Seth woke up with a very cuddly Anri draped around his naked torso. At first he thought he was still dreaming. His dreams had been weird and vivid, but not like this. He snuggled closer, burying his head in Anri’s loose hair and breathing deep.

His body went rigid and his head jerked back. Anri smelled like Anri, but also wrong. He smelled like dried blood and sweat and sickness. Anri stirred next to him.

“Whass wrong?” Anri mumbled sleepily, rubbing his face on his bare chest. It was scratchy with stubble and Seth tensed. Anri was sleeping with him. And they were both…he checked under the blanket.

He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not, but they were both wearing underwear. Anri, his skittish and defensive Anri, was sleeping peacefully, his head resting on Seth’s chest, of his own volition. If this was a dream, he didn’t want to wake up, even if Anri did smell wrong. Anri’s head on his chest felt perfect. Like home.

He forced himself to relax, he wouldn’t ruin this. Carefully, he rested his hand on Anri’s head, afraid to break the spell that kept Anri docile and peaceful.

“Nothing, nothing. Sorry. Go back to sleep,” he whispered, smoothing his hands over Anri’s hair. It was stringy and matted with blood.

Anri mumbled incoherently then snuggled deeper against his body.

Seth’s mouth was dry and sticky. He could taste blood, and underneath that, the taste of bile. Waking up felt like he had been out with Lance, gaming the town all night, only that they had the snot beat out of them as well.

Just as he was relaxing again, Anri bolted upright, jerking away from him. This was the Anri he had been expecting. Anri’s sharp movements had him falling out of bed hard, pulling the blanket with him. Seth shivered. The feel of Anri’s panic through their connection almost had Seth jumping out of his own skin.

“Seth! Fucking hell! I’m sorry! I, you, the, I just wanted to-” Anri panicked.

“Anri,” he said gently, trying to calm the excited vampire down. He couldn’t continue, though. His throat was dry and scratchy and he started to cough instead.

“I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I just wanted to…I couldn’t let you…you were totally covered in blood,” Anri continued over Seth. “I’m sorry about your clothes. I’m sorry about your throat. I’m really fucking sorry, Seth.”

“Anri!” Seth said commandingly once he cleared his throat. “It’s okay. Calm down.”

“But…are you? Are you okay?” Anri asked, looking away, his face full of guilt. Then Anri’s head turned quickly, as if he remembered something he had forgotten. It was locked onto Seth’s arm, and he turned to look at it, too. It was the arm that had been sliced open by Angelina’s gaudy dagger. The only sign of the wound now, impossibly, was a raised pink pucker of scar, a line that ran vertically from nearly wrist to elbow. The wound looked like it was months old, not just a day.

Anri’s eyes moved to his neck. By reflex his hands hand moved to cover to his neck. There were more scars, he could feel them as rough tissue under his fingers. He didn’t care about them, though. He had been there when Anri needed him, when it mattered. He had made it in time. He would wear the scars proudly.

His arm, though. He looked again, stunned by the lack of a wound. He flexed it and it didn’t hurt. He noticed something else, too. a small red-brown scab in the crook of his elbow. The scab looked similar to ones left after he had donated blood, with one major exception. Red lines veined out from the scab in a circle about the size of a quarter around it, eight lines evenly around it. It looked like a spider encased in a circle. It itched and he scratched at it.

It wasn’t surprising as much as it was itchy. Seth knew what it was from, because it had showed him in his dreams.

He knew with sudden alacrity that his dreams hadn’t been just dreams. The creature had shown him glimpses of events while he slept, like looking through a picture album. There were no words, just pictures and feelings. It had shared memories with him, too, memories of being summoned to this realm. Along with the memories, he had shared feelings with the creature. The pain of being summoned, he knew it now. He saw Anri recoil from the creature when Angelina kidnapped him. The pain of being rejected.

That pain was tearing a hole in Seth’s heart now. Anri’s panic, he felt it through their connection, with an undercurrent of…disgust? Was the look on Anri’s face disgust? He recognized the look from one of the demon creature’s memories. Because the spider-cat had seen that look of disgust, now Seth knew it. Anri was scared of him, disgusted with him. The Anri who had opened up to him was now the same man who fell out of bed just to get away from him. His Anri, who was looking at him with that look. The combination of the spider-cat demon’s emotions and Anri’s emotions, both flooding into him was too much for him to handle.

