Chapter 3: The Touch of Silence

POV: Neoma

The claws stopped an inch from my jugular.

They didn't just halt. They froze.

My inner ear popped. Pressure dropped. The roar that had been vibrating in Viggo’s chest cut off—not because he stopped making noise, but because the sound waves were deleted.

Swallowed. The dust motes floating in the beam of my fallen flashlight hung suspended in mid-air.

Gravity lurched. Felt backward. The crushing weight of his massive body, which had been pinning me to the concrete a microsecond ago, suddenly felt hollow. A shell without mass.

My hands were pressed flat against his chest. Right over the blackened, weeping wound.

I hadn't meant to do it. It was pure, lizard-brain terror. Muscles had locked, throwing my hands up to push him away. But I didn't push.

Something inside me pulled.

My veins turned to glass. Cold. Absolute zero. It wasn't the warm, electric hum of Barzil radiation I sometimes felt near the machines. This was a vacuum. A hole in the world opening inside my chest.

I’m drinking him. The knowledge hit like a fist to the gut.

I wasn't just stopping his movement. I was absorbing the kinetic energy of his attack. Draining the momentum right out of his muscles.

Viggo’s eyes—those terrifying, pupil-less pools of molten red—widened. The feral rage fractured. Replaced by a sudden, jarring confusion.

He tried to lunge. His body wouldn't obey. He was a statue carved of flesh and fury. Held in place by my panic.

Then the vacuum inside me found something else.

It found the silver.

The contact point where my palm met his skin began to sear. Not heat—chemical burn. Acid eating through nerve endings. A scream built in my throat. Muscles seized. No sound came out. The Silence had swallowed that, too.

Black veins erupted from beneath my skin. Spiderwebbing up my wrists. Wrong. Ugly.

I watched in horror as the bubbling, necrotic grey slime in his wound began to flow. Not out onto the ground. Into me.

It tasted like ash. Like rotten metal and ozone coating the back of my tongue. My stomach convulsed—hard, dry heaves—but I couldn't break the connection.

The Void demanded to be fed. It latched onto the corruption in his blood. Drank it greedily. Stripping the nitrate-silver away from his cells like meat from a bone.

Stop. My brain screamed it. Please, stop.

The pain was blinding. Swallowing razor blades. My vision funneled into a tunnel of grey static.

Then—snap.

The vacuum released.

Sound rushed back into the world. A physical blow. The hum of the distant city, the drip of water, the ragged tearing of my own breath—it all crashed over me at once. Ears rang.

Viggo collapsed.

His weight returned. Heavy. Solid. Crushing the air out of my lungs with a wet thud. But he wasn't attacking. He slumped forward, his forehead resting on the concrete next to my ear.

I shoved him off. Scrambled backward on hands and heels until my spine hit the turnstile.

I grabbed my throat. Gasped. Tasted bile and copper. I looked at my hands. The black veins were fading, retreating back under my skin like worms burrowing into soil. Leaving me trembling.

My skin felt tight. Wrong.

Dirty.

Violated. Not by him. By myself.

I looked at my hands, shaking violently in the dim light. The Citadel preachers always screamed that magic was a light. A gift. This wasn't light. This was hunger. A parasite living under my skin that had just gorged itself on another living thing's pain.

Monster.

The word echoed in my skull. Stripped of the Dregs' survivalist cynicism. I had just done something impossible.

Something against nature. I had eaten his sickness. Was I any better than the Feral beasts? Was this why my mother had always told me to wear gloves? To never touch skin to skin? Because she knew I was this?

I looked at him.

The gash on his abdomen was gone.

Where there had been a festering, lethal wound, there was now only an angry pink scar. Already fading to white. The skin had knit together—I had seen it move. Seen the flesh ripple and stitch itself.

"Monster," I whispered aloud. The word trembled on my lips. I didn't know if I was talking about him or me.

The giant groaned. A deep, chesty rumble. He rolled onto his back. One massive hand went to his stomach. He traced the fresh skin. His fingers trembled.

Then he opened his eyes.

The red was gone. The mindless, feral fire had burned out. In its place was gold. Deep. Rich. Terrifyingly lucid.

He blinked. Focused on the ceiling. Then slowly—predator-smooth—he turned his head to look at me.

There was no aggression in his face now. Only a profound, shattering awe. He looked at me like I was a ghost. Like I was a hallucination born of blood loss.

He inhaled deeply. Nostrils flared. He frowned. He inhaled again. Deeper. Desperate.

"You..." His voice was a wreck. Gravel grinding on glass. He coughed. Winced. But his gaze never left mine. "You..."

I scrambled to my feet. Boots slipped on the damp floor. I needed to run. I needed to be anywhere but here. I had broken the law. I had used magic—wrong magic, impossible magic—on a Highblood. If he reported this, I wouldn't just be executed. I would be dissected.

I lunged for my fallen flashlight.

Viggo’s hand shot out.

He didn't grab me. He just caught the edge of my boot. His grip weak. Pleading.

"Wait," he rasped.

I kicked his hand away. Panic overrode everything. "Don't touch me!"

He didn't try to stop me again. He just lay there in the dark. Bathed in the afterglow of his own blood. Staring at me with those intense, golden eyes.

"You..." he whispered. The words drifted after me as I turned to flee into the shadows. "You smell like... nothing."