"Ada."
A breath of a voice floats past, barely audible, like it's more of a memory than anything.
I groan, my eyes too heavy to open and try and take stock of where I am, how I got here. My memory jogs and then stutters and I come up with nothing except the here and now: my cheek pressed against cold, hard ground, with dampness seeping in my clothes, going straight into my bones.
"Ada, come find me."
The voice again. My mother's. Here but not here.
Somehow I open my eyes and am faced with a grey world. I'm face down on frosted grass, sprawled against unyielding earth. Slowly I raise my head.
And I see her.
She's standing a few yards away, her back to me. We're on the island again, this place that only seems to exist in my dreams, only now it's not an open space overlooking the sea, we're in frozen woods of birch and hemlock. On the other side of my mother is a large, dark pond, a layer of thin ice stretched across like a spider web. I have this unsettling feeling that the pond keeps going and going and going underneath and there is no bottom.
It's a door.
To someplace beneath Hell. A darker place where there's no air, no life, no escape.
The thoughts rattle me and I'm afraid. I'm suddenly afraid that the door is real, that this is real, and that my mother might actually be in front of me and she'll be lost to me forever.
"Come find me."
She starts to walk.
"Stop!" I cry out.
She does.
I try to move, to get up, but every part of my body is heavy, swollen, and by the time I get to my feet, I'm sweating, my face red hot with strain.
She's still standing there, dressed in jeans and a peasant top, the clothes she was wearing when she was last seen alive.
When she threw herself onto the train tracks of the New York Subway, before my very eyes.
She knew that if she killed herself, the demon that was possessing her, the demon that was intent on destroying us, destroying our world, would die along with her.
The memories hit me like a sledgehammer and I feel myself cracking into pieces.
My mother shouldn't have died, it should have been me. I should have realized what was going on, I should have been strong enough. The demon was inside me first, albeit briefly, and I should have been the one to kill myself and the demon inside, not her.
But I hadn't.
I wasn't strong enough to fight.
And honestly, I don't know if I would have been strong enough to throw myself in front of a moving train either. The fact that if I had been in my mother's shoes, if I had the choice, I may have been too much of a coward to do the right thing. Jacob had said that the young have courage. But I was only sixteen. And I had none.
"Mom," I say softly, the ache in my heart growing and growing, adding to the weight, my body already so heavy, being pulled to the earth. "Please."
I don't know what else there is to say. What can I say?
Too much.
Not enough.
"I miss you," I whisper. "I love you. I wish you were still here. That I'd wake up and come downstairs and you'd be in the kitchen with Dad. I wish we were all happy again. I wish everything was normal."
YOU ARE READING
Veiled
RomanceYOU CAN READ THE FIRST 6 CHAPTERS OF VEILED HERE! The rest of the story is now complete and available for purchase on Amazon (free for KU subscribers!): http://bit.ly/VEILED-KH-Kindle Death. It's something that Ada Palomino has always known so wel...