All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 23: Canine

I forced myself to keep walking towards him though. I had to know the truth even if this was all just another dream. When I finally stood before the cell, there he was sitting on a bench, only his left profile towards me. He had some cuts and scrapes along the fine bone of his cheek and he cradled his right arm against him like a broken wing.

I stood there for some time with my mouth gaping open while my mind screamed: NO! NO! NO! NO!!!

He knew I was standing there and was resisting looking at me. I could sense his...stubborn determination to make me wait before he finally cast a brief glance at me, and tears welled in my eyes when I caught the full damage on David's face. His eye was swollen shut and purple and his nose was mangled out of shape.

He looked at me with spite then turned away and spit out a mouthful of saliva and blood onto the floor between his legs. And I wasn't sure if he meant for me to take the gesture personally.

Finally, he stood slowly in his cell and walked stiffly towards me although I could tell he was fighting not to let me catch-on how difficult and painful movement was for him.

"What," David said in a hoarse gravelly voice while his face approached mine from the other side of the bars despite how painful talking was for him. "You've come to gloat?" he accused.

"No, I-" I started in a weak trembling voice but couldn't even process how to continue, "I don't even know why I am here." Yes, I do. It's because you've finally lost your mind! I screamed inside.

David laughed ruefully and grabbed the bars above his head with his good hand so he could lean to look down on me. "Don't lie. I can smell the sex of him on you," he spat, "The one advantage of a broken nose: a raw almost canine sense of smell." He looked at me with such hatred in his eyes that I shivered. I'd never experienced anyone...hating me before. "I guess when you get treated like a dog...you turn into one," and with that he spat another stream of saliva and blood onto the floor.

I raised my hand above my head and placed it gently on the bar just below his fingers so that they didn't touch but felt the all-too real heat emanating from his flesh. His eyes briefly flitted toward my hand and darkened even more than I thought possible.

"You don't understand," I began, still shaking my head, "You don't...exist...it's impossible. You can't exist."

David snorted in offense at that, "Is that your rationalization for all this." And he cast his head towards the crowded cells of prisoners, and my gaze flitted briefly to a small babe in arms of a woman behind him. Then his eyes were back on me with black bile bubbling below the surface. Suddenly his good hand reached out and wrapped quickly round my neck pulling me forward into the bar so that my forehead crushed against the bar between our foreheads. With his intensity it was little wonder his skull didn't melt right through the bars and smash into mine. His grip was tight and it hurt and my hands raced up in a feeble attempt to pry his firebrand fingers from my throat.

"I should have stuck to the plan and snapped your neck in the woods," he whispered with malice and then just as sudden he released me and I fell to my knees on the cold polished cement floor, gasping for breath. I've never experienced such pain before in a dream, which surely this still was.

When I looked back up, he was standing with his back tight towards me. I knew he would never turn around again as long as I was there, so I slowly rose and hobbled out of the room.

When I finally managed to escape the room with what felt like a hundred eyes boring holes into my back, there was a pretty woman with jet-black spring curls and a wide red mouth wearing a snug fitted grey worsted wool dress waiting for me in the tight narrow hallway I had come from. I must have borne a wild expression on my face because she gaped at me with her soft amber eyes before shaking her head clear and blinking, "He's summoning you."