Voracious - Alice Henderson [44]
“I began to get completely absorbed with it. I didn’t have to fear death anymore and became obsessed with that fact. I even tried to kill myself in a few different ways, just to see if it would work. It never did. But I’ve longed to die a few times over these last centuries. I just didn’t want the responsibility anymore. I just couldn’t keep on hunting him fruitlessly, year after year.”
They sat together for several long moments.
“What is he?” Madeline asked at last.
Noah shook his head. “I don’t know. He’s either completely nonhuman, a creature all his own, or he’s a man like me—a man who was attacked by the same kind of creature, a long, long time ago.”
“Why long ago?”
“Because what you’ve seen me do—the claws, the eyes—has taken me two hundred years to develop. At first I couldn’t even do that. I’d try to grow claws, and instead freakish things would happen. Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to undo them for a while. Like once I grew fingernails in my leg, and another time a finger sprouted out of my stomach. It was excruciating learning how to control the power, and I still know next to nothing. I think if I’d gotten a larger dose of his blood, I might have more power and be able to control it better, like him. He can shape-shift, adopt the features of other people, change his flesh to metal. If he was ever a man, he was so thousands of years ago.” He paused. “But there’s something else that makes me think he’s nonhuman.”
“What’s that?”
“He eats people. Has a terrible appetite for them. But I don’t feel anything like that. This change that’s happening—it isn’t bringing with it a desire to eat human flesh. And maybe that’s because I was human to begin with but he wasn’t.”
“Or maybe,” Madeline added, “it’s because that change hasn’t happened to you yet.”
“Don’t say that!” he snapped. “I’ll never be like him.”
She was taken aback. “I’m sorry,” she said after a pause. “I didn’t mean it like that … I know you never would have …” She thought of Noah cradling his love in his arms as she slipped away, and immediately regretted what she’d said.
“Whatever he was to begin with, creature or human, he was evil. I’m sure of that. And I’m not like that.”
“I didn’t think you were, Noah. I know you’re not. You saved me, remember?”
He closed his eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be so defensive. It’s just … I’ve asked myself that same question so many times. ‘Am I going to turn out like him?’ I have to tell myself no. And I have to keep believing it.”
Madeline looked at him intently. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like for him … to be aging and not know how he’d turn out, if he’d become a beast, to lose someone so special and live hundreds of years without her. “I’m sorry for what you went through,” she said, and the words felt inconsequential in the face of such loss. But she could understand what it was like to be different, to be a social freak. And Noah was hiding it from her, just like she had hidden her own ability. But now he’d been honest with her. And maybe she should return the favor. “Noah,” she said, after they’d been quiet for a long time. “I lied before when I said I didn’t have any exceptional talents.”
He looked at her with surprise. “You did?”
She looked down. “Yes. It’s just that I came out here to get away from it … the negative attention, the imposed segregation. I just wanted to be normal.” She sighed, thinking about the traumatic experiences of the last two days. “It hasn’t been terribly successful.”
Noah arched his eyebrows with curiosity, watching her expectantly.
She was silent for a moment, thinking how best to tell him.
Finally he urged, “What exceptional talents do you have?”
“Well … give me your watch.