Page 54 of Ruby
The songs we shared, both sad and happy, and that time he helped me out of a panic attack by singing. Tears fall as I realize that he was the first person in a very long time to see me have one and the first person to help me out of it with music, the very thing that traumatized me for all of those years of never being good enough.
My eyes close as a memory surfaces. ‘If your voice had been better,’ said the Witch, ‘then you wouldn’t need to use your cunt.’
I push my mother out of my mind and forcibly claw back the image of Szhe’ka.
I can still see his pretty bright-green eyes and the way they would soften whenever I lashed out at him. I hadn’t realized how much I had come to depend on him and think about him. My shoulders slump with the painful, recurring thought that I might never see him again.
My mind is still distracted when I reach down to scratch at my hand and I immediately know that something’s not right. I look down to see that the skin on the back of my arm is raised and has somehow turned blue and yellow, the same bright colors as Szhe’ka’s, except in a different pattern.
Before I can think, I let out a scared yell and attempt to scratch it off. I must be hallucinating. I have to be. My skin starts to bubble slightly like the inside of a cauldron and darken, where it was a little leathery and raw before.
Now, I watch as it reshapes into the odd structures of raised skin like Szhe’ka, but on a more delicate scale.
Another scream finds its way out of my throat when I look down at my hands; they are darkening with what I can only describe as dark blue talons sprouting where my nails should be. There is blood dripping from my fingertips, and a searing pain running up my arms.
What is happening to me? I can feel the beginnings of a panic attack creeping its way up my spine so I grab my hair tight in preparation for the torment to come.
When my hands come away, there’s a clump of bright blue-green feathers in my grasp, along with a couple strands of my ruby red hair.
The next scream is long and primal.
I find out the hard way that my little steel cell isn’t soundproof because a couple of the hunters come squelching to the window. My captor is the one that opens the door and when he takes one look at me, he shrieks.
“You dried hole. What did you do?”
I don’t know!
I can’t explain what happened. I’m still sputtering when I am dragged out by the collar and made to get on my feet.
“This was not supposed to happen; your metamorphosis was not supposed to go like this,” he screeches at me, his rage reflecting in his vicious predatory eyes.
I want to give a reason to him and to myself, but my mind is blank. I’m guessing whatever is happening to me is supposed to be some kind of change triggered by thinking of the person?
That can’t be. It sounds insane.
His black eyes glint with malice; he seems to have grown in size again.
The other ones who had followed him to my cage back away slowly, obviously as terrified of his rage as I am. He towers over all of them now by almost a foot, bringing a terrifying realization that this species’ size changes with their emotions.
I can’t do much but try to crawl backward away from him as he advances, a flipper raised to hit me.
“Come with me, whore. I—what was that?”
I heard it too—the soft snap of a branch in the bushes not too far from us. The camp is silent and when I look around, all of the other hunters are a little distance away and not paying much attention to us but the one beside me has his eyes glued to the forest, waiting for the slightest sound or movement.
In the same direction the sound came from, a flash of brown and white moves in the greenery and the hunter raises his gun to shoot.
I don’t know what comes over me or how I gather the courage or even the strength, but I throw myself toward the hunter and knock his gun away from him so that he misses the shot. I fall to my back and before I can stand up, I hear him bark angrily from above me, his eyes even more menacing than I’m used to.
“Will you ever learn to obey?!”
22
Ani
Obey?
The question breaks me out of my panic and on the heels of his question comes… rage.