Heat started at the base of his skull and crawled down his spine. He still felt like shit, was tired and hungry and disoriented, and right now he couldn’t deal with Anri and also the spider-cat, both sending him their intense emotions. He didn’t even know where to start to untangle which feelings were theirs and which were his own.

Anri was looking around, searching the room. He was probably looking for the demon. He wouldn’t find it here, it knew it wasn’t welcome. But Seth wasn’t really in the mood to tell him. Emotions were overwhelming him, drowning him, pulling him in a million different directions at once.

He reached out for the connection he shared with Anri and tried to close it off, remembering how it felt when Anri had done it in the factory. He pictured the silvery white cord that he could see in his mind’s eye, then squeezed it between imaginary fingers. The sudden loss of Anri’s overwhelming emotions had him swaying a little. Anri swayed, too. Seth now had his full attention. Anri stared at him in stunned silence, his mouth slightly agape.

Seth could feel the spider-cat inside his head, another connection. This one was different than the cord-like connection he shared with Anri. The demont was more like a small presence in his mind. It wasn’t connected through a cord or anything, it just floated in in the background. He didn’t really notice it unless he was paying attention or it was saying something in the feeling-pictures way it spoke to him. When he was paying attention to it, it was a fuzzy mote in the back of his mind, floating gently on thoughts.

He knew he should be more concerned about now having two mental connections, neither of which he had actually signed up for, but he couldn’t find the energy. He was more hurt and angry at Anri’s reaction than he could express. He couldn’t find the emotional capacity to be upset right now about his new demonic companion, not with the look in Anri’s eyes. Not with the way his heart seemed to be exploding with anguish in his chest.

He took a deep breath, trying to stabilize his emotions and failing miserably. Woodenly, he stood up and walked to the door. He couldn’t even look at Anri. He was so mad, incredibly hurt and frustrated. He thought they had made progress in their relationship, but now Anri was looking at him with that fearful, disgusted look in his eyes.

He would never have Anri, they would never work out. Anri was rejecting him, his body language screamed it. He had to leave. He needed to think, and he needed to be away from Anri. From that look. From the pain of his rejection.

Where were his clothes? He couldn’t leave without clothes. The realization that he had nothing sent him spiraling into despair. The wave of sadness that pummeled into him, freezing his chest painfully, was completely unexpected. He had never felt this much for anyone before Anri. Perhaps he never would again. He knew that he would never have another chance like this, he could feel it in his bones.

Or maybe it was all just hormones and brain chemistry messing with his head. It was new territory, and he wasn’t sure he liked it very much at all. He felt like the smallest thing would ignite him like a powderkeg.

He forced himself to look at Anri. Anri was looking down, face hidden behind his hair like a shield, covering himself with the blanket. He still sat on the floor, unmoving since his fall. He stared hard at the floor. Goddamnit, now he wouldn’t even look at him? He had to get out of here, his heart couldn’t handle this.  

“Where are my clothes?” he asked coolly, trying not to blow up.

“I’m sorry. I had to, they were ruined. I threw them away,” Anri said softly, his voice cracking with regret.

“I’m going to take a shower. Then I’m leaving. Do you have anything I can wear?” he asked as emotionless as he could.

Anri didn’t say anything. He just nodded without looking at him. Whatever. Good enough.

Turning away from him without any other acknowledgement, Seth walked down the hallway in his underwear, familiar with where the shower was. He couldn’t even care that Simone might see him practically naked.

He felt empty with his connection to Anri closed. He thought about trying to cut it, not sure if he could. Maybe he needed to just leave. It was obvious to him now. Anri was never going to be comfortable with him. His heart tightened painfully in his chest with the realization that Anri would never truly be his. He had forced himself on the vampire, had chased him until he caught him, and then backed him into a corner.

Seth ran through all of their interactions while he showered, trying to think of where he went wrong, what he could have done to make things different. The black fuzzy mote that was the spider-cat wriggled in his mind. Seth thought perhaps it was distressed, but couldn’t force himself to care. He was slipping into a darkness that he hadn’t visited in a long, long time.  

When he got out of the shower there was a pair of sweatpants and a plain black t-shirt on the floor next to the door. He hadn’t heard the door open, but there they were.

He got dressed quickly. The sweatpants were too short on him. There were no underwear and he refused to put the old ones back on, so he went commando. The clothes Anri had left for him smelled clean, and underneath that they smelled of Anri.

