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What are you?

If there’s an answer, I don’t have it. It doesn’t matter how much I want to answer; I can’t.

What’s the answer?

Tell me the truth. What are you?

What am I?

Pain. That’s what I am. It’s all that’s left of me, after all. Pain inside. Pain outside. Pain you can see and pain you can’t. Pain is the story of my life, written on my flesh like a story half-told. Each chapter etched across my back, legs, and arms… My heart. My soul.

So many scars on my soul. Those… those hurt the worst of all.

Daughter.

I don’t know if the voice is real or if it’s merely a hallucination. The soft whisper brushes against my senses, and with all the strength I have left inside of me, I reach out, latching onto it and holding tight.

I want to answer. I try, but when I open my mouth, all I can do is scream. Then I realize I’m already screaming. I’ve been screaming. For how long?

Minutes? Hours? Days?

Forever. I started screaming the day my mother died, and I haven’t stopped.

I scream and scream. Begging and pleading and praying to gods long forgotten.

I scream for Caelan.

I scream for my mother.

I scream because my nerves are on fire. I’ve been doused in kerosene, and someone just lit a match.

My head falls back. Screams taper into moans of pain ripped from my throat. The sound is unnatural. Like an injured animal, caught in a trap. Too broken to escape or keep going.

Agony pulses through me, zipping along my skin like lightning. My Omega whines, and I echo the sound. It’s shrill and piercing, the cries of a child who stumbled into a nightmare years ago and never woke up.

An Alpha growls, reminding me I’m still alive. Still stuck in this nightmare.

I’m shaking. Trembling. The ground beneath me rolls and shifts. For the first time in what feels like hours, I try to open my eyes, and there’s no resistance. I blink rapidly through the sting of the harsh light. My blurry vision sharpens, and the world around me comes into focus.

It’s not only me shaking. It’s the whole world, too. The sturdy legs of the table above me skitter wildly over stone. Platters full of food inch across the wood, creeping dangerously close to the edge. A platter of white porcelain slips over the side and falls, shattering into a thousand jagged pieces.

My eyes fall. Less than six feet from my face, a skull lies on the floor. I blink, but it’s still there when I open my eyes. Half its face is white bone. The other half is loosely covered by rotting flesh, slowly sliding off the bone like it’s melting. Tufts of long white hair—what’s left of it—reach like skeletal fingers, twirling along currents of wind that don’t exist.

Maggots wriggle and squirm, crawling from the holes of its eyes and nose. A few turn around to crawl back to the dark, but more take their place, wriggling over each other and dropping to the floor. But before they can land, they disappear, swept away on a cloud of smoke.

The skull’s mouth parts, opening wider and wider and wider until the jaw dislocates, coming unhinged and clattering to the floor.

My heart slams against my ribs.

The skull screams.

Rotted flesh sloughs off the bone like melted wax. The bone softens and shrinks. It melts, transforming right before my eyes.

I blink, and the skull is gone. In its place rests a glass water pitcher, lying on its side. Pure white and untouched. Exceedingly fragile. Impossibly clean.

It rolls, clattering across the stone, headed straight for me. Two feet from my face, it sways to a stop and a trickle of water spills over the lip.

Right on the heels of the first is another. Then another. One after the next, faster and faster until dozens of trickles of liquid combine into a single stream that spreads across the stone like a river.