Blood Pact by Courtney Maguire

Author:Courtney Maguire
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-64898-084-8
Publisher: City Owl Press

We went home in a daze. Hide fell down onto a mat with a bottle of wine and immediately set to drinking. I paced the space in front of him, my mind a vicious tangle. The more time we spent in Kyo’s house, the more I was sure he wouldn’t let us leave, yet he had with little more than a brusque grunt of dismissal. I had to wonder why. Did he have some plan for us? Had we become his tools to be used and ultimately sacrificed like that dead Hunter? I played the conversation over and over again in my head, wondering when exactly the trap had snapped closed.

I set things in motion.

The most frightening part of it all was that it made sense. The urge to protect humanity from glutinous predators wasn’t an ignoble one. I’d found a hundred different ways to justify what we did, but the end result was the same: the death of an innocent. Yet I couldn’t stand by and watch the mass genocide of my own kind.

My kind. Had I lost so much of my humanity that I didn't even identify with them anymore?

Kyo, the Hunter leader, he was my kind. Or was he? I am youkai, but not like you. Just the thought of him made my hair stand on end. The power that radiated off him. In my short experience, I'd never felt such a thing, like he could set the air on fire if he willed it. It triggered a deep, instinctual fear in me, as if all the voices in my blood cried out simultaneously. The threats he uttered in such a calm, almost congenial manner as if it were all a game.

“He's a monster,” I said more to myself than anyone else.

“If he's a monster, then so are we.”

I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering as if summer had turned to winter in a breath, and Hide beckoned to me. I stopped pacing and slipped my hand into his. He pulled me down to the floor next to him, holding me tightly against him with an arm around my shoulders, and I laid my head on his chest.

“Maybe we are,” I said.

“Hiro—”

“I felt like a monster that night,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut, “when the Hunters attacked us. Tearing apart that boy. I don't even really remember doing it. Like watching myself from across the room. Sometimes, I lay awake at night and wonder when killing became so easy. When I started caring more about the high than the price. Does that not make me a monster?”

“So control it,” he said firmly, lowering his face to look into my eyes. “Take those parts of you that scare you and break them off. Put them in a cage. Release them only when you have no other option. Make the monster a slave to you.”

I swallowed hard, pushing my nose farther into Hide's chest. I thought of all the things I'd be giving up: the mind-obliterating high, the drunken power.

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