CONTENT WARNING CONTENT WARNING CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT WARNING 
This is the most graphic chapter of Amalgama and possibly the most graphic thing I've ever written. If you are in ANY way squeamish about self-harm do NOT read this chapter. If you need a quick synopsis with all the information you'll need to read the next chapter, Elle reminisces on one of her adventures into the city and then she and Kali make out. 
Again, I repeat, there is self-harm in this chapter, it is fairly graphic, do not read this if it is going to make you uncomfortable or if you have harmed in the past. While I moderate my content pretty heavily in my other books to make sure that I handle emotionally dangerous or charged subjects in such a way that it is not triggering, this book is essentially just my springboard for artistic development. It is no holds barred, as I have indicated from the start, and if you think you need to distance yourself from this story you are by no means obligated to keep up. Thank you.)

Dylan slips into the glove of Red, the way I have seen them slip into each other. I have envied them, in the past. I remember how their bodies cling to each other even when they are not engaged in acts of intimacy. This is how people are supposed to walk down the street, together. I have seen humans do much the same.

Romance is the pallor of faces coated in make up, white wines exchanged over the usual conversational falsehoods, and hunger. That is why I arrange for things to begin in restaurants, but lately, I have begun to think it might just be easier to take people. I ask them where they live. Then I ask them to take me there. I have taken women, though they are harder to bribe. I have taken well-dressed men. Shabby men. I am looking for someone who I will not want to leave at the end of the night.

I slip out of rooms as I enter them. I do not know why I am bothering with this or what I am looking for. When I slip into the top room of the man's house, where his bed is situated under an unfurnished slanted ceiling, I scent his clothes and his sheets. It would be hard not to take in all the being that goes on in the bedroom. He could have been murdered here, for all the sensory information he leaves in his room. He is spilled all over it.

This is needlessly illustrative. The room is dark. I am the only person in it. Dylan yells up the stairs, "Elle, are you taking the bedroom?"

"Yes."

"Would you mind if Kali comes up there with you? Kind of a large part of the house to claim like that," Dylan yells. I cringe.

"You don't have to ask her like that," Kali growls from downstairs. "Elle, do you want a roommate?"

"No."

"See? Leave her alone. I'll sleep in the kitchen. Middle kids take the main room. Talked to Angel earlier, she's going to stay in the barn to watch Trace."

"And you trust that?" asks Kali.

I turn in the bed, placing the singular pillow over my head. It muffles their voices to the point where they are no longer irritating, but it is a stranger's bed, and there is no man besides me with a hand around my waist or breast. I stare at the stairs, which descend into light, and angle my gaze back to the unyielding darkness of the rugged ceiling.

I am thinking of our last night in the city, when they caught me.

---

This time I do not pull myself back when the night is over. He speaks of beautiful things and the lights of the city, which has been his for twenty years, since he started his career. His breath is harsh with beer even though he partook in very little alcohol tonight. He grabs my arm when we are on the streets and is surprised when I grab him back, my lithe arm almost pulling his out of its socket. His breath chokes in his throat. All the dull lights in the city flare up at once.

We are both pulling each other with charmed dialects into the bed, wrestling each other all the way down. He thinks he is winning against me. I have wanted this since the second I pulled him out of the crowd. I writhe the way he wants, falling beneath him, and his breath grows heavier, smelling like fermented wheat and death. I can sense my own body prickling up and rotting, straining to get free.

A woman flicks on the lights. She is enviably slender and her mouth opens, brows sliding back, and she asks the man what the hell he thinks he's doing. When her eyes fall on me, she cries, "What the fresh hell is that?"

I retract my mandibles into my mouth, squeezing the viscera back beneath the flesh where my body had begun to rupture. A thin screen contracts and slides back over my pupils, and I feel arms shoot back into my sides. I get to my feet, his heat retreating, and say to the man on the bed and the woman in the room, "You were making love to each other. A stranger never entered this room." I keep my eyes on him, trying to will the heat into myself, but I can not make it stay. "It disappoints you both, but it has been like that for a long time."

Red busts in and finds me on the streets where he can prove nothing, Dylan by his side, snarling, snivelling cur with Red's hand on one of his shoulders. I need little to convince them I was doing nothing that they can prove.

---

The man we killed has an unpleasant house.

A red light signals that we are back into the three-number times, which are deep in the morning where nothing that lives by day should be awake. I recognize the light from houses. I sleep on the side of the bed without the clock whenever possible. It reminds me that there is somewhere to be.

I get to my feet, not usually given to memory, and move into the kitchen. A few of them are stashed in the corners, resting in chairs with their heads on the table. Mimsy is on the floor. Kali's hair touches Dylan. Red is limp on the ground, the two of them touching him on either side. I step back from the kitchen with a knife from the block. It makes a long, hollow noise as it exits and hangs in the dark. I bring it up with me into the room and set it next to the clock.

The house resounds with machines clicking away in the basement.

It is imperative that I feel something. I do not remember how to evoke it of myself. If humans can not, if the others can not, I will draw it out of myself. I reach for the knife and swing down across the arm.

The skin does not respond properly. It cuts open like store bought meat, revealing rose petal pink. There is no blood. There is no bone. My head buzzes with new sensation. It is not

comforting.

I run the knife back through my arm. There is no human flesh in sight. There is only a lack that draws arms out of my back. I grip the knife in new arms, manifesting weapons, and cut myself with myself. The scars begin to fill themselves in, flesh folding back into flesh, and the arms drop from my back. I have assuage nothing. My Veritas eyes, multifaceted, scan the room with insect fear, and I feel the person coming up the stairs in my bones. My moan is practiced. I am hoping for some other reaction but my eyes are dry and alien.

I should not be hoping.

Kali flicks the lights on, sees me, and then turns them back off. Her face has lost its usual sneer. Sincerity does not suit her. "Do you need--" Kali asks.

A knife hits the wall beside her. She freezes up.

Charmspeak overwhelms my voice. "Kiss me."

Kali steps forwards in a trance and leans in to my face. She runs a dark hand down the side of my face and settles it at my chin, lifting it upwards so that she can kiss me. I feel myself pricking up towards her, all my arm flesh moving as it wraps itself around her. I drag her into me with fingers of sweet-talk, with flesh, whispering the thing she wants to hear with charmspeak and without it. "I want you." It is a lie on both sides. I feel as much as I did in the room with the man. The heart is a thing that supplies blood to the body. It is mute. The body wants a little, and even then, it is not what it was made for.