Page 9 of Serpent and Shadow

I had no idea what was happening to me.

But whatever it was, I knew it meant something really bad.

3

Questions

“Are you all right, my dear?” a familiar voice asked gently.

There was a lag, an instant of nothingness noticeable only once it passed.

For the entirety of that silence, I forgot he was gone.

I even felt considerably better, because that endless, screaming abyss, the last thing I remembered before I’d lost consciousness, no longer held me in its grip.

My pure relief at it being gone made me forget everything else.

That breath of silence, of peace, ended so quickly my heart slammed violently in my chest.

I remembered.

The visceral images I’d happily forgotten choked off my air, my ability to think. It wasn’t like before, like falling into that endless abyss. This felt like regular grief, something horrible and painful and anxiety-inducing, but something I could still problem-solve through, and think through, and make decisions, and feel. I wasn’t going to black out.

I didn’t feel like I was going to die.

It was bad, though.

Maybe it wouldn’t kill me, but it was bloody painful.

I almost wished I could fall unconscious again, but I knew that wouldn’t help me, much less help Bones. My only consolation was that I doubted his father would kill him. He’d make Bones suffer beyond my imagining of it, but he wouldn’t kill him.

Malefic was far too practical for that.

My mind tried to wipe that knowledge away, to shove it somewhere so I didn’t have to think about it right then. My body had less luck dealing with that overload of memory.

I couldn’t breathe.

“Breathe,” the man above me urged.

No one was going after him.

No one was going to even try to save him.

Rather than chase down Malefic and his evil cult, the Praecuri wasted time dragging me in front of the King. All for what? To scold me? To accuse me of using “bad magic”? To force me to admit I’d somehow found myself married to Bones? Whatever the purpose of that exercise had been, it accomplished nothing. Either they were idiots, or they had no intention of going after Malefic or anyone in Dark Cathedral.

Meanwhile, Malefic was going to hurt his son.

A lot. He were going to hurt him so much.

I couldn’t fucking breathe.

“Breathe, Ms. Shadow. We are not abandoning Mr. Bones.”

The concern grew more audible in his voice, but a harder promise framed his words.

It didn’t change the fundamental truth, a truth I knew with absolute certainty, probably because Bones knew it. His father, that woman, Sirena, Christian Orrin’s father, the other ghouls in black hoods, they would all derive enormous pleasure in––

“Drink,” the voice urged.