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Her body went limp in my arms only a second before it burst into a cloud of white dust.
Staring down at my shaky, blood-coated hands, speckled in white, I could scarcely draw in a breath. I’d never taken a human life before. Not with my own bare hands. In one cold thrust of a blade, I stole her laughter, her tears, her memories. I stole everything. Just like that, she was gone.
Bringing my hands up to my face, I wept.
* * *
Tugging at my sleeve broke me from my staring, and I looked up to see the boy standing over me, urging me to get up. Muscles heavy with anguish, I pushed to my feet.
He was right, I couldn’t stay anywhere for too long in this place. As we exited back the door, I twisted around to see 623 on its surface. The corridor felt colder, more terrifying without Vespyr at my side. The obvious silence skated over the back of my neck, and I kept looking over my shoulder, the fear of seeing one of the creatures keeping my muscles in a constant tremble.
A door stood ahead, and as we approached, the air in my lungs thickened.
777.
I only brushed my fingertip across the handle of it before pulling away, and I shook my head. “I can’t. I have a bad feeling about this.”
A glance toward the end of the hallway showed no other door in sight. Perhaps it was the last in the labyrinth. The center of it.
The boy tugged on my sleeve, and I let out a sigh.
“I have to, in order to get out, don’t I? I have to go inside.”
From the other side of the door, I heard a baby crying. The same sound I’d heard back in my room, when I’d been lured into the labyrinth.
The same sound which lured me right then.
61
JERICHO
Ifelt as if I were in a daze, walking through the corridor that wound and twisted into new dark passages. Uncertain if she’d been telling the truth, or if it was a lie. I focused on the foreign word, which ricocheted through my head. Son.
My son.
One I never knew about. Trapped in these corridors. Alone.
Abandoned.
And if what she’d said was truth, the only way to free him was the one thing I couldn’t grant. Doing so would have cast Farryn into the dark subspace of her mind for as long as Syrisa inhabited her body.
“What hell will this one bring?” Vaszhago asked, as we approached a new door.
It opened onto the familiar corridor in the dungeons of Blackwater Cathedral. Dread sank to the pit of my stomach as I imagined the possibilities of what I might find there. Seemed the labyrinth was hellbent on tormenting me with my most troubling guilt, and I imagined the very rooms in which I had engaged in countless hours of my own self-inflicted pain could only mean more of the same.
With slow strides, we made our way down the dungeon’s long hallway, and at first, I wondered if we’d gotten by unscathed, as not a single sound, or creature, presented itself.
Moans echoed from the opposite end of the hallway.
“Fuck.” I rubbed a hand down my face.
“Sounds like it.” Vaszhago strode ahead of me. “Might as well see what cunt has decided to torment you this time.”
Sighing, I followed after him. Pointing to one of the doors ahead, he put his ear to the wood and frowned. When I finally reached him, he pushed open the door. His frown deepened, and I followed the path of his gaze toward a bed to which a naked Farryn had been chained. Vaszhago lay on top of her, his hand covering her mouth as he hammered his hips into her.
The sight of him sent pulses of fury through my veins. A fire blazed inside of me, and I balled my hands to tight fists.
“You won’t say a word of this,” the imposter Vaszhago whispered. “Or I will kill him. I will fucking kill him first chance I get.”