Seth took a deep breath of the shirt, holding it against his face. The pain of Anri’s rejection burned in his heart. Pulling the shirt over his head, he fought back tears of pain and rage. He gripped the sink with both hands on the verge of tears, or of punching the beauty out of something. He didn’t want to do either, not really, so he gripped the sink, struggling to get his breathing under control. His knuckles turned white under the pressure.

The spider-cat sent him some fuzzy images, a picture of Anri hurt at the factory and an image of Anri in the trunk with a seemingly larger version of spider-cat leaning against his back. Seth got the feeling that, even though the spider-cat had been rejected, it still wanted to be around Anri. Seth was intimate with that feeling. It wasn’t clear if the spider-cat was trying to make him feel better or just chatting.

He needed space. He was going to go home, take another nap, then go for a run. Work things out in his head. Yes. He needed to go home now. Being around Anri…he had to get away. He was suffocating. He could smell Anri on everything here. The tightness in his chest was unbearable.

He finished dressing. Spider-cat was in his head, sifting and flitting around his thoughts. “Stop that!” he said aloud. He could feel the fuzzy mote recoil a little. “Those are mine. Where are you? Why can I feel you in my head?” It felt a bit silly, talking to the thing in his head. He would have thought he was crazy, talking to a little black mote in his head, if it wasn’t for the spider shaped mark it had left on his arm. That and the pink, too quickly healed ridge of scar on his forearm.

Spider-cat showed him a small dark cage with some scraps of cloth at the bottom. Then a picture of Angelina. “You’re…at her house? Is that where she kept you? In a dirty dog kennel?” he asked, outraged. Seth had a newfound fury for Angelina’s coldness, the way she had kept the creature locked up, living in rags. He always had had a soft spot for animals. She summoned this creature here, she had wanted it, yet she treated it this way? Sometimes, he thought, people really suck. But, he intimately knew that about Angelina already.

Spider-cat shifted in the kennel uncertainly, then cut the image.

“Why don’t you come here?” he asked more gently. Spider-cat sent him an image of Anri attempting to pull the creature from Seth’s arm after it had begun their bonding. Fear and rejection. Seth knew it wouldn’t come. It was afraid of Anri, despite how it was connected to him through blood.

Instead, Seth thought about his house and tried to send the image to the demon. “My house.” he said aloud. “You can go there. Don’t stay at that crazy witch’s house. I’ll be home soon. You can go there.”

A fuzzy feeling. It sort of felt like the creature was sending him an affirmation. The spider-cat’s presence faded, becoming a black mote in his brain, something in the background.
“Hey, wait! I have more questions!” he exclaimed a little too loud. No answer from the spider-cat. There was an answer from the door, though.

“Seth?” Anri’s quiet voice was muted by the door.

Seth sighed. He was not ready to face Anri right now. He hid his hurt behind anger, took a deep breath and opened the door.

“Anri?” he replied, his voice sounding more pissed than he meant.

“Um…is everything okay?” Anri asked quietly, wincing. He avoiding looking directly at him. Anri peered around him, looking into the bathroom. Seth shifted and pulled the door up behind him. “I thought I heard you talking to someone,” Anri muttered

“Nope. Just me. Are my shoes around? My keys?” he demanded sharply. If Anri wasn’t going to look at him, well, two could play that game. He slid past Anri into the hallway, completely avoiding touching him. Anri didn’t respond, just turned and walked down the hallway.

He followed Anri to the small foyer before the door. He looked around but his shoes were nowhere to be found. He growled a little under his breath. He debated going out barefoot but he still didn’t have his keys.

Anri was behind him again, Seth hadn’t felt his presence. With their connection shut down he felt cavernously empty. Numb from the inside out. How had he lived feeling this way before Anri? It felt like he had lost a limb, only where his heart was. He was numb and lonely and empty and painful all at the same time. It took mental willpower to resist the urge to loosen his mental grasp on their connection.

“Sorry, they’re kinda gorey,” Anri said softly behind him. He sounded…he sounded how Seth felt. Hurt and lonely and sad. But...Anri had rejected him. Anri had been disgusted waking up next to him. His anger flared again, burning hot. How dare Anri act like Seth was the one doing the rejecting.

He sat down and Anri put the shoes on the floor next to him. He did not turn around. His shoes were disgusting and he didn’t want to put them on his feet, especially without socks, but his desire to leave outweighed his disgust. His blue tennis shoes weren’t blue anymore, but now brown and black with small spots of blue showing through the gore. Where had all this blood come from? He was beginning to realize he had almost  died in the factory. It came to him that he actually owed the spider-cat his life.

