Flip the Coin [BL]-Chapter 418. Turning a page

With the crystals fully covering the table again, having grown over the wood, the tabletop flipped back.

The hands had snapped back in place, covering my senses and letting me forget every future I had seen, heard, or felt.

The moment the table turned, I felt the warm sun shining on my back as I still lay on Henry, who was holding me.

"Don’t ever control him again. This is your last warning," Henry hissed in a murderous voice, addressing the child.

I also felt the wind against my skin again.

My body had turned sluggish, my thoughts jumbled, but what I saw when I turned my head were the frozen zombies, jerking and trembling as if they were trying to fight themselves back into motion—they had escaped with us from the place we had just been.

Henry held me closer to him, and I could feel his alarm and simultaneously his own exhaustion—unable to continue a battle with neither them nor me.

One prominent thought entered my head.

’I don’t want to fight them; they should just go back to that place from before.’

-Where time stood still, where they were under my control, where the darkness would corner them until they would be devoured forever.

And the second I thought so, they really disappeared.

There was a long silent moment before Henry, with the danger gone, rubbed my back and sat up.

"Kenny, Kenny, don’t lose consciousness; stay with me."

After they had disappeared back into that space, I coughed up blood before I violently vomited a sprawl of it all over his shoulder.

"Kenny!" Henry tilted me back to take a look at my face before he wiped away blood that was flowing out of my nose.

"Don’t lose consciousness, Kenny; it’s fine, you are fine." He felt for my pulse on my throat, his eyes so terrified that it was hard to believe in his words.

"WHAT HAPPENED HERE?"

I heard Ethan yelling, his voice growing closer as he sped to us.

Henry rocked my body slightly, to calm me or maybe himself, behaving as if I was dying or something.

I rolled my eyes, my eyeballs feeling so hot as if they would burn through my skull while I tried to get a picture of what had happened.

I looked at Henry’s shoulder, but I couldn’t see the state of his wound with his bloody shirt covering it.

"I am fine, already healed," he promised before biting his wrist and feeding me some of his blood.

My fucking goodness, I don’t want to taste the metallic shit ever in my fucking lifetime again.

I moved my head away when Ethan arrived and asked what had happened, with nobody answering him, but Henry was adamant about getting more of his blood into me.

"I’ll get the doctor." Ethan turned around to run back.

I felt a tiny bit better after swallowing the red fluid, but that was it.

"No, we will return to the house." Henry stood up with me in his arms, holding me so close to himself that I could spot Ren while glancing over his shoulder as he walked back to the house.

Ren was shaking violently, his eyes had turned back to the reddish-brown, and he was bawling his eyes out without making a sound.

That was so fucking heartbreaking to see.

’I’m sorry.’ I mouthed weakly, seeing Ethan come to the child and hug him before also lifting him up.

Now only Kitty was left lying there as if dead, and I felt a sharp pain that grew more violent, and so did the self-hatred at what I had done.

The kid continued to stare at me, even while being carried, and he picked up my glance at Kitty.

Wriggling himself out of Ethan’s hold, he soon ran to the tiger, stroking over his injured head.

Then he put his hand into Kitty’s slightly agape mouth, moving it as if he were scratching his skin open on one of the tiger’s teeth.

Ethan stood by, and I watched while being carried away as Kitty healed.

How is this possible?

Kitty soon stood up and disorientedly shook his head before lowering his body as if asking for Ren to saddle up.

Ren climbed on the tiger, and they sped up to our side.

Henry was continuously talking, assuring me that everything was fine and that I couldn’t lose consciousness no matter what.

Here and there, he even lightly pinched me or squeezed me as if trying to keep me awake.

When Kitty and Ren appeared beside us, he just glanced at them, continuing to speak.

Ethan was left behind and had to hurry up and come after us, and I watched him run elegantly in his suit.

