“I never was,” I said with a smirk, recalling a time when he’d bested me on my escape attempts, and as that one memory charged through me, several more followed, flashing one by one and so quickly I almost didn’t realize it.
Elora just smiled at me. “Memory?”
“No.” I grabbed her arm to steady myself. “Several.”
“What do you remember?”
“Only Falcon.”
“Falcon?” she said, holding me up. “I haven’t heard you call him that in… ages.”
I smiled, until I remembered my husband was missing, then it slipped away as I took in the landscape: wide grassy fields, with one lab building all on its own, and a forest in the distance. How would he have escaped Falcon? There was nowhere to hide.
Then again, if Falcon was concerned for me, he might not have noticed a bomb drop on his toe.
“If he did walk away… I mean, we’re all freaking out, thinking he’s been kidnapped, but we’re not really thinking about him as the David we all know.” It occurred to me then like a hit with a rock in the head. I drew the vial of blood from my pocket and handed it to Elora. “Take this in to Jason’s team for me.”
“What is it?”
“Lilith’s blood—a cure for one person.”
She looked at the vial, her brows pulling together, head whipping up as I turned away. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to check Morgana’s cell. That’s the first place I’d go if I were David.”
* * *
Last time I was down here it was pitch black, the echoes of violent screams lingering in the tunnels long after they’d ended in tragedy. This time, the torches on the wall had been lit, casting orange flickers over the path like swords being crossed, warding me off. I walked along, my hand to the sickly-wet wall, praying in my heart that David hadn’t come down here but praying also that he had. I needed to know he was safe. Needed to know where he was. But if he did come down here, Morgana could have hurt him by now and no one would’ve been there to save him.
Distracted by rage last time, I barely noticed the cool brush of ghostly whispers moving down my spine, or the way the low ceiling felt like it was miles above my head, making the tunnel longer, darker than it was before. I looked ahead, seeing shadows move in the darkness, my heart tightening in my chest and screaming for me to turn back. But I walked on, determined to find David, shutting my eyes to imagine a better place and just letting my hand guide me, the sticky muck making my fingertips grainy and sore. If I couldn’t see with my own two eyes what was waiting up ahead, I couldn’t fear it. I knew I had the gift of Sight—that I could talk to and see spirits—which only made this worse. I hadn’t yet encountered a vengeful spirit, and if there were any place on earth to do that, this dungeon would certainly be it.
My eyes scrunched tighter and my head sunk into my neck defensively when a loud bang echoed down the tunnel, surrounding me like it happened just a foot away. I stopped dead, holding my breath, my eyes popping wide to scan the walls and the floor. I wanted to call out hello, like all those stupid people in horror movies, but I didn’t want anything to answer back.
I stole a peek to the length of tunnel I’d left behind me, the torches so distant now they were just a blink of light. I’d travelled much farther with my eyes closed than I intended—much farther than the last person down here had gone—and with that in mind, my arms frosted with little bumps. I had no idea where Morgana’s cell was, but I did have an eerie feeling that I’d come too far and an even eerier one that if I turned my back, something out of the darkness up ahead would touch me.
I stood frozen with my back to the wall, taking slow, steady breaths, too afraid to go forward and too afraid to go back. I could see it in my mind—see the long, creepy fingers of something dark and horrible reaching out to grab my arm and suck me into its black abyss, so when I felt a solid thing on my shoulder a second later, I sent a shrill scream ripping down the tunnels before dropping my knees and landing on the floor. I smacked at the hand, fighting it away, but it kept grabbing until it caught my arms and held them still. It was then that I saw its face, and a rock of solid horror landed on my chest, filling me with embarrassment.
“Are you okay?” Quaid laughed, his stark-white teeth the only thing I could really see in the darkness.
“Oh my God.” I breathed. “You scared the living hell out of me.”
He laughed harder, helping me up. “I noticed.”
“Why did you do that?” I asked, slapping him playfully on each word. “Why didn’t you just announce yourself?”
“Because I didn’t want to scare you,” he said, and we both laughed.
“What are you doing down here anyway?” I asked.
“Elora sent me. She was worried.”
I nodded.
“So you think David came down here, huh?” He cast his eyes from one end of the tunnel to the other.
“Yeah. I’m worried.”
“About what?”
“That she might hurt him.”
His throat made a funny grunt before it pushed out through his nose and he folded over, hacking out his hilarity. “I’d be more worried about what he’ll do to her.”
“He’s human, Quaid—”
“Yeah, and she is in no state to do anything to anyone,” he said with a reassuring kind of certainty.
“What do you mean?”
“Come on.” He took my arm and turned me in the opposite direction. “I’ll show you.”