He really needed to see if spider-cat had a name. Calling it spider-cat all the time seemed incredibly impersonal after that revelation.

Dried blood flaked off of his laces as he tied them. “You…you don’t have to go, you know…” Anri said softly behind him.

He wouldn’t feel bad for Anri. First Anri rejected him and now he was telling him to stay? He couldn’t handle Anri’s mixed signals right now. Screw him.

“Keys,” he said shortly, holding his hands up expectantly without looking back at Anri. Seth knew how to leave. He was good at ending relationships before they began. This was what he was good at, what knew how to do.

Anri sighed, then Seth felt the familiar weight of his keys in his hand. He stood up slowly, his body full of unique aches. Without turning around, he opened the door and walked away from the only person he had ever fallen in love with.

Dear lord, it was cold out. The slightest breeze was torment with only a pair of sweatpants and a black t-shirt. He just added it to his ‘reasons to be upset today’ tab. Spider-cat bounced into the back of his head. His rage was a fire inside his chest, the only thing keeping him from freezing. The creature, who had come back excitedly, recoiled at the intensity of his feelings.

Seth showed spider-cat Anri’s face, the disgusted look. Spider-cat showed him Anri’s face when was tied up, before Seth and Simone had shown up at the factory. The same look. Seth’s hurt doubled.

“Why are you showing me this? Don’t rub it in!” he cried aloud to the creature in his head.

The black mote bobbed. It showed him the scene again. Then it showed him a picture of him and Anri in Anri’s bed. Anri’s whole body wrapped around Seth, a relaxed look on his face. His hair draped over Seth’s bare chest.

“Stop! Just…just stop. Why are you trying to hurt me, too?” Seth felt tears welling in his eyes and wiped them away with roughly. He would not cry.

It was so cold outside. Why hadn’t he made Anri give him a coat? He shivered, pulling his arms around his body and hunching down. He was extra grateful for his shoes now, even with the small chunks of nothing he wanted identified rolling around under his toes.

The mote bobbed again, even more excitedly than before, refusing to be ignored. It showed him another scene, one of Anri carefully cleaning off Seth’s body. Cutting his ruined clothing off. The look of concern and worry and…something else on his face. Then Anri looking at the creature when it was attached to Seth’s arm. The look of disgust and hatred on his face. It showed him Anri’s attempts to remove the spider-cat from his arm.

His lungs hurt. It was too cold outside. He only had three blocks to walk but was really really regretted not asking for a sweatshirt. It would have been too small, anyway, he thought ruefully. He couldn’t stop shivering.

It was like a lightbulb turned on in Seth’s head. “You think…you mean that look was for you? He wasn’t…he wasn’t rejecting me? I could feel it, his rejection, through our connection. I don’t know…” he said, unsure. Anri’s feelings had been so strong. The spider-cat hadn’t even been around then.

“I don’t think that’s just it. I think…well, it doesn’t really matter, does it? I’m coming home.” Seth dismissed the tiny flame of hope that kindled in his chest, the urge to reopen their connection.

Images of Seth’s couch. The Spider-cat’s legs all wrapped tight underneath it, its tail wrapped around its body. A feeling of contentment.

“Lucky you. I’m freezing. I still have a while before I get there,” he bemoaned. “Waitaminute! How’d you get there so fast? Does Angelina live by me?!”

Spider-cat sent some confusing images so fast they blurred together. They didn’t make any sense to his emotionally wrought mind. He sensed that the creature was frustrated, and it didn’t send any more images. He huddled up, walking faster.

A moment later he received a cascade of colors in the back of his mind, feeling a bit like curiosity. Spider-cat mote’s feelings were weird and difficult to discern. The mote buzzed in his head and Seth saw an image of him on the street, walking. It was his own vision that spider-cat was sending back to him. Then, another image, this time of the empty space on the couch beside it.

“Um…I don’t know what you’re telling me. You want me to sit next to you when I get home?” he asked, confused.

Spider-cat buzzed with something like frustration. Then, the spider-cat was just a small blank mote in his head again, like before. Seth shrugged and walked a little faster to his car. Only one block left to go. He wrapped his arms tightly around his body, tucking his hands underneath his arms to try and warm up his freezing fingers. All he was really doing, it seemed, was freezing his arms more, though. He began to jog.

Seth felt and saw the air peel open in front of him. It was a strange feeling, a pop like a small pressure change, and then the space in front of him seemed to peel back like the page of a book.

