The sound of the door opening broke the still silence of the room as Victoria let herself into the healing room, clad in nothing but a modest nightdress and a shawl to cover her upper body.
She looked around pensively for Thelma, and when she didn’t see the blonde woman, turned away to leave immediately, something like relief passing over her face but a jolly voice stopped her in her tracks.
“Leaving already?” Thelma asked as she came out of an inner room, wearing the same sundress she’d put on to go to town. “First, you purposely come late and now you’re trying to leave?”
“I was helping the librarian,” Victoria said stiffly, drawing her shawl closer to her body. Her voice was strong but had Thelma bothered, she would have seen the fear in her eyes.
The Healer moved towards the door, locking in securely from inside and as she did so, a feverish smile split her face into two.
“Mikel was here today,” she told Victoria in that trademark jolly voice of hers. “And the whole time I healed his wounds, and we spoke and laughed…”
She leaned down, framing Victoria’s face in her hands and up close, Thelma’s smile was horrifying to look at. “The whole time, the only thing I could think about was how satisfying it would be to carve out his heart, or flay open his veins. There’s something so beautiful about killing the ones who trust you, don’t you think, daughter?”
Victoria leaned back, and her face told how repulsed she was by the Healer. “I wouldn’t know, I have never betrayed those who placed their trust in me.”
Thelma gave a small laugh, humming a tune under a breath. Her grip became painfully fight as her nails dug into the flesh of Victoria’s cheeks and suddenly the Elder remembered what tune it was Thelma hummed – a popular mourning song, sang by close family members on death anniversaries.
“Aren’t you tired?” Thelma whispered to her, in the voice a mother might sing a lullaby to her babe in, “tired of reliving your life over and over again each time an Outsider is transported here? Only you and I know this, yet why do you try to protect them when they come?”
“You would not understand,” Victoria replied, even though Thelma’s nails were now drawing blood from her cheeks. “You have never taken the time to forge real bonds.”
Slowly, Thelma removed the shawl Victoria wore, and in the dim glow of the overhead torches, the scars Victoria bore showed, the scars of the price she paid so Mikel – and the many others before him – could stay at the church without a price on his head.
She knew not all of them, the Outsiders, were lucky to end up at the Church of Erynla, where they were safe, even without their knowledge, from a quick death.
Every time Thelma had discovered an Outsider before the Elder could, she had finished them off ruthlessly with a madness only Victoria knew of.
It had happened so many times now the Elder had begun to see a pattern, and if suspicions were right, her talk with that strange man, Ty, would take Mikel out of the church, well on his way to completing his task.
On some level, she knew it was wrong to betray her church so, for all Outsiders came with only one goal in mind – to destroy this world – yet, if it would stop Thelma from taking innocent lives, then Victoria could risk being a traitor.
“Does he know?” Thelma mocked as her fingers traced the scars on Victoria’s bronze skin, both old and new. “Does he know each week you come here to be tortured? Each week you pay the price for every day he spends in bliss?”
“It is the price you insisted upon for your silence,” Victoria said through gritted teeth as Thelma pressed down on one of the newer scars. “I cannot blame him for a penalty he has no knowledge of. But I will never forgive you Thelma. Never.”
YOU ARE READING
No Blessed ✓
Fantasy- Completed - For Mikel Ark, being offered a job by the world's biggest gaming company is a dream come true, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that will launch his career as a hotshot programmer. But what Mikel hasn't been told is that his employer's...
