by Keri Lake
Tears stream down my temples as I study the path of the cracks in the wall, all the way up to the ceiling, and I let loose a sound I considered myself no longer capable of. Obnoxious, inappropriate laughter that echoes in the room.
“I’m happy that you find that so amusing. It’ll help with the trauma.”
“You’re … fucking stupid.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“All of you. You’ve all been fucking duped. You’re all so ... stupid!”
“Enlighten me as to what I’m so stupid about.” The grinding of his teeth betrays the calm in his voice, as he slides his robe over his body, shielding me from his sickly, naked form.
“I wasn’t a virgin when you took me in. I fucked my best friend to avoid being raped. I was supposed to be a Daughter. A symbol of virtue and fertility. But I can’t even get pregnant.” Another wheeze of laughter explodes out of me, jostling my body against the bed. “My body isn’t designed for pregnancy! So you will never bear a perfect child with me, Remus. Never. The joke is on you! Stupid!”
An eerie silence follows.
Remus draws his hand behind his back and paces beside the bed. The sound of his harsh breathing is white noise to the graceless clomp of his feet. “You’re lying.”
“What do I gain from lying? You won’t set me free. You’ve taken everything from me. What do I care what you do to me now?”
An angry sound vibrates in his throat, and he runs his hand through his hair, before coming to a stop alongside the table across the room. “You want death. That’s why you’d lie.”
“It’s true. I’m ready to die.” A shield of tears blurs my vision. “But I’m not lying. Not about this. I swear on Titus’s soul, you will never have a child with me. And that brings me more satisfaction than anything in this world.”
With his back to me, he rolls his shoulders and rakes both hands through his hair. When he turns around, the gleam of metal in his hands is unmistakable. He chuffs, nodding as he crosses back toward me. “Well, then.” Once standing over me, he holds the tip of the knife against his palm, twisting the hilt with his other hand. “You got me good. Didn’t you, Thalia?”
Only a flash of metal shimmers in my eyes, before a cold stab of pain strikes my lower belly. Needles of shock pulse like waves over my skin, my whole body stiff and trembling, as I stare down myself to the knife he’s lodged inside of me. Just above my pubic bone.
He angles the blade downward, and gives another thrust.
A scream rips from my throat.
White dots float before my eyes.
Hot pain turns icy, cool, the tingles dancing over my hipbone and down my thighs.
“To be sure no one will ever get you pregnant, Thalia. Which leaves you nothing but an empty hole to fuck.”
Shallow stutters of air fail to fill my lungs.
The cold tickle of nausea spreads across my chest.
The room shrinks as blackness closes in on the fringes.
As my eyes shutter against the horror, the sound of Remus’s voice in my ear tugs me back into consciousness.
“I will not let you die and go to him. Not yet, Thalia. There is so much suffering left for you.”
Pain blossoms from the stab wound, spreading across my belly like vines crawling beneath my skin. The vines curl inside of me, pulling at me. The walls turn to dark, vacuous holes. Thousands of starless pores creating a thick suction that tugs my body toward the unknown. The emptiness beyond. Remus stares down at me, his eyes black and beady. I watch as two antennae emerge from his face. His skin deepens to a claret red, and he reaches down with his clawed hand, tracing the edge of my face.
Through this terrifying darkness, I watch behind a thin veil of tears, where a massive figure stalks toward him from behind. Shoulders bunched. A black patch over his eye. Body taut and spoiling for a fight, with the fire of seven hells burning in his eyes.
Beyond anger.
Beyond mercy.
He’s a magnificent savage beast, here to avenge me.
To steal me away to the afterlife. Away from all this violence and death.
Titus.
Go to him, my body beseeches me. End this pain. Go to him.
One sharp twist of the knife, and I jerk forward. The edges close in on me. Screams echo in my head.
Everything flicks to blackness.
I open my eyes, to find Titus dragging Remus away by the curls on his head, while the smaller man kicks and screams.