He skidded to a halt. The space where the air had peeled back was dark but it looked like…his room? Spider-cat’s cheshire face peeked out in the air, just its head in a very Alice in Wonderland kind of way.

In that moment, he fully understood Anri’s repulsion to the creature. It was really unnerving and unnatural. It looked at him expectantly, hanging down from above him. He felt the connection to it burn back to life, and he felt it urge him forward.

Seth looked around the alley but no one was around. He had no idea what time it was, but it had to be the early hours of the morning. No lights in windows, nothing thing was lit up. Seth shrugged against the cold.

“What the hell,” he muttered, then stepped forward. He reached his hand out and pushed against the tear. It felt like silky rubber or latex, smooth and soft and pliable. He pushed it back a little bit. It was squishy and soft and warm, like he was touching something alive. His hand reflexively pulled back into his body. Spider-cat’s cheshire grin flattened and Seth thought it looked annoyed. The mote in his head showed him a memory of the spider-cat moving through a smaller but similar rift to get to his house from the kennel at Angelina’s place. He recalled it from the blur of images he had received before and now it made sense. Kind of.

“So, that’s how you got there so fast. You can…what? Tear holes in space? Like a tesseract? A tesser-cat?” Seth asked it. The spider-cat seemed to shrug in indifference.

He reached out tentatively to the tear again, shivering at the fleshy feel of it. He pulled the tear and it peeled forward a little more. Seth squeezed into the shimmering portal and immediately felt like he was in a bouncy house tunnel, pressure surrounding him from all sides. Pressure built up in his head and he popped his ears. As soon as his ears popped, his body stretched from his head but not his feet, those seemed to be frozen to the icy alley. His first thought was of taffy pulling. His body reflexively went rigid, his muscles straining to pull himself back together, but it only served to make the pulling sensation even more tight and uncomfortable.

The spider-cat mote in his head mentally rubbed against him like a cat, soothing his stress. He recoiled to its mental touch at first but then he relaxed into it and the pulling lessened into something bearable.

And then…he was in his room. It was warm. He looked around in disbelief. It was his room. He was really here. One minute he was freezing his ass off in the alley and next he was still freezing, but he was in his warm room.

The spider-cat sat on the couch, a huge cheshire grin on its face. It was really weird looking. Seth hadn’t yet had the chance to truly see it in person. When he had seen it before, he had been distracted and a bit loopy from blood loss and trauma.

The demon was about the size of a Great Dane on his couch, though he could have sworn that it was a lot smaller when it was attached to his arm. It had two perky cat ears on its head. Its face was very feline with the exception of all of the extra golden cat-slit eyes and the too large mouth that seemed to go out past the sides of its face. If a spider and a cat had a baby, this is what it would look like. The creature had eight eyes and eight legs, and that weird cat tail, normal with the exception of the stinger, which Seth was now intimately familiar with. He absently rubbed the fresh wound in his elbow, remembering its sting.

He felt the rift close behind him with another strange popping of pressure. It sounded a bit like a zipper being zipped up, but maybe that was just his mind trying to make sense of things. He turned around but the air behind him was just air. He put his hand through the area where the rift had been, but it felt normal, no resistance and no flesh-like rip in space.

He looked shrewdly at the Spider-cat. It wasn’t sitting like it was in the image it shared with him, now it’s legs were out around it, all eight of them. The front two were tapping idly on the couch. Each leg ended in what appeared to be a tiny three fingered hand. The black fur with red swirls didn’t cover the hands, they were black on the top and a light pink color underneath, like the pads on the bottom of a cat’s feet. Seth could see sharp claws extending and receding from the tips of the ‘fingers’ as the creature tapped the couch.

The spider-cat was studying him, now, sizing him up. Then it began grooming itself in a very cat-like manner, promptly ignoring him.

Seth wasn’t sure what to do. The whole situation was FUBAR. But, he had invited the creature to his house and it had ‘beam me up Scottie’-ed him back to home, so whatever happened at this point, happened. He was too emotionally drained to stress about it.

The spider-cat continued to ignore him but sent him an image of the empty space on the couch. “You want me to sit next to you?” he asked it.

The creature sent a mental shrug. Seth shrugged, too. He went to sit down, stopped, ran to the closet and grabbed a blanket, wrapping it around himself before he sat down next to the creature. It was pretty creepy but oddly cute, too. It was sort of a cat. So, kinda weird, kinda cute.

