The Blood We Crave: Part Two (The Hollow Boys, #4)

by Monty Jay

I did all of this for her. So that we could be together. And yet, she mourns him. I killed so many for her, will continue to kill them, and instead of seeking comfort in my arms, she mourns.

They are weak. Breakable. Love has exposed their humanity. Here lies the thin line between gods and monsters. They will all see—Lyra will see—that those boys they mark with divinity are simply a false claim. There is no divine right and no god to protect them. They bleed, and when they do, they will flow red.

The ache of losing him is brutal. I don’t miss him, the way you miss a pair of shoes that you grew out of, a memory of a glowing summer, or even a pet you’d lost. I do not miss him. He is missing from me. A vital organ torn from my gut. A severed limb.

My heart and soul were never mine. They had always been his, and now they belong to no one. They are lost, forgotten, alone. I tethered myself to him, and now he’s just…gone. He is gone, and his memory isn’t enough. Yet, it feels like all I have left.

“It seems you have your priorities a little skewed if you’re treating him more like a suspect instead of a missing person.”

“Until I find his body, Thatcher Pierson is our number one suspect in the murder of those girls and May Pierson. I’d get used to it now so it won’t be so difficult adding money to his books when I throw his ass in prison.”

Sweet May. Possibly the only innocent person involved in this web we’ve found ourselves trapped in. She didn’t deserve this, to die like that. Cut up. Dissected. Robbed of her heart.

I feel like my blood might set on fire as the electric hum of opportunity races through me. Wrath strikes through my veins with violent speed, and I look at Player One not as my attacker but as something far better. An outlet. All of this miserable rage and guilt finally has a place to go, given the perfect chance to quench my thirst for revenge, even if it’s for a moment.

I warned them what I would become if they took him from me. Now there is no need to fear the reaper. They should fear the woman who loves him.

“Hello, darling phantom.”

Death always seems to be that thin line cutting between Lyra and me. Always there, lingering in our space, existing between the two of us like air. Where we go, it follows.

“Do you feel that?” I ask. “Knowing how easy it was for me to leave you?”

“Remember that when you try to love me again.”

I stand there in silence, holding on to the acceptance that, yes, Henry gave her the trauma that birthed a curiosity, planted the seed of morbid desire. A hunger. A craving. But it wasn’t my father that turned Lyra into a monster. It was me.

Because I’m the ice that chills the fury in his veins. The one who let him sneak into my window when his parents were home. I’m the one who showed him how to bandage his wounds. I’m the person who let him sleep on my floor, the person who stayed awake until he fell asleep. I didn’t do it because I cared. I did it because he needed it. I’m always handling the things they need but don’t have the guts to do for themselves. Alistair’s rage, Rook’s pain, and Silas’s demons. I’m his—he knows it—just as much as he is mine, but the difference? I don’t need him. I don’t need any of them.

“What are you going to do, kill me in my sleep?” “Don’t flirt with me like that.” I smirk, watching the color of her cheeks turn pink.

He’s not allowed to have her either. No one is. Because even though I can’t have her, she’s still my ghost. She still haunts me. And every single murderous inch belongs to me.

“She said to me, ‘A child is said to be two parts of a whole. One belonging to the father and the other its mother. But,’” he says, a ghost of a smile on his lips, “‘it’s forgotten and often never mentioned that children are three parts of a whole. There is a large part that belongs to them. This piece, unlike either of their creators, is wholly oneself.’”

I know they call him a psychopath. That he is the darkness that eats the light and nothing about him is remotely human. He can’t feel. But I’ve felt his heart beneath my hands, committed the steady rhythm to memory, and I know it matches my own. It’s a pair, his and mine, created from the same flesh and muscle, cleaved into two separate bodies. That’s the thing about love. It doesn’t care if you’re toxic. If their parent murdered yours, or he’s incapable of feeling. Love doesn’t care because it takes you over. It consumes you, eats at you, and leaves you barren. It does what it wants. It takes what it needs, and it doesn’t care what it does when it leaves.

“Maybe I’d die for you, Thatcher Pierson,” I mumble. “But death is inevitable for us all. It’s what you’d do for me that matters.”

“You’d disappear again, just like you did when you were a little boy, just to keep me safe.” I push off the doorframe, turning to walk down the hallway with his eyes still on my back. “And I didn’t even ask you to.”

It’s easy to stand out amongst the world of the living, but Lyra, sweet Scarlett, she is life that spins through graveyards. A face that echoes across the dead. Beauty so divine death can’t bring himself to touch her.

Touching Lyra is the same as stroking ivory keys. Everything stops spinning, and my mind goes wholly still. There within the black-and-white of her soul exists a solace. My fingers beg to hear the music she’d make for me. It’s simply her and the piano. They know my secrets, the things the rest of the world will never.

“No tears, Scarlett. Not for me,” I say. “Save those for someone who deserves them.”