I laugh at this.
Blackness again.
A gurgling scream has me opening my eyes, and I spy Remus lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Eviscerated.
Something sticks out from his body, and through a haze of confusion and weakness, I realize it’s a rib bone. Other rib bones stick out, as well. Like wings at each flank. The blood wings of a demon.
Blackness.
More screams.
Feminine screams this time.
I turn my head to see Agatha strung up on the cross where I was whipped. Her naked body trussed up by chains. Lilith stands across from her, tossing knives. Laughing. She hits her mark and tosses another.
My body jostles around, and I manage to lift my head toward where a man in a lab coat, covered in bright red blood, fusses over my wound. I recognize him. Doctor Levin. My father’s friend.
I don’t remember if I trust him, though. Everything is fuzzy, and an incessant ring in my ears keeps me from hearing his words. Only his lips move.
“No. Stop.” My voice is weak, and I bat him away, but he keeps on with his fussing. “Don’t … touch me.”
What a strange dream. An absolute chaotic illusion.
Blackness.
Strong arms slide beneath me, and I feel weightless. I open my eyes again.
Titus stares down at me with his one good eye, the other hidden behind a patch. Chest covered in thick, sticky blood and gore, his arms tremble around me, his expression vacant and lost. Depleted. Through a shield of tears, I smile and reach up to touch his face.
“The man in the paper boat. You’ve come to take me home.”
Chapter 40
The scent of alcohol and disinfectant invades my nose. Whispers echo around me. I open my eyes to see fluorescent lights slipping past overhead, moving too fast to keep up. Only one constant remains. Titus. I reach for him.
He takes my hand. “Hang on, Thalia. Just hang on, please.”
Intense pain strikes my abdomen, and I arch against it.
“You must let me finish! You must be patient!”
At the sound of Doctor Levin’s voice, I turn my head to where he stands on the other side of me. It’s then I notice the mask over my face, the cool air that I breathe into my lungs.
The pain begins to fade.
The room shrinks to a pinprick.
I lie on my back, hands clutched to my stomach, where a deep, cramping pain pulses. Curling into my side fails to alleviate it, and I open my mouth to scream, but nothing comes out. The agony radiates up into my ribs and down to my thighs. I need to get it out of me. To expel the poison trapped inside of me. I bear down, clutching the edge of the bed, and flex my stomach muscles. The pressure feels as if it might split me in half.
Still, I can’t scream.
My knuckles burn as I squeeze the mattress beneath me.
Pushing.
Cries fill the room. The incessant wailing of a newborn.
Confused, I sit up from the bed.
Blood coats my thighs, staining the white sheets around the stark red body trembling between my legs. Both hands in the shape of claws. Its eyelids flip open to reveal black, beady eyes, the whites of its eyes blood red.
Like a Rager.
I gasp and startle awake. Lying on my side, my fingers are clutched tight around something, and as my eyes scan my surroundings, I take in the white horse on the wall. The familiarity. The scent of burning wood and chamomile.
I’m dead. I’m dead, and this is Heaven.
Turning over onto
my back, I find a shadowy figure across from me. Illuminated by the moon, the lower half of him is visible—thick, jean-clad legs and heavy boots—before the rest disintegrates into the blackness of the shadows that hide his identity. When I try to kick away, an unbearable pain tears across my stomach.
The figure sits forward, and the light hits his face.
Titus.
But the setting is wrong. “Where’s the sea? And your boat?”
Frowning, he stares back at me with his one good eye that seems to have lost its shine. As if dulled by pain. “My boat?” he asks, as though we haven’t rowed a dozen, or more, times across the sea in it.
Emotions weigh down on me, recalling our final moments, when we reached for each other. A yearning blossoms inside my heart, and I stretch my hand out to him. When he looks up, though, his golden eye is black as night. A demon’s eye.
Kicking away, I back myself from the edge of the bed, until a hard surface slams against my spine where I’ve run into the wall.
