Page 10 of Sorrow & Strangers

I curse foully, seeing the bottle on her bedside table. Fucking alchemy. I appear in the bedroom with my avatar, grabbing the bottle to glare at it. Dreamless Draft. So stupidly reckless. These are extremely addictive. If she starts using this as a way to avoid me and the nightmares . . .

No.

Without waking either of them, I vanish to the alchemy lab. The avatar makes it easy to blend into the shadows cast by the various venomous plants and poisonous flowers. It is a simple thing to slip past the night caretaker who tends to the night blooms. It’s not a night bloom I’m after. My eyes narrow on the Latoon bush, and a rune burns on my arm, igniting a ball of flame in my hand. The whitethorn plant is essential for a dreamless draft and requires the specialized environment of this greenhouse to grow. My eyes flash as I ignite the bush at the roots, encouraging the flames to grow up the branches so that by the time the night caretaker finds the burning bush, it will be too late to recover it.

Back in my bedroom, I pace back and forth, wearing the carpet thin. The truth I won’t admit to myself is that I no longer know how to truly sleep. I haven’t in years, and now that she’s sleeping and dreamless, I’m alone with my own thoughts, my own pain, my own loss.

Absently I touch a raised rune on my arm. The old ways once dictated my life, and it took far too long for me to realize how they created a regime of terror. They fostered an endless cycle of those on top crushing those beneath, and an indoctrination of the youth into the same beliefs.

I refused to be a tool for others to wield, and I broke that cycle a long time ago.

You had no choice but to become what they made you. Magic is freedom for some, but it’s a shackle for you. The chains wrap around you so tightly you mistake them for your own skin. What are you but the bonds that hold you to this life? To this path?

Words from a lifetime ago echo through my skull. They were spoken by a man long dead by my own hand, yet they still resonate within me. What am I but what he made me? A weapon to strike through armies, to force them to kneel at just the threat of me being dispatched. I was nothing but a killer armed with the power to make nations fall and realms tremble. A monster dressed as a dream.

I glance again at the spell showing her sleeping peacefully, dreamlessly, and I know it is something I’ll never achieve without her.

Chapter Seven

Summer

The following two weeks pass by in a haze, but they’re not quick like you would expect. Instead, every minute feels like an hour, every hour like a day, every day like a month, yet I don’t feel any better. I still don’t feel any will to live. The only places I go are from my bed to the couch and back. Alice has managed to get me to eat a little more, begging and pleading with me until I give in, but I’m still losing weight. Every time I put on my clothes, they’re a little looser. Every time I look in the mirror, my face is a little gaunter.

He still invades my dreams night after night, and I know he’s been messaging me. I locked my phone away in a drawer and let the battery die. It’s been there since I smashed it into pieces and it magically repaired itself immediately.

I stare at myself in the mirror. I’m wasting away. Good.

“Sum?” Alice knocks, popping her head around the door. “You have anything for me to take to your professors?”

I walk to my desk and grab the handful of loose papers sitting there. I’ve done some work, only because at my worst moments, those following the nightmares and the invasion by the last person in the world I want to see, I wake up feeling so broken that I need to occupy my mind. It took me a few days before I was able to focus enough to do any semblance of schoolwork, but it’s enough to help me breathe for a while. To allow Alice to sleep longer.

“Still not going in?” she asks hopefully, like she does every day.

I shake my head but add, “Maybe tomorrow.”

“Right. Tomorrow,” Alice says, looking down at the coursework I hand her. She knows it’s a lie, but it’s a lie for her benefit. The difficulty with those is that they’re only believable for a small window of time before the belief and trust are gone.

Alice leaves and I climb back onto my bed, pulling my knees to my chest and hugging them. There is a knock on the door, and it is such a foreign sound that it yanks me back to the present. No one has visited, not since it happened. I glance at the clock, mildly surprised to see that an hour has already passed.

With a sigh, I climb out of bed and make my way downstairs. I open the door, surprised to see Max looking down at me.

“You look like shit,” he says by way of a greeting. The insult merely brushes against me.

I turn away but leave the door open as I walk to the small bar cart. I ­haven’t been drinking, but today seems like a good day to start again.

He’s gone.

I pour a heavy measure of scotch and down it in one gulp.

“Alice asked me to come,” he says, stepping into the house and walking toward me. “She thinks she’s going to lose you too.”

I put the glass back down. “Why are you here?” I ask.

He’s gone.

“How long are you going to do this to yourself?” he asks, ignoring my question. I glance at him. His eyes have the same edge of concern as Alice’s. “You know, I hear you in my dreams. Your screams.”

I look away. My thumb glides over the base of my vacant ring finger, pain radiating through me.