I began to pace, scraping my fingers through my wet locks. “No, this isn’t right.”
“Your hunter will give up soon. You’ve been asleep too long and humans are so fickle. Or so I’ve heard. Until Dornwich, I’ve only come to know corpses. Living humans are quite… interesting. Somewhat unpredictable, which is more than I expected.”
“Vidar,” I whispered. His face flashed before me. The smell of rum and leather and salty, ocean breeze. My heart flipped with worry. “He wouldn’t give up.”
“Wouldn’t he? You are just using him, are you not? To shield you from father’s gaze? Once he realizes he is nothing more, I imagine all this will seem rather unimportant to him. Perhaps he will have mercy and just kill you. Although he cannot even build up the will to kill me.”
“He should,” I said, falling to my knees and covering my ears with my palms, though it did nothing to guard against the remnants of agony playing in my head like the wrong chord on a violin. “Then this would be over.”
“Don’t be so naïve. It will never be over.” Lyla stepped forward, slowly crouching in front of me and canting her head to one side. “And this is just the beginning.”
As if answering my panic, the stone beneath us began to shake. The tremors rippled across the floor and the waves outside began to beat with an even deadlier rage. I looked back to find nothing but empty darkness where Lyla had just been standing. Once more, I was alone, but my soul knew I had not always been that way. I’d lost something. Someone. I watched the stone crack and crumble around me, burying me in rubble. But as the rubble rose, blocking the light, it all disintegrated into dust. And then into whisps of black smoke. I was in the water once more, my body getting dragged down into that stifling, impenetrable darkness. It invaded my lungs, my stomach, owning me. Eating me alive. Violating me.
“Shall we continue our game?” a deep voice thundered from the void.
All went black. Pure, dense shadows wrapped me in nothingness. When the silence came, I truly felt as if I had been erased from the world. It was only when something broke the silence that I realized it was just another page turning. The in-between was so empty. I peered down at my feet and found myself standing on black water, ripples expanding from my bare soles.
“Where is this?” came a faint whisper.
I turned to see a figure in the blackness sitting on her heels and hunched over herself, her bloodied hands in her lap. Long, silky tresses of black hair hung over her sharp shoulders.
“Another dream,” she whispered.
From the dark came another figure, separating from the emptiness in the shadowy form of a woman with no features. She walked like she was made of vapor, incomplete and phantom-like.
“Another dream,” she shadow whispered in an almost identical tone.
“Why?” the woman asked.
“Why?” mimicked the shadow.
“I’ve given him two daughters already.”
“I’ve given him two…”
“He wants another.”
“Another. This one he will keep.”
“This one he will keep? But…”
The shadow crouched behind the woman, putting its smoky hands on her pale shoulders and whispering into her ear.
“This one he will keep. You will be done.”
“I will be done,” she repeated.
The shadow dissipated into the void like it was never there, leaving inky stains on the woman’s shoulders. She slowly raised her head, revealing a rounded belly… and a face I would never forget.
“Reyna,” I muttered to myself.
She stood on two legs, staring up at something I could not see. Blood began to pour out of her, turning the black water a deepcrimson. She collapsed to the ground, biting back the agony of childbirth as a small, bloodied infant emerged into the world, wrapped in its own umbilical cord. With tiny hands, it ripped at the fleshy restraints and from its mouth came a deafening cry that sent ripples vibrating through the water’s surface. My mother lifted her head, staring down at the bloody mass writhing between her legs, but before her hands could find the babe, tendrils shot forth from the dark and coiled around the newborn, dragging it by its tiny ankles into the shadows. The screams grew louder. Shriller. Tortured.
I went rigid at the terrible sound as my mother reached silently toward the dark for the little infant she didn’t even get to touch or see.
I had never known my mother to love anything, but if I were a fool, I would say those wary eyes loved that child as it was taken from her, but there was no time to mourn it before she began to strain again against the pains of labor. She swallowed her suffering cries as another bloodied infant slowly slid from her body into the water, silent and unmoving.
The shadowy figure of a woman returned from the darkness and stood over her as Reyna pushed up on her elbows to ogle the motionless babe.
