Where Dark Things Wait: Night Creatures Book One

Chapter Twenty-Seven - Trust and Mistrust

Trigger warning: mention of sexual assault

Water pressed in around her, the force of it agonising against her pulverised body. At least she couldn't drown, not without breath, but the darkness seemed to stretch on forever and she had no idea what way was up or down. She was sinking, she suspected. Her breathless body too devoid of air to bob to the surface. Then her foot caught on something, and she looked down to find the crowned head of a colossal statue rising out of the deep, where it had been submerged as though the sea had swallowed some ancient civilisation.

Just like the ruins beyond her portal, the sight made her sad, as though something she'd once loved had been destroyed. It didn't matter that the feeling made no sense, she mourned anyway. Yet she also knew she couldn't stay there to grieve. Darker shadows loomed in the blackness; great shapes that circled ever closer, and she had no desire to find out what manner of sea monster could prey on her.

Closing her eyes again, she repeated the process, imagining her atoms flying apart, and remembering the long-forgotten voices that she recalled despite all rational explanation. Only this time, a blast of heat engulfed her, even before her atoms had reassembled, and she remember what Alauda had said about dead worlds where fire could burn a person to ashes in moments. She didn't bother to reform her body there, and instead followed another voice to another world.

She regretted becoming corporeal the moment her still naked and still wet body collapsed into the snow of some ice-wrapped wilderness. She trembled and shook as a blast of frigid air caused ice crystals to form on her skin, silver-white patterns snaking over her bruised and torn flesh. Perhaps she'd known this world too, once, somehow, but nothing remained to give her any clue.

Cold and ice rendered it an inhospitable, lifeless place. Staying there offered no shelter, and she would freeze before she could rest or regain her strength, and yet she felt so tired. Lying in the snow, with her teeth chattering and her blood staining the pristine white beneath her, she felt more exhausted than she'd ever felt before. Drained. Almost completely drained, either by the torture or overuse of magic. She longed to sleep, but she knew that doing so there would mean never waking up. She had to move on, but she also knew that hopping blindly through worlds was a game of Russian roulette that couldn't end well. Sooner or later, she'd end up in a world that she couldn't survive.

No matter how familiar the voices in her head felt, they must've belonged to people who'd died so long ago that almost all traces of their people had vanished. They wouldn't guide her to a safe have... No, she needed to find her way back to the only place she knew of where someone might help her. She needed to go home.

Yet what did 'home' even mean to her? She had no family to hold in her mind and draw her back to place she belonged. Her family were dead and gone, perhaps at her own husband's order. She'd spent five years moving from place to place, trusting no one, setting down no roots. In five years, the only person she'd extended an olive branch to was Dunstan; the one man who hadn't betrayed her. The man who'd been willing to let her go if it was what she needed. He would blame himself, if he knew...

Oh God, had he felt it when she was taken? Had their bond forced everything Lapis had done to her onto him as well? After everything he'd suffered in his past...?

Her blistered throat closed around a choking lump, and the ache in her chest would have left her breathless if she'd had breath to lose. In her mind, she saw him as he'd been when he told her about Laelia, so much more vulnerable than he'd seemed in the days before. He'd let her in, and that made him the only thing she had to cling to.

Emptying her mind of everything else, she ignored the biting cold and the way her teeth clanked together as she shivered. In her mind's eye, Kalyna pictured those beautiful amber and honey eyes that she'd seen turn fiery in anger, or molten in desire, or so sad with self doubt and shame that it broke her heart. She focussed on those eyes, and on her memories of the taste of Dunstan's blood, of his kiss, and on the recollection of how he sounded as he moaned her name. Then she let her atoms fly apart one last time, and she folded the veil again, so that the world of snow pressed close to wherever Dunstan Eorl was.