Evanescent Read Free Page A

needs to inhibit your thoughts. Opening my eyes, I stared at the beings in the pods, their skin almost transparent, organs red, purple and black, not beating beneath the surface of their tissue-thin skins. Enoch stalked closer with loud thumps resonating on the ground, his blistering, blue gaze cutting into me. I kept my gaze on his, eyes I once admired, adored even, eyes that held me captive with lies and deceit. My heart thumped. The rest of him had changed. Surgically gutted into his tanned, robust chest, his right arm a solid, golden metal and a mechanical shiny plate covered one side of his chest, right into where his heart should have been. With his metal fingers he held my face, staring into my eyes. The hatred spilled through them – a pure, blue inferno. This is how he was alive; he was no longer just flesh and bone. He was mechanical on the outside, as much as he was on the inside.
    “Are you ready for this Enoch?” I smirked, cheeks burning beneath his grip. Suddenly, as he released my aching jaw, a brutal force pulled against my restraints and I was shoved into the wall behind me. I did not feel the crush of bones, in fact, I had taken the attack on my body very well, withstood it even. I rubbed the life back into my cheeks where his claws had cut me. I laughed while standing. Enoch chuckled and swayed to a twisted tune inside of his own head.
    “Are you having fun trying to beat up a girl?” I grimaced.
    “You are strong.”
    “Ready to find out how strong?”
    His dark eyebrow lifted.
    I gritted my teeth.
    “Is that a promise?”
    The malice on his face was almost enough, but the mind-shift apparently needed more, something pure, over-powering as a trigger, and he knew it. He wanted me to shift. In fact, he was forcing it.
    I gasped, “You wouldn’t!”
    “Wouldn’t I?” he retaliated, grinning.
    “Why?” I swallowed back tears.
    “There is no why.” The smirk on his face dropped like he meant what I knew he was thinking, that he would hurt them just for fun, for kicks, to feel something other than whatever he was going through. No, I shook my head, I would not empathize with a monster.
    “There is always a why!” I spat back. “What did I do to you, and why are you going after the ones I care for?”
    “Oh, it’s not just them,” he said, his face unmoved from his personal sinister bliss.
    “You can’t kill Troy,” I said forcefully.
    “I know that, and I don’t need to. Because you will.” His smile twisted his face into something all-knowing, something dark.
    That was enough. I felt the mind-shift, like a match that’s been struck, hovering over the point of ignition.
    “Why are you holding back?” he asked, narrowing his eyes. “These will be the last words you will hear from me. I will take everything from you!” He bared white teeth, electric-blue eyes gutting me from a few feet away. His words sent me plunging into darkness. The force of the mind-shift was an easy one, and it triggered the blood-shift. My mind was not my own, the sweet, intoxicating cloud of its instinct poured into my awareness, twirling around every nerve inside my body. Ever so slowly, my skin glowed a purple, electric blaze.
    I said, “And this will be the last time I see you die.” My face emotionless.
    “You are beautiful,” he added, straightening and moving in for the kill. In his eyes, my radiance reflected back. Tears streamed down my face looking at myself like that, through his eyes. I almost doubled over with the revelation that I was the furthest thing from human, and it was repulsing; he had made me the monster he was.
    “Yes.” He smiled. “Your existence is why any of this is happening.”
    My flame hummed around me, my fear threatening to dampen my shift.
    He came at me, and his palm struck me right between the eyes. I yelled as I took to the air. Instinct was crippled by fear, blinded by sorrow, and the mind-shift drained completely as I hit the wall – the blood-shift faded