Page 10 of Secondhand Soul
Can’t love without a soul of your own. Without a heart that’s yours.
Telling myself that the soul was some sort of divine spark of life and the heart was just a rotting, reprogrammed lump of muscle in my chest doesn’t mean anything to that namby-pamby voice in my head, the one that must surely belong to someone else.
Shut the fuck up and enjoy looking. She didn’t even flinch when I joked around about her being an undead monster, too. Did she not understand it? Probably not. Probably dazed.
I jerk the car into the sparsely filled lot of the big supermarket on the other side of town, out past the schools and hospital, far from the crowded little streets where Manny’s shop was, almost as far as you could get from the little development where my adopted “family” lived.
You know what?
Drop off the squash. Wait to see Manny and Rhea. Scout for talent. Non-human talent. Gotta be a vampire babe or something. Something I can’t hurt.
Georgia Fenclan got married. She runs the coffee shop in town, and I used to go in just to look at her, a bright blonde bombshell with a hyperactive streak. Her new Orc husband probably wouldn’t appreciate it if I kept doing that.
I could go in just to look at that shy, bespectacled little strawberry blonde with the soft, plump body that I’d love to plow into. She’s all human and helps the Fenclans with catering big events.
Off-limits. Even if she can’t “see” what you are, you’ll hurt her. Tear her up with your teeth. Break her when you make lo— I mean, fuck her.
They made you to hurt people.
Never been with anyone soft.
Never been with anyone human.
There’d been a succubus and a few demons in the CrossRealms of California, dark, fast encounters when I was first free, first trying to survive the outside world and figure out how to get away from Pazcuso and whoever would want revenge for what I’d done. (In my head, such as it is, there was nothing wrong with shredding my creators-slash-captors to bits in order to escape them and their plans to use me as an undead weapon).
Never touched a human except to hurt them—until today, I guess.
Victoria felt hard in my arms, with a long, muscular torso and strong limbs. She held herself rigidly against me even when she was barely conscious. But there was a softness in her skin, layers of softness that some part of me wanted to squeeze and explore.
What the hell happened to you?
You touch one little human woman, and you’re ready to boink anything with a slit.
I storm into the store. Even though I’ve realized that only a few people ever really “see” the supernatural, I still half-expected people to gasp at my appearance today. If gladiators pushed carts, I’d have fit right in. Shirt blowing open, muscles tensed, sharp teeth bared in panic...
Nope. Everyone else in the store is moving with the same kind of violent energy, tearing through shiny tiled aisles, exiting with emergency frozen pies or sticks of butter.
I race through the aisles of a store I’ve maybe been in three times since my arrival in the summer. Where’s the juice?
There’s the juice.
Why is there a whole aisle for juices? How many fucking fruits even are there?
How much apple juice? What kind? Why the fuck are there so many kinds of apple juice? I don’t have the recipe. The recipe would be good, idiot, because it probably answers the questions that actually matter!
Probably just as well. Don’t have the paper—so can’t lose it somewhere in the store.
I clear half a shelf into my cart, eight plastic bottles of juice bouncing against each other.
Do I even have money with me?
ARGH!!
Thanksgiving sucks.
I COULD SWIM IN THIS tub—if I could move. As it is, I drag-limp-crawl-swivel onto the edge of the tub and pull the curtain behind me. I bat the water on with my good arm and let hot water soak over my naked body. I’d soak in the tub instead of letting the shower course over me, but I don’t think I could get back up—and I’m appalled at the amount of mud washing down the drain.
Cloudy thoughts swirl like the brown streaks making their way over white porcelain.
