Chapter b Amnesia

Iggy opened his mouth to answer, but no sound came out. This subject was so rarely talked about. It was not only a fear, but a lifestyle of hiding and being out of sight at all times. The injury that had plagued him for most of his life; there was a rule not to even mention it, but now that disability was disappearing in all sense he felt responsible to talk about it before he forgot it entirely.

His face dropped a shade. He'd never really discussed it with anyone before. In an attempt to explain himself, he lifted his left arm and pulled his dirty sleeve up to his elbow. The place where his debilitating scar was; it had become nearly nonexistent, but he still felt it there. Courageously, he pledged it. He presented the part of himself that brought him great pain and embarrassment. It was his red beating heart, and he showed it with dignity. For a moment, he was his own hero.

Emi struggled to see anything there. She leaned in, took one long look with narrowed eyes, and laughed at the tiny smudge of shiny scar tissue on his left wrist. "Is that all?" she asked. "That scar is almost gone! You don't have to worry about such stupid things anymore! We're practically immortal, now."

Iggy could feel his blood pressure rise. His head welled with weight, his face flushed warm, and his mouth dried up further. "What the hell do you mean?!" he growled in a tone of voice that instantly sobered her up. "I've lived my entire life severely handicapped!" He jerked his sleeve down and hid his arm behind his back. "Don't you have some sort of empathy towards that?"

"Well, if it's so important to you, tell me where it's from, and I'll help you settle your grudge."

He looked past her across the room at the closed bathroom door and swallowed hard. "One of them did it to me."

She cocked her head. "And you don't remember who?" He shook his head. "When did this happen?" Sadly, he remembered no date or time, just the danger. "OK, you're telling me that you had a scar that is gone now, that was from something that 'one of them' did to you sometime probably long ago? And you're telling me this, why?"

Was she stupid? Or was it him? He couldn't tell.

Before he could decide, she snagged his hand and gave him a little tug. "That's enough. Change your clothes, or don't change your clothes. It doesn't matter. Let's go. I'm very thirsty." He stood his ground against her pull and she glared at him, lowering her eyebrows with each attempt until she scowled, "come on! I know that you're thirsty, too!"

"Leave me alone, dammit! I can't go!" He pulled back. "It's only the second day of my new life and I'm already a mass murderer. I don't want to be like that!" She dropped his hand and he fell a step back.

"Oh, that's right! That's exactly what you are!" Confidence hardened her expression as she brought her fingertip up to her mouth, drawing her skin closer to her bottom sharp tooth.

Panic eroded all of Iggy's fierceness and he held up his hands, already begging. "No! Don't do that!" But then, he heard her tooth splice into her fingertip. Scrape. Squish. He closed his eyes as tight as he could. He fell onto his knees and cowered down, holding onto the floor as if he were to be pulled up off of it. He could smell the drop roll out of her tiny cut and run down along her finger. The red was coming and it was going to get him, it was only a matter of time.

All he knew was that she had gotten him down to the feeding rooms, but he didn't remember how. The only thing he did remember was the blind happiness that he got from drinking human blood. It was ecstasy that welled in his chest and caused his limbs to tremble with excitement. It was tasty, sweet, honey-like, and he would have rather bathed in it than to see the sun ever again. It knit together all of the other perfectly sweet things in his life. Oh, he loved it so. Nothing better than it. No substitutions. And binging on it was the only thing that he wanted to do.

Then, without warning, the sweetness turned into something extremely salty. He swallowed once, twice, but it was so salty that he'd become even more thirsty if he willingly took in another gulp. The noisy pattern of shhh, shhh, shhh, returned to him, and became louder and louder. Like a bubble floating up to the top of a lake, surfacing, he came out of the trance. Out of the red.

When he came to, he was lying in the hallway staring up at his brother Baine, whose forehead glistened with beading sweat that flowed through the creases of his stressed expression, dripping once or twice from his chin. His jaw was locked shut as if he were tolerating immense pain but wouldn't say so.

Every one of Iggy's sharp teeth was hooked into the fleshy underside of Baine's forearm. His jaw was clamped closed so tight that if it weren't for Baine's bones, Baine might have lost a chunk of flesh. There in the corner of his eye, Iggy could see Baine's balled up fist and he could feel tiny hairs under his blood soaked tongue. Over Baine's shoulder, Emi leaned near. Her mouth was moving, trying to tell him something. She sure did talk a lot. He refocused, struggling to hear what she was trying to say.

Then, it came to him, abruptly and intrusively. She was hollering, "close your eyes! Close your eyes! Close your eyes!" He forced his eyelids shut and simultaneously his jaw released. As soon as he lessened his hold, Baine unhinged the sharp teeth and drew his injured arm into his own chest. His face was less tense because the pain was gone, but still wavy, harboring vehement worry.

Iggy blinked rapidly, rubbing his burning eyes with the back of his hands while attempting to sit up all at once. He sucked the blood left over from in between his teeth and swallowed. "Oh my god, my eyes are burning! Just burning! What happened? Oh my god! Where am I?" His vision was too blurred now from collecting tears to see, but he could smell the unmistakable salty iron all around him.

As he sat further up, he glanced down and saw that his clothes had been changed into the white ones. They weren't clean anymore, though. They were stained with hundreds of tiny dried blood splatters. He pinched the fabric between his brown sticky fingers. "What… When did… My clothes?"

As he came up onto his elbows, the shadows trailed each of his movements, distorting the light in the hallway like a hand laid over a light bulb. If it weren't for the clothes, he would have been long gone from sight.

At the end of the hall, a small group of about five people watched him, Baine, and Emi from behind the corner with looks of horror plastered on all of their faces. Even over the distance, the shimmering blue, green, and yellow in Iggy's eyes were hypnotic, yet alarming. In a confused urgency, he observed his surroundings and his eyes flashed like the colorful scales of a venomous snake.