He would kill today. Thorn was absolutely, irrevocably certain, and because of it he was crying in the shower. It’d come on so quickly, this time. Had given him no time to catch his breath. It must have been revenge, of sorts, because he hadn’t died when he’d been supposed to.

Right now, with the too hot shower water beating at his back, he regretted that. The beckoning wasn’t an itch any more. It was fire, in his stomach and his veins and his nerves. It threatened to overwhelm him, turn him brain to mush and let the darkness in. Gods, he couldn’t fight it much longer. The old skugabor turned around, grimacing at the pain, the hot water beating into fresh cuts - perhaps too deep, but something else to focus on, something to keep him sane just a little bit longer. He was still wearing his jeans, the fabric heavy with water. Hadn’t even had the time to undress, too afraid it’d get the better of him. He inhaled the steam, the heat of it. He willed it to burn his lungs. To seep into him. Something to keep control, just for a little while longer.

Could May feel his pain? Did she notice that excitement in the dark? She was in the living room, her anxious rhythm somewhere in the background of his mind. So vague - usually there was more of her, but now something else was taking over, something that was inserting red hot needles into every nerve in his body with surgical precision.

He cried, then howled, then turned the water up a little hotter still. So what if she could hear?

The dark would come for her soon enough. It wouldn’t care about how small she was, how boyish her frame still. It would break her, too, but perhaps it was easier to listen to wailing in the bathroom than to howl at the fucking insanity of it all.

Was that movement, underneath the cabinets, a swirl of dark on the floor? Not yet.

There were quick footsteps, outside the bathroom door, and frantic pounding on the wood. He heard May call his name over the hissing of the water, the pain in his wounds, the cascading of the shadows down the bathroom walls.

‘It’s only been days,’ he tried to plead, but knew they would not listen. He hated most that quiet curiosity that dark always emitted when it came for him, once he was sufficiently broken. There was a silent wondering the shadows gave off - why was he fighting so hard? Had he not been hurt enough, didn’t he know he couldn’t stop it by now? There was a second question today, another he didn’t want to answer - why hadn’t he died when he could?

And honestly, Thorn didn’t understand any more either. He could’ve spared himself this torture, the yanking on his guts, the demand to roll over and kill. He was still sobbing. From beneath the cabinets, and from between the fibres of his towers, and from the cracks between the tiles rose a darkness so thick it might as well be solid. It came for him, and he punched the wall and tried to scream, but his body wasn’t his any more.

It sucked him in with that horrid feeling of being just a consciousness, a current of thoughts slipping through the dark, out the bathroom and the building. They swept him away, through Slakshaven, but at least the pain was gone, and he was ashamed to be thankful for that. He hadn’t been taken very far when they spat him out, yanking him to his feet like a puppet, not giving him time to catch his breath or remember how to balance. A house; a home - unfamiliar to him, thank the gods - rose before him, well trimmed bushes near the front door, Christmas lights already on the roof. He had no time to wonder, to mourn. It took him, again, underneath the front door and through the hallway, upstairs, higher still. He knew there to be people, perhaps asleep, perhaps waking at the cold seeping under their doors, in these other bedrooms. He was glad for every door he passed, but the dark dragged him closer and closer to some other victim. He went up more stairs, dreading the moment he’d hold still, but the being in the dark was yanking erratically at him.

It spat him out onto his feet, which didn’t know how to be feet any more, but the puppeteer didn’t care. Here, the attic - he was too tall to stand beneath the support beams, and so the shadows made him hunch, an unoriginal monster in a cheap horror move. Frozen, across from him, stood a graying man Thorn recognized. That was the worst torture of it, when the darkness pushed him forwards and onto the man's body. Who was this, he asked himself, as his unwilling nails dug deep into the man’s flesh, and the other’s screaming in his ears threatened to deafen him.

It weren’t his fingers, not truly, he told himself when they tore into the man’s veins with strength Thorn didn’t think his body possessed. The man - where the hell did he recognize him from? - managed to grab a hobby knife from his desk, but couldn’t conjure up the strength to stab him very deep. Thorn relished the pain, the too minor punishment. The dark wouldn’t have it, though, and Thorn found himself with his hands, blackened veins and bloody nails, around the man’s neck. The undercurrent in the shadows reached into Thorn, forcing him, with a palpable anger that tasted ashen on his tongue.

How quickly he could drain a man of his life’s blood, and how long did the will last in comparison. There was still fight in the man’s eyes, the primal desperation that Thorn had seen too many times before, in too many wide-eyed people. None of them had ever managed to fight him off. Downstairs, doors slammed, and he heard panicked feet quick on wooden floors. Where they coming towards him, the old man, would he have to end more lives, tonight?

He wanted to scream, but even that the dark wouldn’t let him have, and Petr - fuck, his name was Petr - manage to slice at him again. At least he could tell May the man had cut him up and not be lying. It hurt, but it was a measly, weak pain - still the dark roared in anger around him, and Thorn brought down his teeth some place near an artery.

He could tell the moment Petr died; his weak imprint on the dark disappeared, as sudden as though Thorn had flicked a switch. He was gone, his body limp and bleeding. There were sirens in the distance, and as the dark absorbed him again, he imagined Abigail’s unmeasurable fury when she’d realize what had happened.

May had still been pounding on the bathroom door when she felt the dark rise, and scoop up the vocalist as simply as though he was a willing participant. She could tell, in a horrid, wrong way how thin he was spread and how quickly he was carried. She pried open the door’s lock, then, with a rusty screwdriver from Thorn’s kitchen drawer. There was no one there, as she’d already known, and no trace of Thorn save for the bloody knife discarded in the sink.