“I never got to thank you,” she whispers. “For that night. That’s how it started, the stalking. I just wanted to thank you for saving me, and I tried a few times. You were just…” She struggles to find the words, chewing the inside of her cheek to help gather them. “This intangible person. Alluring and so overwhelming. You are so beautiful that people were terrified yet refused to look away. Every time I thought, ‘This is the moment to say something,’ nothing ever came out. I was this little orphan girl that no one ever noticed, and you were infamous. I never meant for it to turn into what it did. I never meant for you to hate me.”

Lyra is the reason I make concertos for my victims. She’s the initial inspiration for my uncommon trophy. She’s why every murder I’d ever committed was inscribed into notes on sheet paper. Why every kill has three forms. The Selection, The Hunt, The Kill.

“My dislike never had anything to do with you, darling phantom. You were a reminder of what my father wanted me to become,” I tell her candidly. “Until one day, you weren’t.” “And now? What am I a reminder of now?” “All the things I can never have.”

“Your favorite artist is Henry Fuseli, and you’ve always been partial to the Dark Art movement, even though May tried to get you to love Monet. I know you accidentally broke Silas’s nose trying to get down from the school’s roof after senior prom. You write with your left hand, even though your right is your dominant side.”

“You stay for hours after weekends at the Graveyard so you can clean Alistair’s hands. And you let Rook think you hate him so he never knows that you pulled a knife on Theo Van Doren after graduation and threatened to cut off his fingers if he hit him again. I know you don’t drink or smoke, you’re allergic to shellfish, that you hate warm weather and the color yellow.”

“It’s a horrible color,” I mutter, my throat constricting.

I press a little harder into her, wanting to sink inside of her and live there for the rest of eternity. I can’t help myself, not when she’s so close. I give in just an inch, just enough to curb my hunger.

“Those are all the things you are, Thatcher Alexander Pierson. All of that and so much more.” Her hands wrap around the sides of my neck, pulling herself towards my mouth. “Things he can never take away from you.”

I never thought there would be anything stronger than the urge to kill. Until I tasted her. I’d die to be inside of her. Consuming her. Beneath her fucking skin. To feel her clench around me in ecstasy as her blood poured into my throat like ambrosia.

I know who I am. What I am capable of. Yet my mind is always left spiraling when I leave Lyra. She does this to me and always leaves me with the same question. Who am I when I’m with her?

“He looks at you like he wants to be beneath your skin.” Too late for that. Far too late.

I look at both of them waiting for me, and I can’t think of many other places I’d want to be than right here, surrounded by two people I’d never planned to meet but can’t live without. The kind of friends you dream of as a lonely kid. I lift the bottle up. “To all of us surviving.”

Thatcher was perfectly made, but I was made perfect for him.

“You didn’t realize your bed was thumping against the wall? Or that you were practically in my ear with those deprived moans?” A smirk appears just before he sinks his teeth into his bottom lip. “I’m disappointed, pet. I was hoping to find a man between those pale thighs. I’ve been itching to kill something.”

“What I would do if I caught another man touching you. Are you picturing me slicing him to pieces while he begs for his life? How I would make him apologize to me for ever laying his eyes on you. For stupidly thinking you belonged to anyone but me, pet.”

“Or is it the aftermath you crave?” He plants a knee on the bed, his strong thighs flexing. My mattress groans with the weight of him. “When I shove my fingers into that pretty cunt of yours while he bleeds out? He’ll die hearing you scream my name. Take his very last breath just as your whiny little pussy clenches around my cock.”

“You’d kill someone for simply touching me?” I

“Darling.” He traces the front of his white teeth with his tongue, a starved animal ready to feast. “I’d rid the world of men who breathe the same air as you.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, pet?”

“Let me see how soaked your cunt is. How badly she craves me,”

“Baby.” He flicks his tongue just behind my ear, nipping gently. “Show me how wet bleeding for me made you, Lyra.”

me leaking crimson is enough to bring him to his knees. I have no choice but to pull my hand from between my legs, squeezing my eyes tightly at the pain of losing my orgasm. The moonlight catches the liquid coating my fingers and palm as I place it between us. He wraps a hand around my wrist, leading my fingers to my breasts, forcing me to swipe at the liquid trickling down my chest. Only when I’m coated in both my arousal and blood does he bring my fingers to his mouth, wrapping me in his warmth. Our eyes connect as he swirls his wet tongue around me, sucking at them. I rotate my hips against his leg as his lustful gaze burns me, and this action alone is almost enough to make me come.

“Such a good fucking girl for me, pet,” he praises. “You taste like my favorite nightmare.”

“God,” he curses. “You’re drenched, fucking soaked. It would be so easy for me to slide my cock into your tight little hole, pet. Have you let anyone touch this pathetic pussy?” I shake my head in distress. “No. No. Never.” “That’s right, because it’s mine, isn’t it? I ruined you for anyone else, didn’t I? I warned you.”

“I own you, Lyra Abbott. Your body, your soul, your heart. Even if I can’t have it, I own you.”

“I wish you’d stop me from hurting you, darling phantom,” he whispers, “because I cannot stop myself.”