When they have me at the fire’s edge, they force me to my knees. The wooden floor bites my bare flesh. Sweat streams down my naked body. I’m ashamed, terrified, sick. I can smell the acrid stink of my own terror.
As I sit there in horrified anticipation, not knowing and yet also utterly certain of what is to come – that I am going to die here, or be tortured here, or be ruined in some way – I accept that it’s what I deserve. The world rights itself when wrong has been done.
Two men died. I was responsible. I walked free.
When I wake up in the night and I think of them, I know this is what I earned.
When the sisters prayed last night, when their chants lost all meaning and infected me like a sickness, I saw those men. I saw their faces, cracked wide open. I smelled their brains, splattered on my skin. I felt the metallic burn of their still-warm blood.
I kneel before this fire and I am vindicated. The sisters’ chanting fills my head and I am vindicated. All the fear that’s clawed inside my chest, the knowledge that something is watching me, coming for me, it was all for this.I am meant to be here.
The chanting rises.
The sisters surround me.
There is nowhere to go. I don’t want to go anymore.
The chanting coalesces and becomes oily, inscrutable. The words darken and crack, reforming andreshaping. The air around me is dense with the sisters’ words, with the power of their chant. The sound is a reverberating echo against my skin, inside my skull. These strange words seem to rewrite the fabric of my body, the air, the flames.
The flames are everywhere.
Tears, sweat, rainwater, drip down my face and naked body. Steam rises from me. The sisters are on their knees now with me, swaying. Their eyes are closed, their mouths still moving, their bodies driven to movement by some wild passion. The heat in the room rises, the heaviness of the air, the terror in my heart. Their voices rise too. A crescendo is coming; a climactic event.
The fire opens up.
The flames part, revealing a doorway of flickering blackness. Then – eyes. Eyes, crimson red, burn through the darkness between the flames. A shadow emerges as if from Hell itself, coalescing before me, forming fingers and hands, arms, shoulders … a face.
He emerges from the fire. He crawls languidly from it, steps through it, both fluid and not, a boiling excretion of black smoky shadow, and all the while those eyes flicker like the flames of the underworld.
He sees me.
He moves toward me.
He surrounds me.
The sisters’ chanting is loud. Pulsing. Deafening.They rock back and forth. Tears stain their ecstatic faces. They clutch their hair, pulling. They tear at their clothes. They froth and cry and demand and cajole.
Do it, their incomprehensible words seem to say.Do it. Open up. Let him in. Do it.
They speak in a language I don’t know, but I understand the meaning all the same. They’ve called me here for something. They’ve called him here for the same thing.
Their god. My shadow.Anguish.
His voice surrounds me like the smoke, like the suffocating heat of the fire. He speaks inside my mind, against my skin, a low rumble that is only for me.
HELLO AGAIN.
That voice. It skitters along my spine, dragging at the tender flesh of my stomach. It presses fingers deep in the meat of my thighs. It spreads my legs where I kneel.
His scorching presence engulfs me. The room darkens around me until he is all I see and feel and know, until his shadows drench the world in black, but even then I see his eyes. I see the planes of his face, illuminated in the flames. His gentle, burning fingers cup my jaw.
‘Midonia.’
At last I feel the weight of him against me. A body of flesh and bone, but also of shadow, caressing me, touching me everywhere. He leans over me, pullingmy hair back until my neck is bared to him. He kisses me there like a brand, agonizing in his ferocity. He is shadow and flame, licking at my thighs; my breasts; every sensitive curve of my body.
The pleasure is so horrible, so terrifying, soperfect, that it could only come from a god.
I feel myself crying. Salty tears burn my cheeks. The dregs of fear roiling inside me grow weak, overwhelmed by the sensation of his touch. These aren’t tears of misery but of rapture.