“So, um, you teleport stuff? I mean, thanks for the free ride, I really appreciate it,” he told the creature. The creature riffled through his brain. It kinda tickled.

“Seriously, we are gonna have to set some rules for that. Stop it. You can’t just dig around my brain however you want.”

The spider-cat showed him an image of him when he was a kid, his family cat sitting on his lap. He was scratching its ears. “Oh, you want me to scratch your ears, eh?” he asked.

Spider-cat purred next to him on the couch, a sound not unlike a muted chainsaw with a broken blade. Seth snorted. He sized up the creature. It tucked its legs under itself again and for a second it almost looked like a normal, if great-dane sized, cat. Almost. It looked at him expectantly with all eight eyes.

He reached over tentatively, nervously. He was really out of his league with all of this paranormal stuff, and now he was bonded to not one, but two supernatural creatures. He wondered passingly if there was a handbook for situations like this. It would have a ridiculous name featuring a pretentious British author, he decided. Sir Hensley’s Guide to Paranormal and Supernatural Phenomena. Or, maybe it would be like an American self-help book. The Supernatural for Dummies.

He reached his hand over and gently ran his finger over the spider-cat’s ear. It felt like a normal cat’s ear, soft and velvety. Spider-cat purred. Seth scratched behind the demon’s ear and the muted chainsaw noise ramped up.

He chuckled, despite his mood. “You know, you’re still pretty creepy. Can you, like, make yourself smaller? I remember you being a lot smaller when you were on my arm. I was pretty out of it, but I think you were a lot smaller. Is that something you can do, too? Change size?” he asked it, still scratching.

Spider-cat ignored him in true cat-like fashion. He continued to pet the creature and it continued purring, the loud noise somehow comforting. After a while it moved, unfolding all of its legs in a syncopated motion. He watched as the creature crawled forward towards his lap. He tensed up for a moment but Spider-cat did the telepathic cat rubbing thing in his head again and he relaxed. It moved across the couch, settling in his lap. Half of the spider-cat’s legs tucked under its body and the other half it flung carelessly over his lap. It was smaller, more the size of a medium dog now. He hadn’t seen it shrink at all, it was just suddenly smaller, like a change in perspective.

A chill went down his spine. Even being closer to normal cat-sized, the unnatural creature was still pretty creepy. Seth felt the spider-cat kind of shrug in his mind, a weird vibration of the black mote in his head. He continued petting the creature and eventually relaxed into it. Spider-cat purred appreciatively in his lap.

“Do you have a name? Spider-cat doesn’t really roll of the tongue or anything,” he asked the creature  

It leaned its head into his scratching. It gave another of what Seth was considering a mental shrug.

“No? No name? Can I name you?”

Another mental shrug.

“I’ll think of something good. Or I’ll try. How about Spicat? No, that’s dumb. Um…let me look up famous spider monster names…Shit,” he swore as he reached down for his phone in his pocket only to realize he had lost yet another phone. He was going to have to start charging Anri. Or maybe just send him a bill.

His breath caught as emotion flooded back in and he shook his head, trying to dismiss it. He wasn’t going to think of Anri right now. “I’ll keep thinking. I’m sure I’ll come up with something appropriate.”

The strange demon ignored him. Then it pushed its head against his hand and he kept petting.

He must have fallen asleep at some point. He had no idea how long he had been asleep when he felt a strong yank on the cord that connected him to Anri. The yank was strong enough to jar him awake with a jerk.

Spider-cat jumped up off his lap and padded away on its small baby handed legs, looking back at Seth, clearly irritated. He wondered if the creature was going to use its claws to go and destroy something in the house in a true cat-styled revenge. Spider-cat walked behind the shoji dividing the room and out of his sight.

Seth felt another tug on his and Anri’s connection, even stronger this time. Seth’s first instinct was to ignore it. He wasn’t ready to talk to Anri yet. But…he couldn’t. He could feel something underlying in the tugs…panic? Fear?

Anri. Seth’s chest clenched. He relaxed his mental block on their connection just a tiny bit. He could feel Anri. He knew where he was. And he could feel Anri’s anxiety directed at him. And then…Anri’s relief when he felt the connection open.

Seth’s heart broke and surged all at once. He couldn’t stay away from Anri. He knew it then. Even if he ran, he knew he would be tied to Anri for the rest of his life. If he went to him, he would be bound. If he ran, haunted.

Chapter 19: The Long Way Home

Chapter 21, Sincere Apologies