Dance in Shadow and Whisper (Marionettes of Myth #1)

Chapter Eighteen

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

 

I'd never known what having a fever was like. Or a flu. Nothing.

Demons were impervious to bacteria and viruses, but vampire venom must have been the equivalent to a hundred flues crammed into my body. I didn't know real ache until then, and I didn't know what it was like to have the sheets cling to my flesh, strangling me, while my insides turned to ice, and I didn't know what real nightmares were. Walls collapsed in on me. The ground swallowed me up. Shadows with hideous eyes crawled across me and peered into my face to check if I was alive, to touch my neck, to listen to the wheezing of each breath in my hollow lungs, to suck on the wounds of my body.

Hunger impaled my stomach and my flesh and my bones. I needed to sink my teeth into anything, even if it was my own hand. I writhed and I cried out and tears poured from my eyes and the blurry walls formed a coffin around me.

I sobbed, and I screwed my eyes shut, and I folded up into the smallest ball I could possibly manage, and I willed it all to end.

Keep strong, Kali, the voice at the back of my head said. Keep strong.

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The pupils of her eyes dribbled ink into the shadows. There was no moonlight, no starlight, only the light from the telephone haloing her. The shadows paced and crawled around it, disquieted, unsettled, and hungry.

Her fingers raised to pinch my chin and lift my face to hers. She didn't feel like anything. She was nothing. She was the coldness of the shadows, the impenetrable opacity, with depth that continued on into infinity. The swell of her lips parted and she said, 'Kali. You'll always be my little sister, and I will always be your big sister. That will never, ever change.' Her voice resonated from everywhere, from nowhere, from inside my chest like an earthquake in my ribs.

Something touched my face, but it didn't feel like her hand. It was the cold caress of nothing, of empty space filled with nothing, smoothing back my hair so sweetly, so tenderly, so sickeningly.

'I promised you, remember? I promised I would take you away from your prison, and I plan to hold true to that promise. I've worked ten years on it.'

She receded away, and the smoky darkness opened up to embrace her, to twine around her like a hundred possessive arms, to swallow her up.

'I'm going to save you. I'm going to save us both. You have to understand that everything I do has a reason.'

The darkness crawled around me, encasing me. The walls crushed me. The light faded. Everything turned black. My fingers burned. Then my arms. Then all of me. My heart swelled with white fire.

I jolted awake.

Sweat coated me as I caught up to my thirst for air. My fingertips still tingled.

I uncovered my hand from layers of blankets and lifted my fingers to my face, but the light was lacking and my vision was blurry. I blinked away the fog and focused. The room simmered in near darkness, the heavy drapes so thick that, were it not for the single sliver of blinding light, the room would have been perfectly black.

My brain told me that I had long since adjusted to the new foreign smells, but now I had the opportunity to truly dissect them. I held perfectly still as I tested the air.