Chapter 46.

Investigation.

Selina Morgan.

Time/Area: August 2nd-3rd, 2013. NYC

Almost 2 hours before previous chapter...

Ugh.

It didn’t make any sense.

Even as I stared at all the pieces, it didn’t make any sense.

Here I was, at freaking 11:50 at night, obsessing over my…freaking weird boyfriend.

I fell back onto my bed, staring into the roof of my bedroom instead of my new [albeit disturbing] hobby on the far wall.

“You’ve lost it, Selina..” I told myself, sitting up on the white mattress.

Feeling stressed, I took a moment to look around my self designed room, temporarily distracting myself to get a breather from what was behind me.

My eyes ran up the white fuzzy carpeting plastered onto the floor, tracing the navy blue zig-zags painted over the bristles until I was looking at my door.

It was adorned with random sketches on graphing paper I had made when I was bored, displaying what I knew I did best.

Architecture.

I loved…architecture.

Bridges, arches, sidewalks, skyscrapers, whatever…I loved it all.

But that wasn’t just obvious from my door.

I smirked, moving my eyes a little to the right.

From there, a loooong table stretched to the side until it hit the corner of my much too wide room, single handedly supporting rows and rows of my best work since I was five.

From the part closest to the door, miniature creations from elementary school stood proudly, and even though it looked like loads of crap to me now, it made the level of progression throughout the rest of the table incredibly obvious.

It acted as a sort of timeline for me, and more importantly, a little escape from the present.

Whenever I didn’t like what I was dealing with, it helped that I could just go back to the past.

Start from the present…

I let out a relieving sigh,

And just go back.

Brooklyn bridge out of Popsicle sticks…nice.

Romanesque church…boring, but accurate.

Gothic cathedral…way better than Romanesque.

A bunch of models of random spots in the city…

A random model of the entire..oh.

My eyes skimmed over a small, clay built, model of New York at the beginning of the timeline, my heart skipping a beat.

That was a gift I had made for a mother’s day craft in kindergarten.

Not random.

As it would seem, even the past sometimes wasn’t so pretty to look at.

I sighed, figuring that was enough of an escape as I dreadfully turned to the other side of my room.

The side that now made me so glad that Dad never bothered to come home often, and the side that made me thrilled that my dad’s hired ‘nanny’ was currently binge watching Gilmore Girls downstairs in our movie theater.

On this particular wall of my room, absolutely none of my architectural work could be seen.

Instead, a giant bulletin board took up the space, red string tied around safety pins sticking various notes, pictures, files, and other stuff from left to right.

And who was the topic?

Damien.

“Ugh,” I groaned, figuring I had better run through everything again before I inevitably reached the conclusion I kept reaching.

I started from the far left of the board, only three notes plastered right on top of one another.

On the top note was an acronym, and the bottom two were just words.

E.R.L.

Stabbed.

Symptoms.

E.R.L .

I began to follow the chain of strings.

Electric…regulating…liquid.

It was a substance that my dad developed to stabilize one of their many laser involved projects.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

And it was also the thing that jumped into Damien’s back during that whole ‘phone’ fiasco a while back.

Damien claimed he got his powers from E.R.L, and that was where my problems started.

Like…seriously…what?

How was a puddle going to give him monster-killing abilities?

That would have to be some stabilizing agent, and the tone at which Damien told me this just wasn’t…trustworthy. But if that wasn’t where he got his powers, where did they come from? And exactly when did he get them?

Which brought me to the second note.

Stabbed.

I shivered a little, not really wanting to revisit that day at the school again.

But it was vital to the conclusion, so I suffered on.

Amidst the chaos of that day, Damien wasn’t the only person who was stabbed.

The janitors were, and they turned into…smaller monsters.

So yes, my question was now…did the powers stem from a monster?

Now, during my first run through of my bulletin board, I was willing to base the idea that Damien wasn’t infected on the E.R.L…that maybe it had saved him somehow…but I wasn’t so sure anymore.

My strings started forming tangents- ideas that I had slapped on after the initial string of thoughts ended.

The first time I heard Damien’s voice shift was at the hospital. The day he…found out about his parents, and the day after he was stabbed.

Why was that important?

Well, if I was still not buying that the E.R.L directly gave him powers, and if I was shaky on the idea that the E.R.L prevented him from being infected, then how could I explain the voice?

