She was suddenly yanked to the side and she stumbled after the pull, halfway rag-dolling.

Something was shoved into her hands. She looked down and wondered if maybe she was having a stroke, because there’s an apple juice box in her hands? Why was there an apple juice box in her hands? She just saw someone decapitate—was it decapitation if it was a yoink instead of a cut—themselves and there’s a fucking apple juice box in her hands.

“Drink,” someone said, and her hands moved on autopilot, taking off the straw and jabbing it against her thigh to cut through the plastic and stick the straw in the foil.

She stops there again. A hand gently grabs her wrist and moves the juice box up to her mouth and she drinks.

The sweetness got to her brain first, and then black dots clouding her vision she didn’t realize were there started to clear up. She blinked, and once her brain processed the view, that being of the city, without glass and bars, just open air, the chill of wind brought her fully back.

“Am I on a roof?” She gasped. “Why am I on a roof, who’s roof am I on?” She twisted around frantically to see Azriel next to her.

She blinked.

“Why are we on a roof?”

“Seth has a key to the roof and I made a copy,” they said. “And it’s the school roof.” Their eyebrows rose. “Do you go onto random roofs often?”

“…yes,” she admitted. “It—it calms me down.” The nausea and vertigo reminded her that she was alive.

“Huh. Well, Seth would like that.” They sat down and pulled out another juice box—where did they keep getting those? “I brought you up here because you looked like a zombie, and I figured you’d like to return to the living in relative solitude.”

She glanced at her juice box, which had the life squeezed out of it in her white-knuckled grip. “And the juice box?”

“Sugar makes everything better. And drinking stuff apparently reboots people’s ability to breathe normally.” They tapped two fingers against their temple.

“Thank you.”

Silence befell them, and unlike in the library, it felt terribly awkward.

“You’re taking this awfully well, all things considered. Dullahans freak everyone out, no matter what we are.”

“Sorry?”

“Morgan.” They tilted their head. “The redhead?”

“Oh. Yes, she’s in one of my classes.”

“…and she pulled off her head,” they said slowly. “I think that’s the important bit.”

Was that what happened?

The memory came back to her, mostly the sounds, and Emi felt queasy.

Tendons fraying/muscles rotting/organs gushing/nerves snapping

“Do you have more apple juice?” She asked weakly.

They once again pulled one out of seemingly nowhere. She sat down shakily and punctured the box.

She decided she was not going to think about Morgan. Too much going on there, and not enough mental stability on her part.

“Do you want to talk about—“

“No,” she said quickly. “No. Just, uh, tell me about you, I guess.” People loved talking about themselves. And she needed to not think or talk about the past ten minutes.

“Alright then. I’m Azriel, the Ouroboros.”

The what.

“The what?”

“The Ouroboros.” They grinned. “Also known as the Endless Serpent. I’m not quite as well known, considering there’s only one of us at any given time. And also because humans seem to love the humanoid monsters over the rest of us.” They rolled their eyes. “The vampires will never forgive Stephanie Myer for that one. And the shifters are just annoyed that it’s only the wolves that get shown. Anyways—“

There was a strange series of gusts of wind, along with accompanying beating noises and the smell of French fries.

“Oi! Azzy!” Came an unseen voice, “I got your apple juices!”

A shadow formed on the cement in front of them, getting bigger rapidly before something slammed onto the roof. Emi let out a small scream and scrambled backwards.

The thing stood up. Gray skin, textured like the concrete she was sitting on, with a few cracks filled with copper here and there, bronze in thin strands on its head as if someone had made a full scalp of hair out of metal, and wings. Big, webbed wings that somehow both looked leathery and stony.

Amethyst eyes—quite literally amethyst, as in the rock, blinked down at her.

“Oh, it’s the crazy girl.” He turned back to Azriel, holding up four bags with grease stains and the McDonald’s logo. “Apple juice.” He had large fangs sticking out from his lips, seeming to be made out of marble.

And that.

She didn’t know if it was the McDonalds or the juice or the memory of Morgan deciding that it was going to burst back into her mind despite her forgetting on purpose triggered by the winged monster in front of her.

But she snapped.

She leaned over from where she was sprawled on the ground, braced one hand on the stone, and vomited.

Apple Juice

0 Comments