* * *
By the time we took the fifth turn down a series of narrow passages, it became clear to me that I would never have found Morgana on my own. In fact, I could’ve wandered these tunnels for a year and not found her, so I was very glad at this point that Quaid found me, even if he did make me almost pee in my pants.
“When we found Morgana, she was looking for you,” he explained, his voice echoing in the darkness but in a comforting way. It was nice having a friend down here with me. “But she was crawling,” he added, “she was too weak to walk.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He turned us around another corner at a crossroad, where the walls were lined with cells once again. “She said she didn’t want to hurt you—that she needed to tell you something important.”
“What?”
“She wouldn’t say.”
How odd. I slowly turned my attention back to the path ahead, my stomach churning with the possibilities. Had David been taken by magic and she knew where he was, wanted to torture me with it?
Quaid’s hand whipped out across the path and I stopped dead, winded. “What the hell, Quaid?”
“Listen.”
I held my breath, tuning my ears to the hollow tunnels, the sound he’d heard reaching them a second later. “Crying?”
Quaid moved swiftly to the wall and grabbed a lantern, the comforting smell of a lit match claiming my worries a second later. He shook it out and tossed it on the floor, closing the glass door as he held the lantern up to a cell. The light reached in and touched the places my Lilithian vision couldn’t, illuminating a shape against the back wall.
A pair of reflective cat-like eyes fixed on me from that darkness then. I jumped back to the wall, my mind erasing the iron bars between us as though the creature in there could grab me. It crawled toward me, its movements jerky, stiff, like it was carrying an anvil on its back. One eye hung from its socket by a skinny thread of flesh, its long black hair tangled into an unrecognizable state, missing in bloody patches around its scalp.
“Quaid?” I said in a shaky voice. “What is that?”
He moved a bit closer with the lantern and sighed. “That’s Morgana.”
My eyes widened more then and fixed on the creature. I’d expected, in the back of my mind, to recognize her, but I had no memory of her face, and yet I was sure that even if I did, I wouldn’t have seen a human there. Not now.
I loosened myself from the wall, intent on folding the flap of skin dangling down on her a
rm back into place. It tore a little more every inch she moved, and when she reached the bars and wound her bloody fingers around them, crawling to her feet, gushes of blood flooded from between her legs, pooling at her feet.
“What the hell happened to her?”
“I don’t know.” He hung the lantern on a hook. “She wasn’t like this when we locked her up.”
With my heavy breath making circles of fog to lead the way, I forced myself to walk forward and take in the face of my enemy. I’d wanted to kill her so badly when I first arrived here, but now… all I felt was a sense of great pity and stale hatred. I was glad to see her so brutally injured but also deeply horrified.
“Who did this to you?” I asked, battling with my suspicions. I could smell him here—smell his recent presence lingering. David had left here not long ago, so while I felt relieved to know he was safe, not bloodied in this cell, I also felt sick by what he’d obviously done. This kind of torture wouldn’t end our pain. He knew that.
Morgana reached out through the bars, her hand trembling so violently with agony that her shoulders shook. “I needed to tell you,” she whispered, her voice thin with despair. “Come. Closer.”
I looked at Quaid, who shook his head. But I went closer anyway. She didn’t scare me. Not anymore.
Her hand closed around thin air, her single eye obviously marking my location incorrectly. I stayed a few inches away from her reach, leaning in to hear her weak voice. “What did you want to tell me?”
“I…” Her mouth gaped widely, and an almost heartbreaking cry left it. She dropped to her knees and folded in on herself, her back against the bars. “I practiced so many times,” she blubbered. “So many times. So many times. So—”
“What are you talking about?” I went to touch her, deciding against it as my hand reached between the bars, and drew it back quickly, a cold shiver running up my spine.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her head reeling around so our eyes met. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” I asked spitefully.
“I just need you to forgive me for what I did to you. I don’t know what happened.” She grabbed both sides of her head, folding into her knees and bashing her eye against them. “I don’t know what happened. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I—”
I backed away, standing up beside Quaid. Of all the things this evil witch could have said to me, an apology was so unexpected I just didn’t know how to react.
“Please,” she whimpered weakly, resting her face against her knees. “Please absolve me. Please say you forgive me.”
It filled me with the darkest, most menacing rage—made my tight fists shake as I imagined smashing them into her repeatedly, screaming that there was no forgiveness for taking a child’s life, but all I could do was move my head, my teeth caged to say no. “You will die today, Morgana. I will watch as your head is hacked from your body, and I will live on after that. I will have another child and I will breathe clean, free air. But you will not.”
She lifted her head and looked at me, her dangling eye weeping.
