The others stopped checking on me around sunset.

  After every door knock and one sided conversation failed them, I was left alone to rot under the covers. Which was all I wanted, really. I rarely got to sit and drown in my emotions alone like this, always having Tori clinging to my leg. But with the girls keeping her company and out of my room, I actually managed to cry for the first time since... well, since I killed Victoria. I'd shed tears sometimes when my anger would overwhelm me, or I'd get emotional during a moment of Tori being awake, or frustration would drive me to my limit, but it felt alien to let myself quietly cry under a blanket. I wasn't even sure what was making me upset. Maybe the book situation, maybe Tori's situation, maybe just... everything that had happened this year.

  I could hear my mother's voice in the back of my head, laughing at me for being emotional, telling me to grow up.

  Thank god she wasn't really there.

  My headphones were the only thing blocking out the chatter and laughter of the rest of the house as they had dinner. I didn't mind being left out; I had NF and Tom Odell to keep me company. Cheesy? Maybe. But good music is good music, and good music can round the edges of almost any problem.

  One of the ones it can't? Hunger.

  Reaching the 24th hour since I'd fed at the rave, I was growing restless. Before my mates had pressured me back onto a healthy diet, when I was running solely on meat from the butcher's and the occasional stray, I could manage for far longer. I was barely strong enough to walk, and I was severely malnourished, but I kept a light consciousness knowing I wasn't hurting anyone and staying out of the threat of the blood addiction I once found myself drowning in.

  Sometimes I'd remember little things my old psychologist told me and I'd manage to shake off any dangerous thoughts - I guess I should thank my dad for sending me to one when I was just a fucked up kid battling an eating disorder, given that although I can't eat human food anymore without my body rejecting it, I still fall in that mindset a lot more than I'd like to admit. Now it was just repackaged. Same thing with self harm. When I'd first turned, I'd thought I was free from all of that, since my new diet was now straight nutrients and I could heal most wounds. Instead, self harm became addictive behaviours, like overfeeding to get drunk on the high of it, and the self deprecation of my ED only worsened when choosing to stay alive another day meant hurting an innocent person or depriving myself with animal blood.

  God, I was naive. I still am.

  Why does it feel like everything I hated about myself as a kid only got amplified when I died?

  By the time Tori came in and took herself to bed, I was sitting at my desk sketching. I barely heard her come in, thanks to Kendrick Lamar blasting in my ears, so I got a rare jolt when I finally noticed her. I felt incredibly uncomfortable at experiencing surprise like that for the first time in years. Nothing ever managed to creep up on me anymore. It felt... humanising.

  Ew.

  I took my headphones off and turned to watch her as she climbed into bed. I bit back the urge to smile, still feeling bitter. She kept my eye contact, silently asking me to join her. I sighed and rubbed my tired eyes.

  "I'm not going to sleep soon." I shrugged. "You can fall asleep without hugging me like a teddy bear, y'know."

  She frowned at the rejection.

  I rolled my eyes.

  "You're a grown adult under your brain fog. You don't have to do this toddler act all the time. It's frustrating."

  She winced further.

  "... Yeah, cool, whatever. Keep pretending you're not lucid." I muttered as I went back to sketching.

  "That obvious?" she spoke up.

  I stilled, but didn't look at her. My jaw set, and my tongue clicked. I sat straighter, glaring at the desk.

  "How long have you been doing that?"

  "Only a few days." Tori sat up. "I didn't... know how to tell you."

  "Tell me what, that you're present often now? That it's no longer some rare miracle?"

  "It's usually pointless. It used to be that something would have to trigger it, like when I killed that dog in the mall, or vomited my guts out." She continued quietly. "I'm not sure what changed, but I keep coming back here when nothing's happening. In the middle of lunch, halfway through a conversation, when I'm just walking through the house."

  I felt my eyes darken.

  "... When you say 'come back here', what... do you mean by that?" I finally turned to meet her gaze. "Where do you go?"

  Tori bit her wounded lip and averted her gaze to her slender claws, inspecting them.

  I suppressed the urge to growl.

