Page 38 of The Blood Rites

Marissa’s face surfaces next in my mind—young and afraid, yet trusting me anyway.

Guilt presses hard against my ribs. She should survive this place. She’s just a child. But beneath that thought, ugly and persistent, something else still claws desperately for life inside of me.

Self-preservation.

I close my eyes.

Only one Offering leaves the Blood Rites alive.

The reality of that truth weighs more heavily now than it did this morning. I don’t know how to protect Marissa while also protecting myself. I don’t even know if I deserve to survive.

And somewhere beneath all of it, buried deeper than I want to examine too closely, is Kael.

The blood on his mouth. The black in his eyes. The way he stared at his shaking hands afterwards.

I press the heels of my palms against my eyes until darkness blooms behind them.

This is not the time to unravel over a boy I barely know. Especially not one who scares me.

Eventually, exhaustion drags me onto the mattress fully clothed. I stare at the ceiling for a long time, listening to the persistent hum in the walls, and silently pray to a goddess I don’t even believe in.

Seven

I wake in a place that is not my room, though the shape of it feels familiar: the flat ceiling, the stone walls, the wooden bed. For a moment I think I’m back in the dorms, and for a moment that’s worse than waking up in the Embrace. The ghosts here have names.

I feel the rough wool of a blanket, bleached coarse. It scratches the skin of my inner thighs—bruised and mottled, dark beneath my skin. I shrug the blanket up to my chin, shivering, but I cannot move my legs. I try, but I feel only numbness, a tingling in my hips that tells me I’ve been lying still for much too long.

There is no noise, but a pressure rings in my ears, and then the sound of footsteps begins. Heavy and methodical. Pacing with precision. A door I cannot see slams open and the room shakes so hard it feels as though the walls may buckle. Suddenly, hands are everywhere—black and gold, the reinforced knuckles of the Guardian uniform. They seize the blanket and tear it from my body. My clothes are next, stripping me bear, leaving me exposed and shivering. I writhe in terror, instinctively trying to worm out of their hold but the hands only clamp down harder. I smell blood and liquor and the filthy tang of old sweat.

I know this nightmare. I’ve had it often, but the fear still rises in my throat, a trapped rodent desperate to chew its way out. The difference this time is the face. I do not recognise it. It registers as a blur of all the men I’ve tried to avoid and the one that I no longer have to. The one I ended. The red nose and dark freckles of an old Night Warden, the gold teeth of a man that would wait in the stairwell at lights-out. The cold eyes of the dead Guardian. Their faces flicker in and out of one another like lightning behind closed eyes.

The hands don’t stop at my wrists and legs. They hold me fast, spreading my legs while another pair of hands forces my jaw open. A third set—no, not hands but something softer, like the heavy hem of velvet curtains—drags along my thigh. The softness is worse than the pain of their nails digging into my wrists. It makes my skin turn ice-cold. The world slips sideways, and I try to scream, to lash out, but the hands only grip me tighter as velvet forces its way into my mouth, choking the sound before it leaves my throat. My eyes fill with water and it’s all I can do to cry.

The room warps and the bed buckles. The walls crumble and I’m left naked and alone on the cold stone floor. Gilded men rise through the floor. They have no faces at all—just resplendent gold sunbursts, shining in a light that brings no warmth. Their hands dig into my flesh once again, their rough palms sure and determined. They take hold of my ankles and force them apart. I thrash and snap and bite, but my limbs betray me, turning to soft, pliant dough.

The sensation that comes next is always heat. It arrives as though channelled: a column of searing flame between my legs, splitting me and burning me. But there isn’t pain this time, not like in my memories. It’s worse: there is pleasure. It prickles up my spine, and I am mortified to feel myself hardening under their touch. I will my body to still, to be dead, but my every nerve is alive and my body reacts anyway, hot and humiliating beneath their touch.

The hands grip around the shaft, squeezing it in tormenting agony, and for one terrible moment the face above me becomes Kael’s, before it shifts to a face I do not know.

The face is immense, eyes endlessly bright that they blind me. It takes on a woman’s form and bends over me, her skin crackling with the impossible light and at first I think it is the Mother Shard come to save me. But her mouth opens and the voice that spills out is that of every man who ever tainted me:

“Such a pretty thing. So soft. You asked for this.”

I twist away, screaming, but her hands multiply like roots sprouting from a tree. The arms of my tormentors, coil around me, crushing me. I feel myself splitting, my skin breaking in great white fissures.

“You want this,” she whispers, but it is the voice of the dead Guardian, poisonous with drink and hatred, “You’ve always wanted this, little Lightborn. So soft, so eager to please.”

“No,” I try to say, but no sound comes out, my mouth cannot form the word. I can barely breathe.

The woman’s face looms over me, enormous, as her features shatter, the pink light behind her skin bleeding through. “You are not like the others,” she says, and her face becomes Lyssandra’s, the beautiful, gentle Waterborn girl. “You are worse. You are a broken thing. Useless.”

The words echo in the air. Worse. Broken. Useless.

The room flickers to nothing. I’m somewhere else now, bent over the railing in the rain on that bridge above the river. The Guardian’s breath is hot against my ear, his hand closed around my neck, his hips grinding into me with a slow, inescapable rhythm. Every movement makes the world shudder as tears well in my eyes. I focus on my hands and on the churning water below, wishing I could fall into its embrace.

A drop of blood splatters on the back of my hand. Then another. Then more, until my vision is awash in red, and I can’t see anything but shining, dark crimson, pulsing its horrid light.

The Guardian's face suddenly looms before me, splitting in two as the voice of High Blessed Sera Vayne spills forth: “I do not deal in anomalies. I extinguish them.”