“Your sister is suffering a great deal. And the ones who love her suffer as well in her absence.”
She chuckled. “I know. I saw it. She is in anguish. Akareth is having a wonderful time with her.”
I envisioned my feet growing roots. It was all I could do not to lunge and bleed her dry.
“Do you love him? Akareth?” Aeris asked.
“I would do anything for him.”
“But do you love him? Does he love you? Would he care at all if one of these men cut off your head and tossed it into the sea?”
“I don’t need his love. It’s rather silly that you all covet such a useless emotion. Dahlia, especially. She’s become so soft. Much softer than I ever was.”
“And you left her there, in her nightmares,” Aeris continued. Lyla met her eyes again, all traces of her mad amusement shattered. I watched Aeris’s shoulders slump a little like she’d been offered disturbing news. “You didn’t leave her there,” she whispered.
The two exchanged a long stare like something was being said between them that we could not hear. Then Aeris straightened as if trying to recompose herself, but everything about her seemed uncomfortable. She sniveled and Nazario took another step as if he was about to scoop her up in his arms and run away.
“What’s wrong, little one?” Lyla muttered.
“I don’t like being close to you,” Aeris admitted. “No one should feel what you’re feeling.”
“What do you know of what I am feeling?”
Aeris jolted to her feet and right into Nazario’s waiting arms.
“You are hateful,” she said urgently. “And angry. And you are so incomplete. There’s… there’s so much of you missing. And… andif Dahlia perishes to whatever madness has taken her, you will only suffer more. Because—”
“Stop,” Lyla said through her teeth, her skin immediately turning ashen, black veins framing her even blacker eyes.
“Because there is a part of you that was glad you found her,” Aeris kept on. “You were glad to find your sister. That is why you’re confused.”
Lyla suddenly lunged at the bars, shaking the whole cage. Aeris leapt back and turned into Nazario’s chest so he could wrap her in his embrace.
“Maldita bruja,” Nazario cursed, spitting on the sand.
Only then did Cathal wake to the spectacle happening around him. He sat up, blinking profusely. Nazario hissed and began to walk Aeris away when she reached out and gently clutched my wrist, pulling me toward her.
“She’s all wrong,” she whispered. “All twisted up.”
“You should kill the witch,” Nazario added. “She is a plague on all of us.”
There was a loud voice in my head telling me to do just that. It was screaming at me, but I couldn’t. Not when Dahlia had yet to wake. My gut had steered me wrong in the past. So had my head and even my heart. I turned back toward Lyla. Maybe it was better to kill her. To end it and unburden ourselves with her presence. She was not aiding in waking Dahlia anyways, so what was her purpose outside of having insight into Akareth that she was unwilling to give up?
I ran my hands down my face with a groan. Cathal was sitting on a barrel, raking his fingers through his shaggy, red hair.
“I’ll be watching her for a bit,” I said to him. “Get yourself some food.”
“Aye,” he nodded, standing and making his way toward Boil, who was cooking what smelled like a bland potato stew over a fire.
Taking Cathal’s place on the barrel, I stared into Lyla’s cage, right into her monstrous gaze. I had never been a man who pleadedfor anything. Begging wasn’t in my nature, but at that moment, with hopelessness growing like a weed inside me, I was nearly prepared to drop on my knees and beg for a way to bring my Dahlia back from whatever hell she’d been pulled into.
If only there was a sliver of achance it would work.
Be it your imagination or no
Reality is only what it pretends to be
~Unknown
