is so focused on their music that he hardly notices when Flori stops.
“Here it is,” she says. Behind her is a low bed of grass surrounded by rocks covered in soft moss.
“Thanks.” Keefe tries for a smile. Who knows if he gets there.
Flori takes a step away, back toward Havenfield. “It’s good to have you back.”
“Really? Not that I’m not flattered but–”
“The Moonlark missed you,” Flori corrects. “More than she’ll say.”
“Oh,” Keefe says, hoping the moonlight hides how red his face is. “I missed her too.”
Flori nods once. “Good. The flowers here are meant to soothe and bring a peaceful sleep. I hope they are restful.”
Keefe does too, but he can’t help tossing and turning. The pain in his stomach alternates from aching to sharp and stabbing. He thinks about his offer to Alvar to sneak back to London, and that he should do it anyway. Just for a bit. Only to quickly eat something. Anything.
A small, furry thing creeps out of the brush.
It picks its way toward him, unselfconsciously tip-toeing through broken branches and uneven terrain. Spots of moonlight trickle down and highlight its short body. It pauses for a moment to investigate a patch of dirt that appears no different from any other.
Keefe’s nose twitches. Saliva pools in his mouth.
He can’t. He doesn’t do this anymore. It’s awful disgusting horrifying gruesome repugnant ugly monstrous . It’s succumbing to terrible things his mom wants him to embrace and then going the extra mile. It’s destroying all the misplaced faith Sophie has in him.
He can’t.
He can’t.
He can’t help himself.
He slowly eases himself out of the nook. In small steps, he creeps across the gap, trying not to loom over the animal and scare it off. With bated breath Keefe holds his hand statue still above it, waiting for his heart to calm down.
Between one breath and the next, he swoops down and grabs its body in his right hand.
It squeals and twitches. Its claws scrape against his palm. Little teeth try to dig into his skin. Keefe ignores this as he readjusts his grip to leave a section of the torso exposed. One hand holds down the head while the other clenches the legs still.
It’s easy to lean down and stick his teeth in.
Fur rankles against his tongue, matted and itchy. But then, the blood. Oh, the blood.
It’s sweeter than any mallowmelt. More refreshing than Youth. Keefe can’t get enough.
Sucking it out is hard – teeth don’t leave large holes. He drags them down the animals’ side to open up more skin. His tongue messes with the loose flap. Some trickles down the side of his mouth, leaving hot, wet trails. He pushes down harder to get more out and a few fragile bones snap.
Distantly, he can recognize that the poor thing is scared. He can feel it in the way his heart races and his legs shake in time. The fear comes nowhere close to how good it feels to eat after starving for so long. Why was he so hungry? Why was he denying himself this ?
What’s so wrong with embracing the change?
It twitches to death a few seconds before Keefe finishes. It only takes another forty-five seconds for the gravity of what he’s done to set in.