Vidar “Bone Heart” Woelfson.
Son of the Wolf.
Captain of the Burning Rose.
A ruthless hunter full of hate.
He’ll slice you to bits, he will.
A hundred voices echoed in my head, warning me of the man. The hunter. Bone Heart.
How was I on his ship? I could not remember how I’d gotten caught, but I knew no begging would save me. Bone Heart left no victims alive.
I thrashed, struggling against my restraints only to rub the skin of my wrists raw until they bled. My tail was a useless appendage, too heavy without water. I watched Bone Heart trace my tail with his hand, prodding with his fingers until he found a notch in my bones. I opened my mouth to demand he stop only to find my mouth suddenly absent a tongue. I only screamed, but no words came out as he raised the butcher knife. No struggling could have saved me from the impact of the blade. It hacked through me, one swing after another. Once. Twice. Thrice. Until my tail slid off the table like a large, dead fish. I screamed again, eyes wide as I stared up at the swinging lantern.
Not Bone Heart. Vidar. I need him.
Why are you doing this?
Words and questions whirled in my head and made no sense. Confusion infected me like a disease, weakening me.
I should have been in pain, but I wasn’t.
Vidar… no, Bone Heart, hovered over me with the same, bloody butcher knife. I saw empty sockets where eyes should have been.
My Vidar has eyes the color of rain-soaked soil.
This wasn’t right.
He raised the blade up again, one hand grasping a thick lock of my hair and tugging until my head hung off the edge of the table. I diverted my eyes back toward the lantern, watching it swing like a pendulum in a clock, counting down the seconds before the knife came down on my throat. The impact jarred my entire body, but still, there was no pain. Only the knowledge that I was being cut to pieces. One more hit and I felt my spine splinter and my flesh tear as he pulled my head from my body. I looked down as he lifted me and saw myself lying there, my hands flexing as I continued to struggle against my bonds, headless and without a tail. Blood drained down onto the soggy floor as I was carried across the room to a barrel that smelled of salt and filth. The shadow of the captain, Bone Heart, tossed me into the brine-filled barrel. I floated on a salty bed as he closed the top over me, robbing me of what little light I could see.
I opened my mouth and screamed again, my throat filling with acrid saltwater until I was silenced by it.
I peeled my eyes open to almost complete darkness. Nothing was around me but the night-like ocean and the flat, rocky bed of the ocean floor littered with the bones of those passed. I was lying on my back, one of them, waiting to decay and be forgotten.
A better fate than most.
“Take a moment to breathe,” a deep, rumbling voice spoke, creating ripples in the watery walls around me. “We have plenty of other fears to explore. Or, we can stop. Simply beg me.”
I rose to my knees, my body stiff with the chill of the deep. The chill of death. I was a corpse, days dead, trying to breathe.
“No,” I muttered.
A blind man is blind
But he sees so much more
~ Annaca
When I opened my eyes and saw the ceiling of the treehouse, I was devastated. A whole night’s sleep and… nothing. No dreams. I turned my head to see Dahlia sleeping beside me, wholly unmoving, her hand clutched in mine and cold as ice. Near the wall, Aeris was curled into a tight ball on a pile of blankets, staring unblinkingly at Dahlia. Judging by the heavy bags under her eyes, she did not sleep at all.
I rose with a groan, scrubbing my face with my hands and trying to prepare for what I might discover that morning.
“You didn’t dream,” Meridan said. “Not once.”
“How do you know?”
“I would have heard your breath change. Your pulse. Your eyes would have moved. You didn’t dream.”
