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I began to walk and found myself in a cavern of ice, the color of glacier water, glistening and pure and clean. It was time to meet my ancestors. A light beckoned at the end of the tunnel and I began to run toward it, feeling free and joyous and ready to enter the Land of the Silver Falls where my father's people went after they died. As I hurried forward, a figure began to form from mist and shadow. My mother, waiting for me on the other side.
"Mother!" I raced toward her. So she had been allowed to join my father's ancestors, even though she was human. Now we'd walk together in death.
"Menolly, come to me, baby!" The look on her face was so beautiful, so welcoming that tears began to course down my cheeks. She would protect me, cleanse me, soothe my soul.
But just then, I felt a tug at the back of my neck. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a silver cord connecting me to my body. Damn, what the hell? But I'm dead. What would it take to get away from this monster?
The cord slowly began to change color. It was turning bloodred, and the color was seeping from my body toward me. What the hell? Whatever it was, the energy felt tainted and I wanted no part of it. I tried to reach the end of the passage but the cord began to drag me back. As the trail of red hit my spirit, I felt myself being sucked back into my body.
No! "I don't want to go back!" To enter that scarred and pain-wracked body again? To face Dredge again? Never!
I tried to fight. As I struggled against the pull, Mother watched, frozen, a horrified look on her face. "Menolly! My baby… Let her go, damn you!" Tears ran down her face and she fell to her knees, holding out her arms. A warm and embracing cloud of sparkling light filtered toward me.
"Mother!" I screamed for real now, struggling. If I could just reach the safety of her light… but the force of the cord was growing stronger. "I won't go back. Mother—save me, please save me."
And then, the light began to fade. I heard her scream my name again, but she vanished into the darkness as I went tumbling out of the ice cavern, back into my stone-cold body. I fell through layer after layer of skin, feeling the lack of a pulse, the lack of breath as I stretched out in the still shell that had been my home all these years.
As I searched frantically for the beating of my heart, I began to panic. I was going to suffocate. I struggled, rocking right and left. Dredge's laughter filtered into my ears and I opened my eyes and reared up into a sitting position, ripping the chains out of the slab.
"She's a strong one, Master," one of the shadows from the corner of the room said.
"Yes," Dredge said. "She is. We'll be able to make good use of her." As he spoke, he held out his hand and I saw that a miniature figure stood in the palm of his hand. It was a shadow of me. He squeezed and my ribs constricted. I yelped. And then he let go and I could relax again.
"Dance, puppet," he said.
My legs swung over the edge of the slab and I couldn't stop myself. I stood and began to dance. "No—you can't control me. I won't let you."
Once again, he laughed. "Are you thirsty, newborn? Go home. Drink deep. Go home to your family and rip out their hearts, and then become a scourge on the world. Destroy all in your path."
With his words, the thirst hit me like a ton of bricks. Blood. I needed blood. I needed to drink. All I could see was a red haze of pain and desire, and I yanked the chains off my wrists and ankles. Dredge stood back, his laughter echoing against the ceiling of the cave as I raced into the wee hours of the night. I had to get home to feed. And then the world went black…
"Menolly, can you hear me?"
The man's voice penetrated the haze of pain buttressing the periphery of my thoughts. Where was I? Was I still in the cavern? And then I remembered—I was safe, in a temple, tied down but under the watchful eyes of someone who was helping me.
I licked my lips, expecting my voice to sound raspy from screaming, but it came out clear and calm. "Yes… yes, I can hear you."
"We witnessed what happened to you. Now that we know, we can work on breaking the cord that binds you to Dredge. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
The words drifted through my thoughts and I flashed back to dancing when Dredge said dance. A puppet. He'd called me a puppet. "What do I need to do?"
"You must return to that moment and find the thread of energy that connects the two of you. It's not just his blood that makes him your sire."
Go back? Did he say go back? The last thing I wanted to do was dive back into that mire of pain and anger. But then the thought of being free dangled, the carrot in front of the horse.
"What do I have to do? How do I do this?"
"It's simple. You go back and I'll be here, shoring you up. Focus on finding the cord that binds you to him. We need to know precisely where it connects in your aura so we can pinpoint and sever it. But before we make the break, we need to find out where he is. For that, you'll have to reach out from the present through the binding cord and touch his soul."
Jareth brushed a stray hair out of my forehead and that simple kindness made me sniffle. Reliving the past was exhausting, painful. But if reliving it is this bad, think what it's doing to you every day, every hour, every minute you carry the burden. The words echoed in my mind and I blinked behind the blindfold. All of my anger and sorrow couldn't be wiped away as if it had never happened, but perhaps I could lay it down? Quit carrying it and let it go?
"All right," I said. "Let's do it. How can I keep from being sucked under by the memories?"
"I'll be by your side, now that I know what you're facing," he said. "Lean on me. Call on my strength."
As the smell of blood came close once again, I said, "Dredge tried to do this, didn't he? You took him back to his time of turning?"
Jareth let out a long sigh. "I did. I had no idea he'd been a priest of Jakaris in life—the years of perversion that twisted his soul. And so the ritual went terribly wrong. Instead of being willing to let go of the anger, he was looking for a way to absorb his sire's power into himself. And it worked."
