“I don’t-”
“Yes, you fucking do,” Lance shouts and grabs Joanna by the hair, forcing her neck back to look at him. “Yes, you do, Jo, you have that fucking fae magic shit. You haven’t been the same since your littlesick leave.”
“I don’t,” she insists, her voice cracking. “I don’t, Lance. There are no pins or any shit, I swear.”
“Don’t fucking lie to me.” His screech makes even my ear hurt. “I am not leaving here empty-handed, you selfish bitch. Where’d you put them?”
“They aren’t-” Lance twists her hair tighter and Joanna cries out. My sands vibrate and quake beneath my skin, trying to get closer to my mate, my Joanna.
“Yes, they are real. You can’t lie to me any more. That freak of a dead boyfriend proves it. Does he have them?” He shoves her head forward hard and the chair teeters. Metal flashes under the fluorescents and a gun points directly at me.
Joanna’s sharp cry echoes in my pounding skull. I desperately try to push my sands towards her, but they will not leave me. Useless, I am useless. Until my body has healed, or my sands have reformed my missing parts, I am forced to watch the horror scene play out before me.
“I know you were here on Saturday. A dirty jerk off in the johns and David from IT showed me everything. You two and that weird crystal bitch found the last of those fucking pins.” Lance seethes, his chaotic anger making my gut roll. “I really thought after last week, with Gary on this fucking project, he’d make sure you got fired so you wouldn’t get in my way again. I really did. I don’t know what you said to that fucker, but Patrick had no clue about the security breach.”
“I buried legal’s report,” Joanna admits, tears dripping off her chin.
“You what?”
“Gary submitted the report to legal about the breach so they could record it in case of an incident, but I hid it so he wouldn’t see it. I can’t-”
Joanna’s confession breaks off into a harsh sob when Lance shoves the small handgun into her cheek.
“Joanna finally has to pay for her fuck ups, and you fucking do this, huh? Can’t risk people seeing how useless you really are.” Lance shoves the barrel harder into her cheek and the chair crumbles.
Joanna’s face bounces off the floor. My body jerks. Every grain of sand I can take control of pushes out of me. I have to protect her. I have to save her. She gasps, sobs wrack her prone body as she tries to breathe, but I cannot reach her. I cannot comfort her. Her eyes meet mine, a flicker of something in her iris, but it is just as quickly gone when she blinks away tears.
“Piece of shit.” Lance pulls his foot back to kick her.
“Don’t,” I groan. My tongue forms the words and forces them through my sharp teeth. “Don’t you-”
“Shit.” He jumps and almost drops the gun. “What the fuck are you?”
Distracted at last, he steps away from my Joanna. He must have shot me in the head to make my recovery this slow. And now he has that damnable thing pointed at my chest again. He cocks the gun and shoots. His aim is poor. The bullet pierces my shoulder. Sands dribble from the hole, forcing the bullet out of me. My ichor cools quickly against my shirt.
“Your,” I roll over onto my stomach, “worst nightmare.”
My body jolts as another round crashes through my spines, but I force myself up. I move my body, swaying on my feet as I stand. My fingers move to my face and the crusted ichor that sticks to my hair. That is an amount that will take me time to recuperate, the grains of my sand still slipping from the wound.
Another shot is fired at me and I stumble back. My knee gives out and I fall back down.
“Augustine,” Joanna whimpers.
“Do not worry,mon abeille,” I say. “This is nothing.”
My sands are pouring from holes in my body and pooling lifelessly below me. Certainly not the worst scrape I have ever gotten into, but Joanna does not know that. I can taste her despair in the air. It burns, like ammonia being forced underneath my nose to wake me from a faint. I cannot escape the scent.
Lance cocks the gun again, and I brace for another shot. A plan is already forming in my head, how I am going to torture and torment his soul for eternity, twisting his dream into nightmare tales for all time. When my sands are alive again, Lance will die. He just needs to shoot me again, empty that stupid weapon into me and then it will be all over for him.
“Do it,” I command him through grit teeth. “Fucking snake.”
Vile, stupid snake.
He shoots me again. The bullet pierces my stomach, and it takes everything I have to hold myself up. My spines tremble before sinking back into my body. The sands suddenly become too much and I choke. It rushes through my head, filling the empty space and making my thoughts scramble. I collapse on my side.
“Augustine!” Joanna screeches, and I see the gold thread again.
It floats through the air in a slow pattern, like a lost bumblebee searching for a flower. I look at my human and see a true shine in her eyes I have never seen before. Honey gold eyes meet mine as a second thread flies and dances with the first. They both land on Lance’s hand, the gun jerking in his hold.
