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Sand fills my mouth, crusting my dry, cracked lips as I hit the ground face-first. It’s warm against my cheek, almost as if it’s anticipating the rising sun.
I let myself enjoy it, just for a few seconds.
I don’t think I deserve to be pleasantly warm in the few moments before I die.
So I claw my fingers into the ground, sand settling underneath my fingernails. Perhaps if I can bury myself, the layer of sand above me will protect me from the sun. I’ll pass out, repeatedly, I’m sure, from suffocation. But my vampirism will wake me again, until the daylight passes and I’m free to travel at night once more.
I’ll be too late for Othian by then, of course.
But then my nails scrape against something hard.
I’ve hit bedrock.
And the layer of sand covering it is too shallow to bury myself underneath.
Foolish child, whispers the parasite, its voice rising in panic. Let me out, and I could help you. I could change you.
It’s trying awfully hard to sound seductive, but its panic is getting in the way.
I’m at the point now where I’ll die just to spite it, just to leave it alone, trapped out here in a desert where no one will ever find it.
The spite warms my heart almost as much as the sand does.
And then the sun peeks over the horizon.
At first, death feels like burning. Like having every nerve in my skin go up in flames as the sunlight scorches my flesh.
The pain is hot, intense. Unbearable.
But nothing is permanent.
And then the fire burns through enough skin that everything goes numb.
That’s when the shadows take me.
I think I should fear the shadows, the darkness that comes to carry me away from the world, but I’m too numb to bring myself to care.
I must be dead now. Permanently this time, because the shadows wrap their arms underneath me, pulling me into their darkness as they lift me from the ground and carry me away.
It’s dark in the shadows, and my heart despairs a bit as I wonder if this is where my baby is, has been for years. But then I remember—no—my baby is somewhere full of light, and surely the shadows are reserved for people like me.
But then Death whispers my name, and the sound is so familiar, I wonder if I’ve belonged to him all along.
“Blaise. You’re safe now,” he says, and even in death, tears fill my eyes, though I can’t feel whether they hit my scorched cheeks.
I failed them, I tell Death, but if he hears, he doesn’t answer. I failed my friends.
Death carries me away, but now I’m feeling frantic. Because it’s dark here, and I can’t feel or see, and I can’t bear the thought of my friends following me here all because I failed them.
Please send me back, I whisper. Just long enough to warn them.
But Death just cradles me as he leads me into nothingness.
CHAPTER 90
NOX
The shadows of the paldihv I stole from the man whose throat I ripped out in the inn in Charshon have carried me through the daylight hours.