She was pacing in the hallway when the vocalist was spat out of the shadows, clutching his side, someone else’s blood all over him. He fell to his knees and May grimaced as his kneecaps hit the hard floor. The long-haired man looked up at her. His eyes were red, and the veins on his bare arms were blackened still. May swallowed.

‘I knew him,’ Thorn said. A silence stretched between them as May struggled to find words. There were none. She shook her head.

‘He had a knife,’ Thorn said.

And then something broke through Thorn’s carefully build up façade, that stoic mask he’d been crafting for decades. May’s eyes opened wide in astonishment as she heard the man cry.

’Come on,’ she said, walking over and helping him up. ‘Let’s get you cleaned up.’

May opened the door to Thorn’s bedroom and flicked the light on. The endless rows of black-and-white portraits on the walls made her feel shifty, watched, judged; she couldn’t fathom Thorn enjoying their presence.

’How much do you remember, afterwards?’ She sat him down on the edge of his bed.

‘All of it,’ the vocalist said, shaking now. ‘They don’t take the memories, gods, I wish they would, but they’re that cruel.’

’Oh.’ A fear coiled in her stomach, on the quickening rhythm of her still-growing itch. ‘Be right back.’

She fetched their perpetually half-empty first aid kit from the bathroom and soaked one of Thorn’s kitchen towels. When she returned, he sat with his head in his hands, shoulders shaking. May swore under her breath. The man’s calm tugging on the shadows had derided into chaos, a storm on the border of May’s consciousness that wouldn't let itself be ignored. Somehow, some of his pain leaked into her mind, too.

She knelt in front of him, and took his hands, cleaned them off. Peeled dried blood from beneath his ragged fingernails, scrubbed the rusty stains from his palms. He kept on crying, and she could tell he was screaming on the inside; she sensed the agitation in the shadows, like a spider would feel its prey get stuck in its web. Shaken, she sat back to look at the rest of him, his battered torso, the wounds. Across the webs of old scars on his torso someone had carved shallow new wounds with a desperate imprecision, but May knew Thorn wasn’t breaking down because of the pain. There was no way to tell which ones he’d made himself and which had been made by a dying man.

´May,´ Thorn said, voice unsteady and somehow still crying, ´May, you really don't have to do this. Just let me be.´

´No. You'll keep me up anyway. You shouldn’t be alone right now.’

That shut him up. Gods, boy, she thought, when is the last time someone cared for you?

‘How come you knew him?’ she asked softly, unsure if she wanted to know. She still hadn’t told him about the itch she’d woken up with the other day, the tingling inside her bones she couldn’t scratch.

Thorn nodded. His hair, full of knots and dried blood, fell in his eyes. He didn’t bother tying it back. ‘It was Petr. Did you ever meet him?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said, drenching a piece of cloth in iodine. He hissed when she reached for the first cut, but the skugabor didn’t stop her. She watched his pale, bloodied skin turn yellow from the ointment, staining her hands too.

‘He’s a photographer, lives up north from Slakshaven.’ His words came out in an unsteady, shaking voice. ‘I’d met him, before. He liked my work. He had a knife, and a family…’

‘Oh.’ May didn’t know what she had expected, and now she really didn’t know what to say. She was nineteen, damn it all, and not at all equipped to deal with this.

‘What time is it?’ Thorn asked, roughly drying his eyes with the back of his arm.

‘About eleven at night,’ May said, bandaging another cut. If Petr had managed to find a knife, it hadn’t been a very long one. Thorn leaned back, hands on the bed, tendons stretching beneath his skin. The darkness had retreated from his veins, and he looked a little more human without all the blood. The shadows were still frenzied around them, dancing on the floors and walls, and when May looked up from Thorn’s bandages, he was in tears again.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry, May, I don’t know…’

‘Is all right,’ she told him, ‘It’s all right, Thorn, you can cry if you have to. You’ve been through more tonight than anyone ever should.’

He didn’t answer, and May didn’t think the vocalist believed her.

‘Are you hurt anywhere else?’ she said and shut the first aid kit when the vocalist shook his head. She stood up and looked at him. He was staring at the ground, his tangled hair draped across his back like a widow’s veil. The man was still trembling, ever so slightly, and his pale skin was covered in even paler bandages. How long until she’d be huddled up like that? Weeks, perhaps days, she guessed by the way her blood danced whenever she thought of murder. On the wall behind Thorn the shadows coiled, in beautiful, erratic patterns. They contracted around the pair and then spread out again, darkness pooling around them, removing the oxygen from the air around them.

’Please don’t leave,’ he said, and it was an admission, of guilt, of hurt, of vulnerability. It was so unlike the Thorn she’d lived with these past weeks that she sank down on the bed beside him. He opened his mouth and shut it again. Sometime between her getting up and sitting down again his tears had stopped, but May could still practically see the pain radiating from his body. It was in his hunched-up shoulders and even in the frayed ends of his jeans.

She sat down behind him, legs nestled against his shaking, skinny back. May took the hairbrush he kept on his night stand and started at the knotted ends of his waist-length hair. He hadn’t brushed it in days, she knew. Hadn’t she seen him, pacing and terrified and focused on nothing but death? Gods, the man cared so much, hated himself so much. He’d gone to such length to postpone it all.

She didn’t think most of his fresh wounds were made by Petr.

‘Talk to me,’ she said.

‘About what?’

‘About anything.’

And he did talk; in short, tired sentences about the man Petr had been, and the man Thorn should have become. May sat, and listened, and worked the knots out of his hair. It wasn’t tiring work, but by the end of Thorn’s words she was drained.

‘What is it?’ he said, eventually, when May had stopped moving but hadn’t moved away from him.

‘I’m itching, too,’ she said, and the weight of it threatened to crush them both.