The headaches are getting worse. At night she dreams of old seas, older than time, out of time. She dreams of teeth, and waves.

.

She’s always had a few stretch marks at her thighs, under her arms. They’re old and faint, spiderweb white from a time when she was growing too quickly for her body to keep up. She likes them—they’re the only scars she bears from something other than violence.

But they’re old, familiar, so it takes her a while to notice how much they’ve widened, deepened, her skin sliced to her knees, up her shoulders. The color is wrong too—the mottled yellow of a bruise, of things broken, and infected. She keeps an eye on them after that, watches as they darken to purple and then black, like ink and sin.

She thinks of saying something to Nick, but doesn’t know what she’d say.

They crack open during a hunt, oozing thick, tarry blood that stains all the way to her jacket. She doesn’t notice until afterwards, when she races through a shower (she drew the short straw, no hot water for the last in line) and then finds herself staring at open wounds.

It looks like something was trying to claw her way out from under her skin.

.

Alex has not been afraid in such a long, long time that she forgot. It feels like drowning, like sinking into the cold and dark with salt on her tongue, and she forgot. Forgot how. How to. How…

She’s forgetting a lot of things, these days.

.

(breathe)

.

People have stopped looking like people to her. There’s no spark of recognition there, no rush of fellow feeling. They’re nothing like her, just dolls, hollow dolls made of candy glass and blood, and she wants to crack them open and lick the inside.

She knows she’s not supposed to, but can’t remember why.

.

She has the conversation in her head a thousand times, brings it up a thousand different ways. Shows Nick the wounds, or tells him about the headaches, the dreams; how good a human heart would taste to her right now. (She thinks about that a lot, about burying her teeth in innocent people’s flesh and eating and eating until she is warm and full and sated. She’s so hungry.)

Maybe she starts with the way her reflection doesn’t move with her. Sometimes it smiles by itself. Sometimes its eyes are black.

Maybe she starts with the voices.