SLEEPSONG (BoyxBoy)✔️

Chapter 88

Chapter Eighty Eight

Panic.

My hands shook, blurred by tears as I smoothed blood-soaked hair from his distorted face... I could hardly tell the color of the strands anymore thanks to the smears of blood and gore that decorated him like a macabre child's finger paints. Red bubbled out of his mouth and poured down his jaw, and when he coughed, flecks of his blood splattered against my cheeks and lips.

"No," I whimpered, not quite believing what I was seeing. "No, no, please, you can't-"

He coughed again, and a broken hand with long, crooked fingers cupped my face.

"Aeri..."

"Shush, you have to stop talking! You need to rest, you can't move, you-" I babbled.

"Aerin," said the faceless man, wide blue eyes full of love and terror and urgency; the life slowly bled out of those eyes and the hand slackened fell to the dirty ground. "Run, boy... RUN!"

With a final cough, those pupils shrank... and then breath escaped his lungs. The blue eyes stared at nothing, looking through me, and all I could do was sit there in horror. Recognition slid into my stomach, followed by a cold creeping wave of ice, and I almost remembered. I reached out, submerged underwater, finding it hard to move or see.

Everything was slow, leaning was a struggle that took hundreds of years. I cried out in anguish, wanting to touch the eyes, to wake them up, make them blink.

Those were my eyes.

Those eyes were mine!

They had to wake up!

They had to blink! They had to--

"Aerin... come on, kid. Open your eyes."

HE HAD TO BREATHE--

"Aerin!"

I sat up in the dark and tried not to retch, nausea overtaking me.

I clamped my hands to my face as a wash of agony sparked through my brain, making my lungs skip and stutter and my body convulse. I shivered, muscles jerking, and then all of those awful sensations passed. I was left only with the feeling of a hot hand between my shoulder blades.

Another was patting my arm.

Who was he? I foggily wondered, not lowering my hands as the harsh, gruff, insistent and yet somehow nostalgic voice echoed inside my head. Who did those eyes belong to? Why did I know them? What happened to me back then and how... did he die? I don't understand.

I shivered as another wave of nausea passed over me and disappeared into the gloom.

"You okay, boy?" Richard's voice asked, and a jolt went through my brain, shocking me.

Boy?

Boy...

'Run, boy... RUN!'

My head flew up and I stared down the long hall with sightless eyes.

I was frozen, muscles locked up.

I could remember the dream this time. I remembered every detail. The blue eyes, the feeling of horror and pain and tears, touching his bloody hair. A chill ran down my spine and I swallowed, irises dancing back and forth as I processed what I could and couldn't recall.

"Aerin!" Richard growled, and my eyes found his; he was looking at me with a glare, knotted beard a tangled mess, eyes narrowed and yellow. "Are you all right?"