you're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares. you feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. see, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.
It is a strange scene that unfolds before them.
He sees his daughter curled around something.
Something that skitters away from them as Adna crashes into the clearing and he follows after.
But he is not a fit parent and, seeing that his daughter is safe, although painted in blood, he forces himself simply to watch. Certainly any effort he made to draw Gospel back to them would only be met with violence.
So he lingers in the periphery, chest heaving, teeth gritted.
There is one singular stab of guilt.
A blade slipped beneath her breastbone at the sound of her mother’s panic.
Her beautiful, lethal mother.
And then she sees her father and the edges of her vision strobe with rage. The boy scurries backward, away from her, and she hisses her disdain, nostrils flared as she watches him go. She gnashes her teeth, the fangs he’d pressed his lips against.
But her fury is forgotten, her petulance falling by the wayside as he opens his mouth and lets go a stream of fire. Her rage dissolves around the soft edges of delight, the slitted eyes widen and a grin alights on her face.
He is insane, she realizes, and the realization is so delicious that she wants to thrust herself back into his space. Wants to anchor herself to his side. Wants to fuse herself to him. But she takes a step toward him and her father reaches for her, catches her baby withers between his teeth and she shrieks in protest. Writhes and hisses, her attention temporarily arrested, ripped away from the object of her desire. She rears back her head and thrashes her limbs, venom dripping from her mouth.
“I’m staying here!” she says. Bethlehem lets her go when the chaos of her limbs connects a foot with his knee.
She hurls herself across the clearing then, scurrying across the middle distance to thrust herself back into Ghaul’s orbit.