“Thalia, I won’t hurt you,” he says, but it isn’t Titus I hear.
It’s Remus. He’s somehow found a way inside my safe escape. No. Not here. Not here, please!
He reaches out to me with his clawed hand, and I let out a scream.
“Get away from me! Don’t touch me!”
My whole body trembles, watching the figure retreat back into the shadows. A new wave of pain strikes my stomach, and I grunt, setting my hand there.
“Thalia!” I hear the thunderous boom of Titus’s voice.
Dizziness has my head spinning, and I fall to the pillows.
“Wake up, Thalia. There’s so much suffering left for you.”
At the sound of Remus’s whisper, I cry out and jerk back, eyelids flipping open to the dark room. Shadows crawl over the wall, and a pinch of pain, like that from a claw, hits my stomach.
A soft stroke against my face sends a wave of terror down my spine, and I smack it away, curling myself into a tight ball so it can’t touch me again. “Stay away! Stay away from me!” I swing out at the shadow looming over me, and feel hands press into my arms, holding me down.
“Thalia, it’s me. It’s Titus.”
It’s a trick.
“T-T-Titus is dead. You’re a liar! Titus is dead! Oh, God, leave me alone! Get off of me!”
I scream.
So loud and so long, my voice goes hoarse. I scream until the figure releases me and backs away, letting me slip into the blackness once again.
Chapter 41
Warmth hits my face, drawing me out of sleep. Nausea churns in my stomach, and I let out a grunt, resting my hand there.
“You’re still healing.” It’s Titus’s voice this time, and I frown toward the shadows in confusion.
“Titus?” The shaky tone of my voice reflects the uncertainty swirling inside of me. I can’t figure out what’s real and what’s a dream. If this is Heaven, or hell. “Is this real?”
“Yes. It’s real.”
My chest turns cold with panic as I look over the surroundings, the quiet room in the cabin that seems real. But how?
“I … I watched you die.”
“Yes. You did.”
“Then, how?”
“Lilith and the others came for me. They took me back to the convent.”
I want to believe him. I want to stay here, in this place, but I watched him die!
“Back to the convent? Legion? Didn’t they attack?”
“Doctor Levins brought us back through the passageway. Hid us away from Legion soldiers, and told them we’d fled. He tended my wounds for days after.” The remorse in his voice weighs heavy on his words, and if I could bring myself to look at him right now, I wonder if he’d have tears in his eyes. “Days you suffered.”
I clamp my eyes against the flashes of memory passing through my mind. No. If I allow myself to focus on them, they’ll drag me further into the dark pit that waits to swallow me from below. I won’t think about it.
Not yet.
“How is this possible?”
“Doctor Levins healed you.”
It’s a trick, a voice inside my head says. A cruel trick. Remus pulled a number of tricks on me, and this is the worst. He’s lying. “That stab wound was fatal. I know it was fatal. I should be dead.”
“You should. But Doctor Levins injected you. With Alpha antibodies.”
“What?”
“For the last week, you’ve been recovering. Healing.”
“A week?”
How did a week slip by? How do I have no memory of the time between? Only flashes of images. Of Agatha. And Lilith. And …
“Remus?”
“Dead. Unfortunately. And what I wouldn’t give to tear him apart all over again.” Morbid fascination swirls behind his glare, as if he’s imagining it, and a deadly promise clings to his words like a thick, black poison.
“It’s true, then. What I saw in dreams.”
“He can’t hurt you anymore. Ever. Agatha, either, for that matter.”
“How?”
“Once I had my strength, and Atticus was well enough to fight, we stormed the prison. Killed every guard and set fire to the building.” He lifts his hands and curls them into tight fists, and what sounds like a growl fills the brief pause that follows. “I ripped his bones from his body with my bare hands. Made Remus suffer. And still it’s not enough.” Resting his elbows on his knees, he bows his head, stroking his hands back and forth over his skull. “Tell me … what did he do to you?”
