Chapter 4: The Taste of Stolen Knowledge

Chapter 4: The Taste of Stolen Knowledge

The world narrowed to the space between Dahlia and her father. The writhing wallpaper, the sickly light, the impossible length of the corridor—it all faded into a peripheral blur. There was only John’s face, his expression of shock curdling into rage, and the desperate, primal command screaming through her veins: end it.

Her lunge was clumsy, more of a desperate fall than a coordinated attack. John, for all his arrogance, reacted quickly, raising a forearm to ward her off. It was a mistake. It brought his arm directly to her mouth.

Her teeth closed on the sleeve of his expensive cashmere sweater. The fabric tore, and then she bit down. Hard.

There was a sickening grating sensation, the sharp points of Shelby’s eyeteeth scraping against bone. The immediate taste was coppery and hot, the salt of blood flooding her tongue. But then, something else surged through her jaw, a bolt of psychic energy so potent it made her vision white out for a second. It wasn't just a taste of blood; it was the taste of him. Of his boon.

An avalanche of stolen knowledge poured into her. She felt the greasy satisfaction of a perfectly told lie, the cold thrill of hearing a subordinate’s denial and knowing, with absolute certainty, that it was false. She tasted twenty years of petty deceptions, of business deals won through supernatural insight, of a power he had not earned but wielded with smug entitlement. It was a torrent of bitter, corrupted information, and her mind recoiled from the sheer filth of it. The prosthetic in her mouth hummed, not with Shelby’s love, but with a hungry, righteous fury, siphoning the very magic that animated him.

John didn't just cry out in pain. He screamed, a high, thin wail of disbelief and terror. He stumbled back, clutching his arm, his eyes wide not with physical agony, but with a profound, soul-deep confusion. He looked at his own hand as if he’d never seen it before. The silver tongue, the infallible lie detector—the core of the man he’d become—was being ripped out of him through the two small wounds in his forearm.

“What… what did you do?” he stammered, his charismatic authority gone, replaced by the panicked bleating of a common cheat who’d just been caught. He collapsed to his knees, his body beginning to tremble uncontrollably.

Dahlia had no time to process her victory.

A whisper of displaced air was her only warning.

Mary moved. She didn't run or leap; she simply flowed. One moment she was ten feet away, her face a mask of horror. The next, she was on Dahlia, a blur of motion and violence. The preternatural speed Shelby had warned of was a horrifying reality. An impact like a freight train slammed into Dahlia’s side, lifting her off her feet and throwing her against the wall of the corridor. Her head cracked against the plaster, and the world spun in a nauseating kaleidoscope of diseased-looking flowers.

“You little bitch!” Mary shrieked, her voice no longer a silken purr but a feral snarl. The porcelain doll was gone, shattered. In her place stood a thing of terrible, ageless rage. Her flawless face was twisted, her eyes burning with a cold, predatory light. “You ruined him! You ruined everything!”

Dahlia scrambled to her feet, her ribs screaming in protest. Mary was on her again in an instant, her hands surprisingly strong, fingers like steel claws digging into Dahlia’s shoulders. She slammed Dahlia against the opposite wall, the breath rushing from her lungs in a painful gasp. The silver locket around her neck was crushed between her chest and the wall, its delicate chain snapping. It clattered to the floor, a tiny, forgotten casualty.

This was the real fight. John’s power had been passive, mental. Mary’s was raw, physical, and overwhelming. Dahlia was a university student; Mary was a monster in a human shell. She dodged a grasping hand, ducking under a swipe that would have broken her jaw. The air whistled where Mary’s fist passed. It was like fighting a phantom.

Mary laughed, a cruel, breathless sound. “Did you think you could win? Shelby was a fool. She gave you a trinket. The Collector gave me eternity!”

She grabbed a fistful of Dahlia’s dark, wavy hair and yanked her head back, exposing her throat. Dahlia cried out, clawing at Mary’s wrists, but it was like trying to bend iron bars. Mary’s face was inches from hers, her perfect smile a predatory sneer, her eyes dancing with a vicious, triumphant light. Her gaze dropped once more, with that same hungry intensity, to Dahlia’s mouth.

“I’m going to pull those ridiculous teeth from your jaw,” Mary hissed, her vanity, her weakness, making her gloat when she should have finished it. “And then I’m going to tear out your tongue so the Collector can’t hear you scream.”

It was the opening. The one and only chance she would get.

With all the strength she had left, Dahlia stopped pulling away and threw her head forward. It wasn't a lunge this time; it was a desperate, snapping bite, like a cornered animal. Her aim was clumsy, but true. She missed the offered throat, her teeth sinking instead into the soft flesh of Mary’s shoulder.

The second taste was entirely different. It wasn't a flood of information; it was a flood of sensation. She tasted stolen time, the ghost of twenty years that should have marked Mary’s face with lines but hadn't. She tasted a cold, hollow vanity, the terror of aging, the brittle pride of a beauty preserved in amber. It was like biting into spoiled fruit and ancient dust, a flavor of rot beneath a perfect, unblemished skin. The prosthetic hummed again, a greedy, discordant note, tearing away the unnatural vitality that held Mary together.

Mary’s scream was a thing of pure, unholy terror. She recoiled, throwing Dahlia to the floor. But the damage was done. The backlash was instantaneous and horrific.

She began to shake, her unnaturally graceful movements becoming spastic, her limbs jerking like a puppet with its strings cut. John, still on his knees, was now babbling incoherently, his eyes vacant. But Mary’s transformation was far more grotesque. The timeless perfection of her face started to crack, literally. Tiny fissure lines, like those on old porcelain, spread from the corners of her eyes and mouth. Her flawless skin began to pale, then grey, losing its luster. Her lustrous hair seemed to dull, the color fading as if in a time-lapse video.

Both of them were on the floor now, writhing. Their screams were thin and reedy, the sounds of souls being foreclosed upon. The air in the impossible hallway crackled with a palpable, invisible energy, the stench of ozone growing thick and cloying. The boon, the magic they had bartered for, had become a poison. Ripped from its source, it was now consuming them from the inside out. The psychic backlash of a broken contract was a spectacle of pure agony.

Dahlia pushed herself into a sitting position, her body a constellation of bruises, her breath coming in ragged sobs. She watched, horrified and transfixed, as the two people who had given her life were unmade by the very forces that had sustained them.

Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped.

The screaming ceased. The convulsions ended. John and Mary Thorne lay still on the grimy floor.

The silence that fell was absolute. It was deeper and more profound than the grief-filled quiet of Shelby’s apartment. It was a vacuum, a void where sound itself had ceased to exist. The sickly yellow light from the bare bulb flickered once, twice, and then went out, plunging the corridor into a darkness that felt solid.

And in that chilling, complete silence, a new presence made itself known.

It wasn't a sound. It was a shift in the quality of the darkness. A shadow in the far corner of the hall, a patch of black deeper than the rest, detached itself from the wall. It began to coalesce, to rise, gathering the shadows to itself. It was a hulking, vaguely humanoid silhouette that seemed to absorb what little light remained, a figure of pure, negative space.

Dahlia felt, rather than saw, the weight of countless eyes watching her from within its form.

A voice entered her mind, not through her ears, but directly into her skull. It was a layered chorus of whispers, gravel, and the hiss of static.

A default, the voice rasped, a sound of stone grinding against stone. How very… irregular.