Page 144 of The Blood Rites

“What was that?” he asks.

I shake my head, too spent to care.

He kisses my hair. “You shouldn’t be able to do that to me.”

We lie like that for a long time, neither of us willing to break the moment.

Eventually, he tries to get up. I grab his wrist before courage can leave me.

“Stay,” I whisper. “I know I won’t wake up with you. But I want to fall asleep beside you.”

He nods, settling back against the pillow as he wraps his arms around me and buries his face in my hair.

We drift off together, not as Offerings—just us.

I know it can’t last.

But for tonight, it is enough.

Nineteen

I am not awake.

Not quite asleep, either, but caught in the seam between. Something holds me here, some sticky membrane between worlds, as if I’m trapped within a wound that refuses to clot.

The ground is not solid. It is a sliding, infinite surface, shifting between solid, liquid and the all-devouring black of the void. Every time I try to focus on it, it changes, like a lie trying to survive the questions it’s asked. I stand. I float. I sink. None of it matters. II can barely feel the edges of my own body, as though I’m being puppeteered by a bored child.

Three figures take shape on the horizon. They are so large my brain tries to reject them, tries to shrink them down to a manageable size, but they only become more enormous. They form a perfect triangle around me, at such a distance that their feet never seem to meet the surface I stand on. Their faces are entirely obscured by the clouds and mist above.

The first is a man—a sculpture, really—made of a thousand shattered crystals barely held together. Each movement grinds one shard against another, forcing trickles of dark blue fluid out of the cracks. A wound in his chest glows with a familiar light. It is my own light. I hate it instantly.

The second is a woman, pink and pale, her hair curling down from the clouds like ropes of wet flesh. She has the same nurturing glow as the medics at the barracks, but the way her limbs move betrays something malevolent. Her hands are massive, soft and mothering, but they end in sharp points.

The third figure is the worst. It is wrapped in vines of purple-black with barbed thorns. No skin shows. It is a bound shadow, sculpted by the absence of everything else. Every so often it flickers, as if trying out new forms and hating each one. I cannot look directly at it for long, nausea building in my stomach, but every time I glance back at it, I swear it has moved closer.

I don’t know what these things are. I don’t know whether I should run, or fight, or try to scream.

I do nothing.

Instead, I stand there, a pathetic dust mote, as the voices begin.

They are not voices, exactly. Some are distorted, like sound beneath the water’s surface, bubbling up from the deep. Others are soft, hypnotising, laced with violence that twists itself so much it sounds like sweetness. There are words, but none I recognise; sometimes they run backwards, sometimes they are only the sound of glass scraping on glass.

I try to speak, but my mouth fills with the black powder. I choke on it, sending clouds of midnight into the space. I try to claw it from my mouth, but it is unending. Tears run down my face as my life ebbs away.

But I do not die.

The powder is pulled from me by an unknown force, like life force being drawn into the Mother Shard.

I drag in a breath, gasping for air that doesn't feel real. The powder turns to liquid, a viscous black oil, and falls to the floor, burning me where it splashes against my skin.

The pink woman sinks to her knees, her face luminous with the glow of the sickest kind of infatuation. She raises a hand—so slow and heavy it makes the air warp around the motion—and points at me.

I feel it in my sternum before I see it. A pressure, hot and splitting, like a fever trying to possess me.

I want to move, but I can’t.

The pink woman shuffles closer. Her hands swell—splitting into smaller hands, and smaller again—converging around me without touching, compressing the space I stand in until no air remains.