Page 167
All I had wanted until now was to get away from this dark place. For that, I needed a certain amount of humanity, which would provide me with a free ticket out of this drama-ridden prison.
But things had changed... I now had friends with whom I was about to uncover one of the many secrets of this eerie town.
They were all far from human, and it started to feel like I was lacking something to belong. As bizarre as it probably sounded. I lacked the supernatural.
If there was magic or whatever slumbering inside me, where was the goddamn manual for it? Neither Alarik nor Bastien, and certainly not the Circle, had been able to help me.
Well... I didn't really know about Bastien. I still had his blood bags, which I had never taken another sip from. The craving for it had simply disappeared. So had my excessive urge to eat or all those little improvements in my senses. Even my old bras fit again.
The only thing that remained was the black dot. And it had changed...
The memory of this morning flashed through my mind. My entire body had frozen, and an unpleasant fear of myself had spread through me when I had pulled up the brown knit sweater and found something else besides the dot.
Two differently shaped, small, curved lines, perhaps one inch long, emerged from the dot, reminding me of ornate runes, adorned with jagged edges, delicately sharp ends, and additional black speckles of varying sizes.
These symbols seemed familiar. As if I had seen them somewhere before. However, that was impossible. I would remember...
What if I had been infected with a supernatural disease? What if Amara had really made a mistake and something abnormal was growing inside me for weeks, which was only now coming to the surface?
The entire mark stood out from my skin, just like certain moles did, except that what was there between my breasts was clearly not a mole.
It looked crusty, but it was surprisingly soft.
When I touched it, the sensation was strangely intense, and it hurt whenever I pressed too hard or accidentally brushed against it.
I wouldn’t even have noticed it if the spot where my bra had pressed against the black marks hadn’t been in such extreme pain.
“Finally. There you are.”
Confused, I raised my head and spotted Larissa standing against the wall at the last corner before Alarik’s office.
Somehow, I must have made it up the massive, dimly lit stone staircases with their open archways and Gothic arcades – adorned with column figures of nobility and elegantly dressed figures whose backstories I wished I could look up in the library – completely absent-minded, yet without stumbling or making any noise.
Larissa waved me over.
“The coast is clear, but there are voices.”
“What do you mean, voices?”
“Two women. Over there.”
She pointed down the hallway – softly illuminated by small round Victorian lamps – where I thought I could make out a massive wooden door at the very end, thousand feet away. Despite the distance, it looked just as elegant and solid as the one we were about to open again.
“Do you think that will be a problem?” Larissa asked.
“Not if we're careful.”
After all, less than a quarter of a mile separated us from the voices in question.
A few intrusive thoughts managed to slip through an inner door that I had long since locked, but I pushed them back where they belonged.
“Larissa?”
My friend turned her head toward me, her expression full of curiosity. “Mm?”
“How are you coping with all this?”
“Without you, I'd be lost,” she laughed.
