“No,” Meridan whimpered. “No. Vidar, what have you done? Y—You killed her. You… you killed her! She trusted you! She trusted you!”
Her screams grew in volume and her writhing continued until she sounded like an animal in chains. I stared at Dahlia’s dead features as I lifted my hands from her neck. Already, bruisingtainted her skin where my fingers had collared her. Death’s teasing chill washed over me, laughing at my failures.
“Move, cap’n,” a voice said.
Aleksi pushed me off her and moved onto the bed, grasping Dahlia’s head in his hands and tilting it back. I watched, dizzy with realization as he pressed his mouth to hers. I could hear his breath push into her lungs. I did not understand it, but I did not understand anything I was realizing. I glanced back for a blink to see both Mullins and David pressing their full weight on a thrashing Meridan, trying to keep her hands from finding a blade. I stood to aid them, my body moving on its own to do things that felt routine. Helping my men. Fighting a siren. Preparing for violence. I was good at those things.
And evidently, I was good at killing the woman I loved.
Meridan’s face was in a way I’d never seen before. Her teeth were sharp and she was baring every single one. She had never looked so feral. So consumed with rage. And why wouldn’t she be that way? I’d just killed Dahlia, perhaps the only person who meant anything to her. She curled her fingers into claws, desperately reaching for me.
I was tempted to tell the men to let her go. To let her have her way with me. It would have relieved me of the guilt and shock that was curling inside me like the thorny stems of a rose bush.
But then Meridan’s face froze up. Her snarling lips relaxed. Her brow flattened. She shifted her gaze toward the bed and something in me lit up with life. I spun back around to see Aleksi patting Dahlia’s cheek as if trying to wake a sleeping child. I sat on the bed opposite him, pulling her hand into mine. He pressed his mouth to hers one last time, his fingers pinching her nose closed. Her chest expanded and then…
Aleksi pulled away and I heard a desperate intake of air enter Dahlia’s lungs. Her gasp filled the cabin and silenced everyone else. It was the most beautiful noise I’d ever heard. She opened her eyes with a start, wheezing for a proper breath, and my heart leaptinto my throat. When her frantic gaze found mine, I saw a lifetime worth of horror reflected back at me like she just brought hell with her from wherever she’d gone. She stared up at me, but she did not see me.
“Dahlia. Dahlia, it’s me.”
She wrenched her hand from mine, limbs flailing like a trapped bird, clawing her way up the bed until her spine struck the headboard with a hollow thud. Her eyes devoured the room, every face, every shadow, in a single, ragged breath. My chest splintered at the raw terror reflected in her eyes, splintered further as a scream of pure, unbridled agony, tore from her throat, shattering the quiet night.
She was awake. Dahlia was awake.
Her eyes went dark as onyx as she rolled off the bed, tripping over feet she hadn’t used in days. I watched her scurry for the door, pushing past Meridan’s open arms as if she thought we were trying to catch her and eat her alive. I ran after her, the sound of her terrified sobs cutting into me like knives skinning me slowly. She ran into the clearing, unstable on her legs, and then toppled to her knees, retching and gagging until bile evacuated her mouth. I stopped five paces from her and when Meridan attempted to run past me, I threw out my arm to stop her. She shoved it away and rushed to Dahlia’s side despite me, crouching beside her, but as soon as her hand met her back, Dahlia recoiled from it like it was the source of her sickness.
I watched Dahlia, the ferocious, man-eating siren who’d endured the worst the world had to give, crawling away like a dying animal looking for a place to perish alone. I did not think my heart could hurt so much. I knew by the look on Meridan’s face that she was feeling it, too. Something had changed. Something was missing and what had woken up in that bed was a ghost of the woman we both knew.
When Dahlia stopped again, I could do nothing but watch as she shivered, a hand pressed to her heart as she sobbed, unable tocatch her breath. The urge to go to her ate me alive, but the way she fled from me…
I did not knowthe right thing to do.
Might you stay a while in this dream?
For reality is the torment.
~Alyssa Jons
My heart was racing with such ferocity, I thought it might rip through my chest and leave my body gouged and twitching on the ground. My muscles were like sacks of stone. As I sat there in the dirt, things started to blur together. The colors. The sounds. I held my breath, staring down at the soil. Slowly, I reached toward it, letting my fingers gently press into the soft ground until I could feel the grit against my skin.
“This is real,” I muttered to myself, closing my hand into a fist to gather up the earth.
I lifted it, opening my fingers to watch it sift through the spaces. I did it again and again, waiting for it all to disappear, but it didn’t. Then, the sounds began to separate. The whisper of the wind and the hushed drag of water sliding over stone. The crackling of campfires along the clearing. My pulse thrumming in my ears. I gradually panned my gaze from the soil to the trees andthen to the cage standing in the shadows where Lyla was trapped behind bars.
Yes. She was in a cage. I remembered.
She stared back at me, no discernable emotion in her eyes. She looked… different. Her voice rang in my head, speaking of suffering and pain and all the ways Akareth would force my submission. All the ways he’d forced hers. Her eyes seemed less like holes and more like mirrors now and it made my stomach turn, but I had nothing else to expel. Akareth’s touch lingered inside me, in places I did not think a person could be touched. I shivered at the fuzzy memories when someone stepped between us, blocking my view of her. I blinked, coming out of a trance, when I saw Vidar crouching down in front of me. His eyes were not black. They were brown. The color of tea or earth.
I stared at him, waiting for the shadows to blanket him in darkness. For the screams to start. For the pain to begin. Instead, he just looked back at me as if waiting for something. I strained to take a breath and found his familiar scent surrounding me. Leather, rum, and oak. Rain. Salt. I’d never smelled him so vividly and gods did it feel good to fill my lungs with him.
I slowly raised my hand toward his face, letting my fingers brush the short hair on his jawline.
“You’re real,” I whispered.
He lifted his hand, cupping it over the top of mine and pressing it to his warm cheek.
“I’m here,” he said. “I’m real.”
His body shifted toward me and as if a metal rod was between us, I leaned backward. Vidar ceased immediately, drawing back like I’d slapped his hands away. Nausea gripped my stomach again, a sickness toward myself. I was so filthy. Infected. Twisted up. I couldn’t even accept the touch of the man who’d been my savior. Or perhaps it wasn’t him at all and just another trick. Perhaps the illusions were simply getting more real.
