“Shut your fucking mouth, Rue. I don’t have the patience for your stalker antics today.”
“Anything for you.” Her beaming eyes cast down before turning to Lytta with a sneer.
“Lytta, I think we should talk–” Brooks whispered.
“Not here.” Her tone was final.
“I just think that after last night–”
“I said not now!” she hissed, and the sound was not remotely human.
A flash of black veins slithered down her pallid cheeks away from orbs of midnight. She turned away quickly and cleared her throat before saying, “We’re not in good company.”
Brooks’ brows furrowed as he looked between Lytta and Rue.
The silence during therapy was awkward, and Brooks couldn’t help but turn inward. He tried not to think of his Siren or the darkness that lurked within. Instead, he thought of his dreams.
Last night with his Siren was the first his mind had ever strayed from the petrified woman in the tree or the circle of light shrinking as he fell. He much preferred the cave of asphodels to the fall that made his stomach lurch, but his mind drifted toward it anyway.
In his dream, he looked to the stars as he let loose a breath and tumbled backward into oblivion. A voice rattled in his mind, so full of sorrow and relief that it made his heart ache.
“I give myself wholly to you, take me to the void between the lights.”
Even those were but a whisper.
Falling, falling, falling.
A freeing, weightless feeling tinged with a million emotions.
Dread, relief, sorrow, and acceptance.
Brooks dreamt it over and over again, but it didn’t make any more sense now than the first time he sprang awake to his stomach lurching. At least when he dreamt of the three mystic women with weeping eyes there was no feeling involved. He could float above his body and seek respite in the dark.
That’s because you’re weak and happy to live in ignorance.Lytta’s voice from that night on the roof filtered through his mind and he bristled.
The audacity she had to call him weak.
He’d gone through extensive electroshock therapy as well as an insulin-induced coma for gods knew how long to rid the disease from his mind, and he had survived it all.
Brooks was not weak.
He was a fucking survivor.
“What a life it must be to only survive when you could hold the power to destroy them all,”a deep voice rumbled in the confines of his mind.
The dark presence stretched as it stirred from its slumber.
“Good thing no one fucking asked you,” Brooks muttered as a thought. He didn’t dare speak out loud.
“I only speak the truth. You and I did great things once when we were one.”
“Shut up. I’m not talking to you. No more voices.”
“You cannot hide from me.”
“I said shut up!”
It was only after everyone turned his way that Brooks realized he’d yelled out loud.
