In The Dead of the Night

10 | drowning lights

The words of the dying neon sign appeared as blurred lights in my eyes as Shawn pulled into the empty parking lot. The tires of the old taxi cab screeched against the pavement, and there must've been a windchill that sneaked through the cracks in the windows, because my body shivered

"Camila," the muffled but familiar voice rang in my ears. A warm hand tucked under my chin and I shivered, fingers sprawling over my jawline.

"Camila," the voice said again. For a moment, I forgot I existed. "Were you listening to the radio?"

I tried to turn away from him, to avoid his imploring questions and final answers I would eventually have to give, but his hand was warm and strong under my chin, and my eyes couldn't help but lock onto his own, which were the only things on the planet that could possibly pull me into reality so firmly. For that very reason, I broke our stare, so I could turn this twisted reality into haunting hallucinations once more, like it was simply a trick of the light.

Shawn's hand loosened its grasp under my chin and traced down to my collarbone, before coming up and softly brushing a strand of hair away from my face. "You aren't crying. Camila, why aren't you crying?"

The way he seemed to sing my name to melancholic orchestra music made me want to sob. "I am crying," I responded, a little too much logic laced in my voice. "The world is blurry."

"You aren't crying." His voice broke, but he tried to speak with the same steadiness. "You must be dizzy, or sick. Let me help you."

A second later, the door creaked open on his side and again on mine, letting the bellows of the agonizingly freezing winds and the clouds of thick snow fill the car. He took his time to lift me from my seat, but I let myself collapse into him, afraid of the cold. He placed my body in the backseat which he'd already lowered the seats of, and after what appeared to be a moment of contemplation, climbed in himself.

I must have been dizzy, or more so sick to my stomach, aching to my bones, because as soon as my body could lay down, some of the pressure on my skin was relieved, and the clarity in my vision seemed to go up a bit. Enough to identify each of the bulletholes in the rusted ceiling.

"Are you... are you glad he's dead?" Shawn asked in a dying whisper after minutes of lying and listening as the storm only continued to stir above.

"No," I responded through the haze in my mind almost immediately. "H-he's the only man I would die for. I'll never be able to put into words how much of a hell my childhood w-was, but he kept me safe. When I was very young, he gave everything he had to make sure I had a stable life. I-I was always destined to live as a child through fire, b-but he kept those fires as far from me as he could, and burned himself whenever possible. I loved him. Love. Loved."

For this moment, and every moment forward, I could hear in my mind as clearly as if he was the one that pulled into this empty parking lot of cracked tar, sitting in the front seat and listening to what he would be remembered as after he died. When my mother left, when the Second Try began, when I was officially recruited as his apprentice, when I took that first step into the midnight train and met those nearly black, pained eyes for the last time. When he walked into my room that mid-November night before I left, did he know that would be the last night we would spend in the same building? Did he know as he said the words he'd tattooed into my mind over the course of over a decade that that would be the last time he said them to me? Only now did I realize how strange it was that he smiled while he said those last words.

My heart stopped.

First it hit me like a sudden night in a decade-lasting summer evening. My world flipped upside down, my compass broken and shattered, even my rainclouds turning into barrels of pouring stones.