She shook her head and curled her toes, scrabbling for the stone beneath her feet. She needed to get the apotrope, needed to catch him, stop him, but the world about her wasn’t real enough to muddle through, and she couldn’t stand let alone run.
“But of course you are afraid,” the voice said, the familiarity of disappointment in it thick. “Just as you are afraid of all things.”
It was true—shewasafraid. “I don’t want more power,” she admitted, heart racing at the thought. “I want less.”
Syphon did not move away in the silence after her utterance, but she was emboldened by his lack of a response. Perhaps he would actually consider it? She wasn’t worthy of what she could do as it was.
“I don’t want to be like this,” she continued nervously.
“Of course you don’t,” he hissed. “But I cleanse things, make them better than they were. You feed me that which is imperfect, and I perfect it.”
“You’ll make me better?”
“Better? Pet, I will make you unstoppable.”
Celeste’s heart raced as she scrunched in on herself. Unstoppable—that was a thing that Delphine had always wanted to be, and it had never once sounded virtuous. “I don’t want to do bad things again.”
Laughter echoed through the bizarre room she was trapped within. “A trivial concern, but who put it in your mind, I wonder?” Syphon’s voice was just in her ear and held her to the spot, dashing away all of her other thoughts. “That man, surely.”
Celeste’s grip on her locket tightened, though it did not react to the touch.Don’t, she thought, lacking the courage to actually say.Don’t you talk about him. But her silence said enough.
“Yes. Him. Another weakness.” Syphon’s presence pressed in on her. “You would disillusion yourself into believing a man like that is capable of caring for you when, in truth, heloathescreatures like you. Creatures likeus, forever tainted by the infernal plane.”
Celeste’s next breath was shallow, chest refusing to expand under the weight of his words. “I don’t think Reeve loathes me,” she whispered.
Syphon’s laughter rumbled deeply, the sound traveling from one of her ears to the other. “Do not tell me you are pathetic enough to think he loves you.”
Her next breath would not come at all. “No,” she struggled against the restraint. “It hasn’t even been long enough—”
“Love doesn’t take that long,” Syphon bit back into the dark, and hands gripped her shoulders, cold and wet. “If he doesn’t already, he won’t. Time does nothing for love, you’ve learned this—you’ve known people for years and never been loved by them, haven’t you?”
The pressure in her chest bloomed into pain, words falling out of her mouth against her will. “My sister?” It was a question, of course, because she was never really sure.
The hands that had formed from the mist that was Syphon squeezed, and it was almost a comfort. “Perhaps she did, because she had to. It is a difficult thing, love, especially when the object is so wretched.”
Celeste didn’t need to be told what she was to know, but to hear it so plainly? A sob caught in her throat.
Syphon’s fingers trailed over her collarbone and down her arm. The place where she had been cut when the lamp’s globe burst pricked with his touch. “Such a shame you got yourself injured. If you had been more careful or if you were stronger, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened.” There was a body against her back then and another hand slipping up around her throat.
Celeste had forgotten about the apotrope and she had forgotten about her locket, all of her thoughts replaced by the truth that she was as wretched and weak as he said, and the tightness closing in around her neck had been earned.
“You aren’t yet worthy of the gifts I’d like to bestow upon you,” Syphon said into her ear, “but you will be.”
The pulse in her throat pounded up against his grip. Instinctively she clawed at his hand, but her fingers slipped through, his flesh only smoke.
There was a prick of light ahead in the darkness of the chamber, something that hadn’t been there before. Completely caught in his grip and lungs refusing to fill, she was pushed forward, and the light came nearer.
A deafening drip echoed into the room and the dampness of the earth pressed in on her skin. No longer on her cot in the acolyte’s chamber, she knew somehow she was underground, pitched into the darkness with only that silvery glow as it crept toward her. Her hand was lifting, and she was reaching out until she felt the freezing burn on her skin.
Noxscura.
Celeste sucked in a breath of cool but stagnant air, blinking eyes open, heart pounding. She was in her little room in the temple again, and she could see in the faint moonlight the outline of the wardrobe, her dress laid across a chair, the table that held her hairbrush and copper cup.
She touched her throat. Her skin was cold, the ghost of fingers still pressed into her neck, but she was alone.
“No,” she said to herself and squeezed her eyes shut, “just a dream.”
She knew of things that came from the infernal plane, things that enjoyed tormenting the minds of others and had the magic to play with dreams, but this was surely just her own weak mind frightening her.
