'Don't look, Lillian. Never look into the eyes of a Sin-Eater, you will be as cursed as he is and will forever languish in darkness.'
Lillian Elmes remembers the warning her mother gave her about the town's Sin-Eater only too well.
How could she n...
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It is the coldest slumber I have ever known. Ice encapsulates me. Pulling me under. Holding me down. Wrapping me in its freezing embrace. In its cold arms, I cannot move and yet I know I must. Black wings brush at the edges of my dreams. Bird screams seek to rouse me from my sleep. I must wake.
Wake up, Lily.
I am scared to wake. Scared to remain here. Scared to dream. To live with such fear is the foulest of dreads and yet, to wake into the unknown is fouler still.
Wake up, Lily, you must wake up.
My throat feels dry and wanting. My body is heavy and pained, weighed down by semi-consciousness and the ghost of a nightmare. I do not want to wake and yet I do. I must.
As I rouse, I feel hard, unforgiving stone pressing against my back. Binds shackle my wrists and ankles. Gently, I open my eyes, not wishing to force the nightmare on them all at once. So much better to ease in the terror, fraction by fraction, for fear that my whimpering heart cannot take much more.
Candlelight flickers on stone walls. I smell wax and cold earth. Damp and rot.
'Lily, thank Heavens.'
Oh, how I am glad that his is the first voice I hear. Warm, gruff, and yes, fuelled with worry, but it is he that I hear and I am thankful for it. To be wakened by the sound of his voice seems a blessing, a reach into the darkness, pulling me out from the ice that I half-wish would refuse to let me go. If it were not his voice I hear, then I think I would almost rather stay, but the need to see him is stronger than my reluctance to face the nightmare I know is coming.
'Daniel?' I open my eyes and at first, he is not there, and I think it to be a cruel trick to force me back to the surface, but then I turn my head and I see him.
Daniel Carver. Sin-Eater. I owe him a fish supper. That I remember. And his scowl. The way he frowns at his feet as he walks, clutching that Bible to his chest. The way his body moved with mine under the water. The way his lips feel against my own. The taste of him.
'Well met, Mr. Carver,' I whisper.
He smiles, shaky and weak, but a smile, nevertheless. 'Well met, Miss Elmes.' Before he can say another word, his gaze darts to something beyond my vision, an anxious glance steeped in fear and anticipation. I twist my head to follow his gaze, but it hurts too much to move that fast and I must still myself to stop the world from whirling like a spinning top.
