“It wasn’t me. It was her. It was Cinderella,” I explain, and the words should come out frantic. Because my best friend believes I stabbed her.
But my voice is calm. Low. Like the growl of a lioness in wait.
Ellie’s heart is pounding, her fear palpable as she stares up into my eyes. She scrambles backward on her elbows, but she’s wounded and there’s nowhere for her to go.
“Shh. I’ve got you,” I whisper. The words I might whisper to one of my children during the crackling of a storm.
The tenderness in my voice is absent.
“Please don’t hurt me,” she begs, and something about that feels wrong too, because it is not like the Ellie I know to beg.
But then I realize it’s not Ellie speaking. It’s me. The words fall from my lips.
“Please don’t hurt her,” I’m saying to myself.
Fear grips me, because the desire that cascades through me is so unnatural, so wrong, I cannot bear to feel it.
My ears detect something, the slightest of beats. Ellie’s pulse, rapid and panicked; it sounds like a sultry dance.
It’s slipping away from me, and I have to hear more of it.
“Please. Please don’t do this.”
It’s Ellie again, but I’m not sure what she doesn’t want me to do.
All I want is to listen.
All I want is to taste.
When I sink my teeth into Ellie’s neck, the screaming I hadn’t been paying attention to ceases.
The blood is not sweet as I expect, but bitter, and when I come up for air and glance at my friend, her eyes are wide open, but she no longer sees.
“Ellie?” I ask, and I feel a bit drunk, her warm blood still coating my chin.
My friend doesn’t answer, and now I’m the one screaming.
CHAPTER 41
BLAISE
“Blaise. Fates, Blaise, please wake up. Please…”
The voice is familiar, like a song I would have heard often in childhood, but whose words have been lost to time, to the holes in my memory.
It asks me again, begs me to wake. I’m not sure I want to.
It isn’t blissful in sleep. Here there are fires and monsters, and the monsters are me.
But at least in dreams I can tell myself it isn’t real.
That I am not a monster.
That Nox is not burning.
That I would never hurt Ellie.
So I try to return, to swim through the fog toward the nightmares that offer me solace, but that voice—that strange familiar voice—hooks into my consciousness and pulls me back.
When my eyes flutter open and a dark silhouette blocks the intensity of the lantern light, I do not feel entirely awake.
Rather, I don’t feel that all of myself is awake.
It’s almost as if I left part of me behind in sleep, and I should dive back under to retrieve it.
Like I can’t face wakefulness without it.
“Blaise…”
My name on this strange voice is a tether, and I now know whose shape stands above me, even if my vision has not yet honed into view.
“Nox.” My voice cracks with disuse, but even then it doesn’t sound like me. Doesn’t feel the way my voice has always felt in my throat.
It’s weightier, deeper.
I have to blink several more times before Nox comes into focus, and when it’s clear I recognize him, his throat makes a strangled sound. He rests his forehead on his folded hands, his elbows pressed into the stone counter upon which I lie.
Everything hurts.