  "I knew you do it on purpose." I crossed my arms. "You purposely don't answer my questions. You go quiet and pretend that you're gone again, so that you don't have to reply. Then you pretend to be vacant until you really do fade away."

  "I-It's not that I want to lie to you!" Tori pleaded. "I just don't know what to say to you."

  "The hell does that mean?"

  "I don't know how to talk to you anymore, Zach." Her voice softened with guilt. "I don't know how to look at you. I don't know if I can."

  "What, you're angry at me? Sure, be angry, you're in your right." I murmured. "I'd never blame you-"

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  "Why won't you tell them what really happened?"

  "... I-"

  "I thought you'd get better with your friends back, with the girls under the same roof, but you're still stuck in the same self-deprecating, self-ashamed cycle of anger that drove you to killing me in the first place."

  "Tori-"

  "And I want you to get better, Zach, I want you to heal. So I let myself watch you when I do come back here. I stay silent and monitor you." Her pale eyes teared up for a moment, before she hissed in pain at the tears hitting a recent wound on her cheek that had been refusing to heal. "B-But you just can't accept help."

  I shot her a bitter scoff.

  "Like you're any better? Silently keeping tabs on me when my every day revolves around trying to find a way to bring you back?" My teeth grit. "You're acting like you don't wanna see me like this, yet just a minute ago you were playing husk again and innocently asking me to join you in bed. And you think I'm the confused one."

  "I..." Tori blinked a few times too many, struggling for words.

  "Save it. I know you're leaving me again." I stood from the desk and headed to the closet. "Just go. I don't want to talk to you tonight, anyway."

  Her eyes widened in alarm as she watched me put on a hoodie and grab my phone. She knew me too well.

  "D-Don't..!" She choked out. "Zach!"

  "Why not?" I glared. "They want me on human blood. They don't want me destroying my room. Why can't I go and take my anger out on a stranger like I used to, huh?"

  Victoria gasped for air as she tried to beg but couldn't get a word out. She weakly climbed over the bedding to grab my arm in desperation.

  I felt my resolve threaten to weaken for a moment, only for the thought to be buried by resentment.

  "You wanna stop me?" I growled. "You better figure out how to leave whatever merry land it is you go off to when you leave, and keep your ass here for longer than a few minutes."

  She silently cried.

  "Carly and London don't know I'm doing this. You're the only one that does." I threw my backpack over my shoulder and tied my shoes. "So make up your mind, Victoria. Do you want to leave me, or do you wanna stay in the nightmare I'm in? Because I can't keep doing this back-and-forth bullshit with you."

  -

  The rain didn't start until I was already far from the house, but I didn't slow down. If anything, I hoped it'd pour harder, just to muffle out the noise in my head.

  Streetlights flickered as I passed under them. Birds flew away. Stray cats hissed and fluffed up. I'd never figured out if that sort of thing was my imagination, or something even remotely scientific. Every time I got pissed off, it was like the world just knew. Maybe I had some sort of negative aura. Couldn't tell you.

  At some point, I found myself at the same bus stop I used to go to school from every day. New graffiti had been tagged over the old ones. The glass wind barrier had shattered to the ground. Even more litter lined the corners of what was supposed to be the shelter. I sat myself down on the bench and stared off into the distance, a heavy yet familiar numbness weighing over my shoulders.

  Couldn't feel the cold of the rain. Couldn't feel the bitterness of the wind.

  Couldn't feel anything.

  Except hunger.

  I felt myself blink, and I'd suddenly wound up inside the bus. I only had a brief moment to look around and gain my bearings before another blink sent me to Flinders Street Station. A pounding headache forced me to shut my eyes again, and I opened them in an alley in the middle of the CBD.

  My breath sped up from nausea, and I leaned back against the bricks behind me as I tried to stay present in one moment for just long enough to think. I was almost scared to close my eyes. I knew the routine, this was a warning. This was the last thing I'd usually remember before blacking out and winding up killing someone. Or several people.