Or...anything, really.

Which finally rounded to the third point: symptoms.

Arrow proof…super strength…weird electrical powers…deep vibrational voice.

I sighed.

It was almost so obvious it hardly felt like a mystery.

‘Did his powers stem from a monster’?

No….no no no no.

I paused.

Yes….yes yes yes yes.

It made too much sense, especially with all the side stuff I had charted.

Stuff like whatever ‘feeding’ nonsense went down at his house, or the way electric appliances behaved around Damien. He literally created interference, just like monsters did.

But I had only one question, and Melissa had brought this up once: if Damien was a monster- he definitely should’ve looked different, right?

I looked at the end of my long path of red string, going up from the final point labeled ‘monster?’ to a tangent that looped back to the first point.

E.R.L .

I had thought about this before.

What if the ‘Electric Regulating Liquid’ was actually somehow ‘regulating’ the infection in Damien?

It would explain the voice changes…it would explain the powers…and it would explain why Damien wasn’t twelve feet and cannibalistic.

I glanced at my phone sitting by the door on the carpet.

I knew Jason knew what was up- it was so obvious- but I didn’t want to call him after what happened with his uncle.

It occurred to me that I could just confront Damien about it…but…no.

First off, if I was really right about this whole thing, and if I wasn’t just sending Hiru on stalking missions for nothing, Damien should’ve told me.

It sounded cliche, but I didn’t need his protection (if that was even his reason for hiding it…and if I was even right about any of this…ugh).

I wanted Damien to actually want to tell the truth to me, not force him to spill his guts.

I once again fell back into the blue silk sheets of my white mattress, repeating that to myself over and over.

Despite his sheer idiocy, Damien probably had at least some good reason for hiding it from me, right?

W-well, assuming I was actually right.

My boyfriend…a monster.

Just thinking of it felt weird, and I had been thinking of it relentlessly for the past week.

I glanced at the clock above the bulletin board, shocked that I wasn’t tired even at one in the morning.

My eyes lowered back to the start of my little ‘investigation’, reconnecting the red strings in my mind once more before ending up right back at the final note.

Monster?

I needed some air.

I rolled off my bed, figuring a stretch break couldn’t hurt as I walked over to my door.

After grabbing my phone, I headed into the upstairs hallway outside my room, the snores of my ‘nanny’ signaling the perfect time to sneak out.

I just needed to get out of there; get a moment to breathe.

Maybe I’d take a bus out of Tribeca to somewhere else in Manhattan.

Maybe I’d just go for a walk around the neighborhood.

Or maybe I’d say hi to Damien…

Uhh…no, nevermind,

“The goal is to not think about him, remember?” I tried to tell myself.

I’d probably just find some bench to think at; whatever got me away from that board.

I glanced back at my door, almost wishing I was wrong about everything even though I was almost 100 percent sure I was right.

I rushed down the stairs, slipping quietly past the couch and into the front of the house where my sneakers were.

While tugging them on, I felt my phone buzz in my pocket.

After I finished tying the last lace, I checked the notification, only offering the ‘New York Daily’ update two seconds of my time before returning the device right back into my pocket.

It was talking about these recent uprisings in muggers lately, and how people were apparently targeting the rich.

People tended to go for the extremes when the world seemed like it was ending. It was like everyone thought their lives were ending tomorrow, and they might as well go big or go home before the clock ran out. I didn’t really have to worry about that though- my dad made sure I kept out of the media as per my request.

In ten more seconds, I was already walking on the sidewalk, questioning why it even mattered that Damien was a monster.

And yes, this did mean I was still thinking about him.

But if he was going to eat us, he probably would’ve done it by now, right?

The E.R.L thing had to be true, it was the only connecting piece that kind of made sense to me. If I was right, it was what was probably keeping him as…Damien…and not…whatever freakshow was going on inside his body.

I shook my head, a flurry of taxis rushing by me as I continued to walk deeper into Manhattan,

“Let’s just take a break from all this,” I thought to myself, trying and failing to keep more ideas from forming in my head, “I definitely deserve it.”

But even as I told myself to drop it for a minute, I knew that it was impossible.

No matter how many other ways I tried thinking about him…that idea always remained.

And that idea was quickly becoming fact in my brain.

Damien Reyes Johnson.

My boyfriend.

Was a monster.

…

Probably.

Ugh.