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Now, more than ever, I’m determined to win the first gauntlet and prove to everyone I deserve to be here.
8
I wake up thrashing and clawing at my throat. Blood wets my fingertips. Crap. Not again.
Pressing my hand lightly to the broken skin where my neck meets my collarbone, I staunch the bleeding as I focus on dragging air into my lungs.
That was . . . awful. The nightmare still clings to my skull like the cloying aftertaste of store-bought tea. Blinking up at the metal rungs of the bunk above me where Mack sleeps like the dead, I count the metal slats.
One, two, three . . . see, you’re fine. Fine.
The bobble-head Eclipsa gave me—an alarmingly realistic version of her right down to the silver braid and dagger dripping blood—watches me from my nightstand.
“The nightmares are getting worse,” I inform the bobble-head assassin. “And considering how bad they were to start with, that’s not good.”
Bobble-head Eclipsa openly judges me with her silence.
Groaning, I jackknife to a sitting position. Goodbye, sleep.
It’s the third night this week that I’ve slipped into Valerian’s dreams, which aren’t really dreams but fragmented memories that make most horror movies look tame. Wiping at the sweaty strands of my hair pasted to my forehead, I try to make sense of this new vision.
Valerian is young, not much older than twelve. He’s tied to a post in the Winter palace courtyard. The air is crisp, cold. Enough that his ragged breath spills from his lips in crystalline clouds.
It’s the middle of the night, the moon, a swollen ivory globe, hung low in a dark winter sky. The entire palace had been dragged from their beds and gathered around the courtyard.
Even dreaming, I had enough sentience to understand it wasn’t real. And yet, I still felt everything.
The light breeze that lifted the hair from the nape of his neck. The sting of the magic-infused rope cutting into his wrists, breaking open the scabs from only a few days ago.
A dark shadow emerges from the crowd. Up until that moment, Valerian has felt nothing. His emotions schooled into a hard wall of granite, unbreakable.
The coldness, the emptiness . . . it’s horrible. An all-consuming ache of nothingness.
But the second his grandfather stalks toward him, Valerian goes rigid. Desperate for anything to block the swell of emotion raging inside him, he shoves his face into the ragged ashwood post he’s tied to, the one embedded with shards of iron.
Two mortal poisons—iron and ash. Both meant to hurt him. Break him open.
Splinters of the lethal wood cut into his cheek. White-hot pain flares. He shudders, welcoming the feeling. Grasping onto it. Trying to drive it deeper inside him to purge his emotions.
But he fails, and a tiny sliver of fear pierces his heart. He recoils from the feeling, but he knows—he knows his grandfather has felt it.
Just like all the other times, he tries to force the word down into his chest. Tries to choke on it rather than let it escape his lips.
If he could, he would rip out his own throat rather than say it.
“Mother. Please, Mother.”
Three words. Three fricking words that undo me. He’s never talked about his mom. Not once. And yet the ferocity with which he longs for her in this dark moment . . .
She isn’t coming. She never does. And the betrayal of it wounds him to the very core. Not the end of the whip. Not the ash splinters or the iron fragments that tear at his flesh.
The pain from his mother’s absence is the torture he can’t endure—the weapon he can’t fight.
I want to scream, to punch someone as I feel him sag against the ashwood pole, defeated. Rage like I’ve never felt before splits me open, matching the agony that crashes over him as the wood burns every inch of flesh it touches.
His heart stutters into a weak, unsustainable rhythm; the air wheezes in his throat.
The poison from the ashwood and the iron is slowly killing him. And still. Still. He thrusts his body against it, giving the poison more and more access. Using it to drive his mother from his heart.