  I knew I was hungry, but I hadn't experienced symptoms this severe since I was 15. It really had been too long since I'd been on a normal diet. All the time I'd spent on the animal shit must've bottled my hunger up until now.

  Losing the battle, my eyes shut again, and I nearly crashed into someone, suddenly in the middle of a nightclub. Did I even have my ID on me? Why would I think to go there in the first-

  "SHIT!" I hissed.

  This time, I really did crash into someone. Me.

  I gaped at my own reflection in the mirror of the public bathroom I'd been taken to. I looked feral. Was I drunk? High? I couldn't tell. My eyes were red - completely red. The scleras, likely from some substance - and my irises, definitely from hunger. My black hair was messy and unkempt. Was I wearing eyeliner? I was missing one of the balls of my eyebrow piercing-

  I never got my eyebrow pierced! Where the hell did I get-

  And now I was in a packed tram.

  "... I.. should really.. go home..."

  I took out my phone - cringed at the sight of it suddenly being severely cracked - and frantically searched through my contacts. I called London.

  "Zach?" She yawned into the phone. "What's wrong?"

  "I need to get home right now!" I panicked. "London, I'm blacking out. I-I ran out of the house because I was pissed off, and I was gonna go out and feed on someone out of spite, but I-"

  My phone was suddenly gone, and now I was standing in Hosier Lane. The colourful art and graffiti lining every brick and surface wasn't enough to distract me from the fact that there was a girl walking beside me, her arm wrapped around mine, reeking of alcohol. I ripped myself free from her grasp and felt myself hyperventilating as I ran off as fast as I could. I heard her call out to me, but I shook my head and kept running.

  My phone was missing. So was my watch, and my backpack, which meant I had no way of getting help now. I could only hope that London would manage to find me somehow.

  "Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck-"

  I glanced up and saw the sky had lightened a notch. I'd lost hours.

  I slid down to my knees against a wall and gave up.

  This is why I hate human blood. This is why I went to the lengths I did to stay on animal blood as long as I could. I can't do this. Not anymore. It took me months to get rid of this the first time. I don't have time to go through all that again.

  I'm so stupid. I should've told the girls I was hungry, they would've figured something out. Hell, I probably could've fed from one of them. But no, of course not, because I'm too fucking stubborn to accept help. Just like Victoria said.

  I didn't actually want to kill anyone tonight. I just wanted to prove a point.

  Any second now, I'm gonna blink and find myself standing over a corpse - or several. Maybe I'll be halfway through it. Maybe I'll skip it and only come to after I've been caught and thrown in jail. And what then?

  Maybe I should starve myself and then throw myself into the sun.

  "Zach."

  London's voice pulled me out of my thoughts.

  I gasped for breath and tried to take in my new environment as quickly as possible.

  My heart stopped.

  Time finally slowed down as the blackout faded, and I found myself kneeling in an alleyway - no clue as to what city. Blood pooled around my legs, just like it stained my hoodie, and coated my lips and hands. I felt London's shaky hand rest on my shoulder in a cautious attempt to ground me, but nothing could calm me down from what I was looking at.

  A guy my age, lying before me, eyes wide and faded, completely motionless. The flesh of the side of his neck had been destroyed and torn. I'd slashed him all over - the claw-like tears in his clothing were proof of that. Blood was... everywhere.

  I couldn't breathe.

  I still had some on my tongue.

  "... London?" I barely managed to speak.

  "I'm here." She fought off tears for my sake, gripping my shoulder tighter. "I'm sorry. I couldn't stop you."

  I found the strength to nod, but not much more.

  The heavy silence that hung over us only enhanced all my other senses. Blood stuck to me like glue, like a stain in white linen. The metallic taste lingered in my mouth no matter how many times I gulped it down, blood caught between my teeth. I glanced down to my trembling, red hands. Some of the blood was mine; my claws had forced themselves free from my nail beds and ripped the tissue in their wake.

  My chest heaved as I burst into tears I didn't deserve to shed.

  "I really tried-"

  "I know." London knelt beside me and wrapped an arm around me, her gaze still frozen on the young life I'd taken far too soon. "I know."