"It’s alright, see? Nobody got hurt. You did so well in getting rid of the zombies. Don’t think, and don’t lose consciousness. We’ll be at the house soon; the doctor will give you every goddamn vitamin there is on earth. You will be as good as new. See? We did everything we wanted to do, and more. You singlehandedly ended the plague in this city. Now everything is good and well; everything is alright. Everything is alright..."

Soon Kitty fell back a bit, as if they had been unhappy with Henry’s rambling or as if they wanted to get a better look at me.

I again mouthed that I was sorry and found that Ren was still silently crying.

"You don’t have to be sorry," Henry suddenly said as if he had heard me.

"You did nothing wrong. You saved us all. You are the best, most reliable, and most precious hero. You are my hero." He continued, again twisting reality to his liking.

And to my liking.

I loved to hear him speak like that, pulling me into our own little crazy world where murder was a romantic gesture and cannibalism the trait of a hero.

I wouldn’t be able to go on; I wouldn’t be able to maintain my sanity without him.

Because even if the crystalline surface glazed over the traumatic memories of my own doing, it would still be unable to make the consequences disappear, and I, facing these consequences without him, would end up in a continuous cycle of shattering the shield protecting me and my counterpart repairing it again.

I needed that, this form of self-hypnotizing, the form of malleable reality that bent after our wishes.

My nose still bled, and I felt high on a fever.

I like being sick. Not in the form of excruciating throat pain or diarrhea or something, but I like fever.

I like it because my mom told me that fever would burn all the bad things in my body away when I was a child.

I like it because she would sit beside my bed when I had a fever, reading a book or scrolling on her phone, but every time I woke up, she would speedily let the things in her hand disappear and look at me as if I were the only person in her world.

And during a fever, neither my dad nor my siblings were allowed to enter the room so as not to catch whatever I had.

She was the only one who would stay by my side, giving me the feeling that I was her favorite child, the topmost priority.

"How do you feel, baby?" She asks me how I feel, and I respond with a groaning sound.

"Fever is good; it burns all the bad things away." She pats my head, and I watch her glance at the entertainment of her choice.

"Do you want to know what I just read?"

I nod and hear her talking about things I usually wasn’t able to understand because of the fever and because I was too young.

Like which celebrity had his nose done or some curiously odd things about animals I had never heard of.

This time, however, I understand.

"Did you know that cats have only eight toes? Not ten."

I shake my head before succumbing to a dizzy spell.

"Remember that. I will ask you tomorrow, and we’ll see if your brain got fried during the fever," she chuckles.

I soon close my eyes to stop her from speaking, but simultaneously, I force myself to stay awake.

Because the room had a dim, warm light that it didn’t have other times because I didn’t want to be a child but a brave adult who would sleep in darkness.

’Cause she was sitting there, slowly turning pages of a book, quietly laughing or clicking her tongue at something she found on the internet.

These moments were so real, so ethereal and safe, that even back then as a kid, I think I wanted to preserve them, etching them into my memory, even though I had been unaware that they would come to an abrupt end.

Now these memories are something so precious that I was relieved not to have given in to sleep during the few fevers I had.

Relieved that my brain didn’t get fried, and I had not forgotten them.

"Do you think it is okay if I conjure up my mom? Just once?" I whispered hoarsely, finally facing the question that had haunted me in the back of my mind since the moment I noticed that I could conjure up a living, breathing Henry.

Henry fell silent, his endless praising, assuring, and twisting stopping in an instant.

He tightened his hold on me, not answering me but giving me a clear answer at the same time.

This supernatural world had come too late for her to rise from the dead.

Still, during fevers like these...

"I miss her."

Let’s just be thankful that Henry, Ren, and Kitty hadn’t joined her, and that at my own hands.

So, my little fever, please burn away all the bad things inside me.

Burn away all my sins and the consequences they could have led to; just leave behind the warm, dim light and soothing presence right beside me.

And...

Let me hear the pages turn.