And I thirsted for it.
Chapter Two
Emma
Dying couldn’t be as painful as this.
There wasn’t a part of me that didn’t ache. The strands of my muscles felt like they were being pulled apart bit by bit whether I was moving or not, mashed and crushed underneath my own weight. I constantly checked the mirror for bruises, but saw nothing, though I was certain that if my body was to show what I felt like, every part of me would be purple and yellow.
My broken ribs and cracked femur sent quaking jolts of agony through my body whenever I took a step. My skin was sensitive to every shift of my clothes. It nearly felt like I was being scratched whenever the cloth drew across it. When I inhaled to breathe, each gasp of air felt like fire pouring down into my lungs. The feeling was constant, a mixture of someone beating you up with a baseball bat and stabbing you, everywhere and in all places, all at the same time.
Even the follicles of myhairhurt. My scalp tingled and twinged, like I had a variety of needles sticking into it and drawing blood across the surface.
I’d never been in more pain. I was used to flare-ups… with my illness, they weren’t unusual. But this one had already lasted more than a month. I hadn’t dealt with such immense pain for such a long time before. I’d put up with this kind of pain, at most, for a week or so.
This seemed like endless torture, and there was no escape. The pain was all I could think about. It consumed my every thought and followed me even in my sleep, where I’d havedreamsabout it. The agony made me delirious and left me broken into pieces, someone who wasn’t even a person, but a nameless thing that was deliriously hanging on to life.
I knew pain. I recognized it, and dealt with it every day.
But this wasn’t any regular pain… it wasn’t living at all.
I had the thought one too many times that if I had a poison I’d drink it, just to put myself out of my misery, and it frightened me.
It was sometime in the afternoon. Ethan had gotten up a while ago, though he hadn’t left my side until I’d begged him to go. Being in pain was hard, but having someone watch you suffer was humiliating, especially when it was someone you loved. It was easier to be alone than it was to look at the sympathy in someone else’s eyes as they realized they could do nothing for you. I felt obligated to pull myself together instead of fall apart when I had my loved ones around me, and there was nothingtopull together, which only made it that much more unbearable.
I had a goal today. Walk to the end of the hallway and back. It seemed like a tremendous task, but I’d made it halfway there yesterday, so I was determined to beat that goal today.
As I prepared to swing my legs out of bed, thoughts downpoured over me.What if I can’t make it? What if I fall? Shit, what if I faint and hit my head on something? What if I fall down the stairs and break my neck? What if…
Weeks ago, I’d been one of the fiercest warriors the fae had ever known. I’d been able to summon monsters to my command, overpower the minds of other fae, and cast incredible magic as I swung my sword and eliminated my foes.
Now, I was terrified to walk around my own house. I didn’t think I could perform a powerful spell no matter how hard I tried.
I forced myself to sit up, and let out a cry of pain as I did so. The room spun. I reached for the bucket Ethan had left by my bedside and heaved into it, but nothing came up.
I must’ve done something to deserve this. I'd offended the gods, in a past life or otherwise, to earn this pain. There was no other explanation.
Tygrys, who’d been sleeping on the pillow beside me, flew up and anxiously pulled a few strands of hair out of my eyes. He yanked too hard, and ended up tumbling onto the mattress.
I opened the side table drawer and rummaged through it for my pills. I choked down some morphine, along with a sip of water.
The morphine was nearly like taking candy. It made me functional, but didn’t relieve the pain, only dulled it.
But at least with it, I could pretend like I wanted to survive.
Miroslava, along with her husband, Jonathan, had relocated to the estate to help us out. Miroslava had been obtaining my medicine by getting help from doctor friends she knew, but everything I needed had to be smuggled, as we couldn’t risk Droga catching wind of where I was. She was putting her medical license on the line for me, and I felt as grateful as I did guilty.
I wanted to recover. I hoped my medicine would help me do that, but it’d failed to provide a miracle cure.
I’d really messed my body up this time. I’d pushed myself too hard when we’d fought Gabby, and I’d been paying for it ever since.
My legs wobbled and felt like water underneath me as I forced myself to stand. The world rocked like I was on a boat, but I remained conscious, so I took it as a good sign. I shuffled forward and put a hand on the wall to steady myself.
To think that I’d been chosen to be an Olympic athlete, and now, I wasthis. I couldn’t reconcile the two. It was like that girl before was a stranger. I couldn’t remember the gravity-defying jumps I’d performed once upon a time.
To be honest, I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t feel like a walking corpse. Existing itself was tormenting. It erased all thought of who I’d been and who I was. I didn’t have an identity when I was like this. I was reduced to a life form that was less than animal, my only thought being when this might possibly end.
I hobbled like an old lady down the hallway. I was held captive upstairs— I didn’t think I could make it back up here if I made it down to the first floor, so I was too afraid to try. Tygrys coaxed me onward, bobbling ahead of me like a coach training a world-class runner.