Tears blur his form, and that cold nausea settles deep inside my gut again. I shake my head, refusing to relive those moments. The endless stretches of suffering and silence.
When he looks up at me, torment darkens his eyes, like that of an animal begging to be set free from its cage. A grim rigidity sweeps over him like hardening stone, and something murderous flickers in his eye. A fissure. A crack that threatens to pulverize his composure.
As if he knows. As if he can see everything written all over my face.
Not even my silence can spare him from this. Or me, for that matter. The scars and shame are permanently etched in my mind. A part of me is still adrift on that black, placid sea, and I don’t know if I’ll ever find safe footing again. I don’t know if I can ever feel whole again.
As though my insides have been ripped out, carved to a hollow shell of what I was.
For the first time, I understand Freya’s words, and even if the universe took note and balanced my suffering with Remus’s, it’s still not enough to fill the vast emptiness inside of me.
“You should’ve let me die.”
“Don’t say that, Thalia. Don’t ever say that again.” Fists tight, he shoots up from his chair. “I would fucking drag death by his scrawny neck and crush him to dust, if he ever tried to take you from me again!”
“Quit trying to save me, Titus. It’s got to be exhausting at this point.” I focus on my fidgeting hands in my lap. “There’s no valor in going down with me. It’s okay to move on, you know? You’re not a quitter for wanting to save yourself. It’s like you said before, it’s the only way to survive in this world.”
“Forget what I said. That was before you.”
“I’ll never be what I was. He broke me. He broke me into so many fragments, I can’t put them back together.” A sob hitches in my throat, and my trembling hands feel cold, all of a sudden. “The things he did to me ...”
Clutching his skull, Titus sinks back to his seat and rocks back and forth, like it’s all he can do to calm himself. “Every minute of every day, I kill him in my mind. I rip his bones from flesh and listen to him scream, and it’s still not enough for what he did to you. When I see you like this, hear you say these things, I want to tear open the gates of hell to pull him out and kill him all over again.” When he lifts his gaze to me, I can practically see the flames burning behind his eye. “Tell me how to fix this.”
“You can’t fix this. You can’t fix me.”
Chapter 42
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The days pass in a blur, with only the two of us alone in this suffocating cabin that once felt like home to me. With every sunrise, Titus is there, washing me, brushing my hair, urging me to eat and drink, to keep up my strength, but I refuse. My stomach won’t allow me the pleasures of food and water without the punishing torment of sickness and pain that always follows. I feel like an empty vessel. Like the abandoned buildings we once passed on the highways, ravaged and left to decay inside.
Today, he seems exceptionally tired. I study the dark circle that shadows his eye, the weight of defeat pressing down on his shoulders. I’ve never seen him look so conquered before, not even as a prisoner to Remus and Agatha. He stands in the doorway beside an equally imposing figure. Atticus, who I understand has been staying with Lilith and the other women while he’s convalesced. He carries the same look of pity in his eyes as my mother did, just before she sent him off to Purgatory.
Mother.
I wish she were here now. Not that she’d know the right words, or offer much comfort, as cold as she could be at times, but I miss her embrace. The arms of a mother.
The men step away from the door, and I hear Atticus ask, “Still not eating?”
“No,” Titus answers. “I don’t want to force her, but soon I’ll have no choice.”
The promise of his words takes me back to the day when the guards force-fed me, and a wave of anxiety churns in my stomach at the memory. I curl into myself, breaths panting with the oncoming panic, and I close my eyes, mentally counting down from ten, as my mother would often tell my father to do, the times he’d have his attacks.
Ten, nine, eight, seven, six ...
Stomach muscles easing, I take deep breaths through my nose.
Titus doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve to see me like this, but the road to feeling normal and well again seems too long a journey now. Walking that path means facing Remus. It means remembering every vile thing he did to me. Some I’ve locked so deep inside my head, I don’t know if I’d recall them, at all.