“Pretty bird!” cried Pluto, the glow from my spirit casting him in a pale yellow light that highlighted the iridescent sapphire, teal, and garnet undertones of his ebony feathers.
Gently, even as he peered up at my spirit form, squinting against the strange golden light that continued to bloom around us, the old man guided my limp and unconscious form to the floor.
“Gods, Helena,” said Flora, her voice hushed and reverent as she shielded wide eyes from the light that radiated… from me?
Still suspended in midair, I peered from one arm to the other and then down at my legs, shocked at the way my transparent and translucent form, garbed in my work clothes—pencil skirt, flats, cardigan, and blouse—shone like a sunbeam.
My time to marvel at this strange spectacle, and to revel in this oddly euphoric sense of weightlessness and freedom, didn’t last, though.
Like a spreading shadow, an obsidian stain flowed down my arms, coating and cloaking my luminous form, hiding the light I exuded from view by sheathing it—and all of me—in a subduing layer of black. One that transformed me into a librarian-shaped wraith.
“What’s—?”
I didn’t get a chance to finish asking my question because something caught me from behind—a lashing whip of freezing ebony, thicker, darker, and more viscous than Grim’s smoke tendrils.
Another murky tentacle wrapped my leg. Two more caught me by the wrists.
Then everything zeroed down as I shrank into a tight ball of awareness. A sphere of darkness that, an instant later, got sucked into a devouring and all-encompassing pit of the same.
48GRIM
Outside didn’t seem to truly exist. Just me, the hut, and the small figure occupying the straw bed in the corner.
Every time I tried to leave the house, the hut’s lone doorway would take me straight back in instead of out. It didn’t matter how the dark outline of the forest waited at the edge of the farm, visible through the door’s frame. Nor did it matter that the light of the shining full moon beamed through the open shutters of the only window.
I knew that small sleeping figure, that sick child—that boy. But at the same time, I didn’twantto know him. Rather, I didn’t want to remember him…
It hurt too much to remember him.
So I walked out the door again, straight into the cold and starry night.
Except that night morphed back into the interior of my simple house with its low, raftered ceiling and dirt floor.
The boy slept under the wool-filled blanket made by his mother—my sister.
My late sister…
Damnit.
I didn’t want to remember her, either.
I didn’t want to feel.Anyof this.
Turning on my heel, I rushed out the door again, as though speed could somehow break me through a hidden barrier, whatever invisible veil existed that kept returning me to this house, that room.
To hell…
My hell.
My efforts failed me like they had before. Like they undoubtedly would again.
But then that now-familiar sensation of dread crept over me, soaking into my skin before whittling its way between my ribs.
Memory. That’s right. I was in a memory. Stuck in a memory—and it was about to start. All over again.
I shook my head, tears burning in my eyes as I stared at that bed, and my nephew, whose breathing had turned unexpectedly shallow.
That afternoon, the boy, who had seen six winters with hardly a cough, had been fine. He’d helped me out in the field with the crops, and for the first day in weeks, he hadn’t cried for his mother. Finally, he’d started to adjust to being away from the city. To being with me. A makeshift and ill-fitting parent, but the only scrap of family he had left.
