“He’s dangerous.”
I scoffed. “That’s all?”
“You can’t stay with him.” He glanced at me again, his eyes old and hollow. “And you know that.”
“Alright then, at least take me to the cave.”
His brows snapped together. “What cave?”
“Cave of the Undead.” I needed to know if it was the same one I’d seen in the dream. Thrax had said he didn’t live in that cave, but he’d been lying unconscious in one. If it was the same cave, then it’d make sense that he frequented that place for his “unfinished business.”
Horror flared in Weeny Man’s face before he smoothed it away. “Never.”
I closed my eyes, breathing through the tightness in my chest. “No?”
“You can never step foot anywhere near there.”
I ground my teeth. “I’m not going inside. I know it’s dangerous—”
“That is not the reason why I said so. It’s one of the reasons but specifically,youcannot near there.”
Why the fuck did he keep forbidding me from places? I would have kept arguing, but damn if I wasn’t so exhausted. I only adjusted in my seat, crossed my arms over my chest, and stared out the window, fighting the fatigue trying to swallow me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
SANORA
“Did you put something in the water?”
I blinked, my brain suddenly clicking on the fact that my body system had been feeling weird for some minutes now. It had not been this way before I left the warehouse. It started a couple seconds after I drank that water. I shook my head, trying to ward off the drowsiness trying to drag me under.
Weeny Man’s distorted face turned to me briefly, and I didn’t miss the slight hurt in his voice. “Only for a few minutes. The weakness will fade soon.”
Horror gripped my chest as my breathing shot up to the sky. I’d just escape a prison just to fall into another one. I shook my head violently, willing the sleep to go away as my body went paralysed. My limbs were like leadened ropes, but my mind was a bright, frantic thing trapped behind glass. Panic and helplessness weaved together; I could think clearly, but my body refused to obey a single small command.
“It’s only going to limit your ability to move for some minutes.”
“I fucking trusted you,” I whispered. He’d been serious about what he said, but a part of me had thought he wasn’t the kind of man that was capable of it. He loved children, he loved...things. He was too kind of a man to carry out this dark shit. I tried to push air in andout regularly, ordered counts to steady the panic, but the effort alone made my vision swim.
“Yes, and keep trusting me. This is for your own good. I don’t want you to die, Sanora. I won’t let you surrender your life to break the bastard’s curse.”
I wanted to speak, to ask him what bastard and what curse he was speaking of, but there was no single strength in my bones, not even to part my lips or hold my eyes open. In seconds, my lids clamped shut, but I wasn’t sleeping. I was weak and tired, my bones melting into liquids.
It was a living paralysis: fully conscious while every tendon and muscle refused to answer.
My head was slumped against the window, eyes closed, with a body that didn’t feel like mine. Winifred might have driven for one more minute or hour, I didn’t know. But when the car stopped, he came to the passenger side, opened the door, and my head fell against him with no control over my body. I wanted him to get his filthy hands off me, but I was helpless and could hardly move as he dragged me out, his struggling sounds and breaths echoing loudly in my ears.
My legs too were paralysed, and I was depending on him for movement. I wanted to see where he was locking me into, but I couldn’t summon the strength to even open my eyes.
The next thing I knew was that he was breathing heavily, trying to help me climb something. Stairs? The movement had been going on for long, and the house I was in seemed to have stairs within.
The next time my brain registered anything was the creak of the door before I was dropped to the wooden floor of the room.
Dust.
That was the first thing that struck me. He’d dropped me in a room full of dust. I could swear there were cobwebs and unused stuff stacked in boxes and pushed to a corner. It smelled like those storagerooms in the attic where no one had visited in years. I was probably lying in mice shit for fuck's sake. Bile rose hot in my throat.
“I’ll go make you something to eat.”
