Page 222 of Coal Hearts

Plummeting into perpetual darkness where I’d always belonged.

No, not just darkness...

Freedom.

Freedom from sickness.

Freedom from loneliness.

Free to be entirely...

me.

Chapter One

...............................

Ily

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I’D NEVER WISHED FOR DEATH before.

Even on my darkest days when I wondered why I’d been abandoned on the steps of a hospital, I’d always been grateful to be alive.

I might have been born unwanted, but I’d been cherished from the moment Krish spotted me. I’d become a sister and a daughter. I’d been kissed and hugged, doted on and adored. If anything, I was grateful to my birth mother for giving me up because I’d found exactly where I was supposed to be.

So no...at no point in my blessed, happy life had I ever heard the whispers of giving up.

Until now.

“Fade away,” hissed a drugged delusion.

“Die so you don’t have to feel the pain,” whispered a roaring tiger head mounted on the wall.

The dead zoo crushed me from all angles, puncturing me with antlers, horns, and tusks. Even if Peter hadn’t forced psilocybin down my throat, I would’ve struggled in this room.

Struggled not to hear the phantom screams of death.

Struggled not to be affected by the stagnant energy of slaughtered things.

But with the drugs?

I didn’t stand a chance.

Henri’s voice trickled down and down into my soul.

“I told you what would happen, little nightmare. I told you what exists inside me. I told you.” Over and over again, his raspy, drunken voice repeated. “I told you what would happen. I told you...”

A vortex.

A spinning, sucking hellhole binding me to the X-shaped cross where he’d imprisoned me.

I shuddered as his tongue slid over my cheek one last time, catching stray tears before he pushed away.

He sighed as if he hadn’t taken a proper breath his entire life. He flexed his shoulders as he finally slipped into who he truly was. The illusion of him with bat wings and vampire fangs returned, painting a morbid fantasy of his shredded, skin-webbed wings fluttering behind him, kicking up dust motes, and sending feathers of dead birds shivering.

I blinked and tried to see past insanity. Tried to cling to sanity.