“I will offer you no forgiveness,” I added, “because it will ensure that you rot in the hottest pit of hell for what you did to me.”
“No!” She rolled to her knees and grasped the bars again. “No, say you forgive me! Say you forgive me!” The words trailed off to pathetic howling.
I shook my head and she screamed the words at me again, repeating them over and over.
“Keep begging,” I said. “So I can remember you like this when I want to cry for what you took from me.”
“Pleeeease! I need you to say you forgive me,” she cried, reduced to tears as it became apparent that I never would. She hugged the bars, sobbing on her knees in a bloody white cloth that barely covered her nakedness underneath, and not one cell in my body pitied her. I did nothing as she lifted her face and brought it back down onto the bars with the force of a hammer, splitting her cheek open.
Quaid stood beside me, both of us frozen; one with anger, the other with disbelief. She bashed her face against the bars until her mouth was cut so deep on one side that her teeth showed through the torn flesh, and when she fell onto her side, I thought for a moment that she was unconscious.
My hands trembled, my blood so thick with a chill that I couldn’t move. My sister, a girl I once loved at some point, lay on the floor in a ball, whimpering. She looked like a beaten dog, and though I felt no pity for her a moment ago, something in my heart changed then. It wasn’t enough to forgive her. Her pain would never lead to my forgiveness, but it was enough for me to see how beaten she was—that she was genuinely sorry. Perhaps her torture had given her pause. Perhaps it had given her insight. Perhaps she had become truly repentant as she suffered. And I was glad of that—glad she was sorry; glad that she would die knowing I would never forgive her.
“What should we do?” Quaid asked.
“Leave her,” I said coldly, turning away. “She can suffer until we chop off her head.”
Quaid hadn’t expected that. I saw the look in his eye, saw the depth of his pity for this vile creature, and as I went to walk away, I saw what he saw in me then. I was no different from her now. I knew that. I knew I could walk away and leave her to suffer, and I knew I would also hate my own reflection from this day on. But maybe it was worth it.
With my head held high, I pushed on, making it only five steps away before her quiet sobs reached my soul. My eyes shut tight and my feet halted on their next step, the sound moving through me and entering my heart—a place I knew I’d closed off to her. I didn’t want to forgive her. My heart was trying to, but I needed to hold onto this anger to help me deal with my pain. And yet I couldn’t.
I turned back. There was something inside me, something as deep as my own DNA that wouldn’t let me walk away. Not because I felt connected to her, not because she was my blood, but because I couldn’t walk away from any creature, foul as it may be, when it was in that state.
By the time I left my shell of grief and confusion and reached her cell door again, the sobbing had stopped. She lay on the dirt floor, her torn arm stretched out high above her face, scratching something into the ground. I listened carefully to the words she muttered, realizing it was a little song, but I couldn’t make out the lyrics. The melody, however, made the air icy.
“Morgana,” I said.
She gasped and stopped singing, rolling over so fast that half of her face remained on the ground. I covered my mouth, sickened to my core, but tried not to let it bother me visibly.
“Have you changed your mind?” she said, blood splattering the bars as she spoke. “Do you forgive me?”
I couldn’t bring myself to forgive her. Not even now. I wasn’t even sure now why I’d turned back, why I was squatting here by her cell. I backed away, horrified by my own reaction to her, and shook my head. “I… No.”
Like an implosion, Morgana took a breath, her face splitting wide open then as the moment of dead silence became a shrill scream, so haunting and so deep with pain that it sounded like a reaper calling for the dead. I scuttled back to the wall beside Quaid’s feet, and the creature in the cell scampered away to the back of the cell, darkness swallowing her whole.
“What the hell was that?” I said, breathless.
“I don’t—” His words stopped short, the meaty sounds of splattering blood coming from the back of the cell.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
Quaid grabbed the lantern and held it up to the darkness, illuminating the figure down the back.
“Morgana. No!” I yelled, but she didn’t even look at me. I couldn’t make out what was in her hands, but it was long and obviously sharp. She drove it repeatedly into her stomach, her chest, her own eye, turning to us as she parted both legs slowly, fixing our gazes before driving the thing between her legs. She didn’t scream out in pain, didn’t even flinch—just kept stabbing it into herself.
“Stop her!” I yelled.
“I can’t.” Quaid put the
lantern on the ground, fumbling for a key on his belt. “If I open this door, she might attack you.”
“Let me!” said a stern, rough voice. I didn’t recognize it at first, but as he stepped into the light, I realized it was my father, and the coiling knot of dread popped open in me. Drake took the keys and shoved the door open before I even saw him unlock it. I tried to find some justification in my mind for why I let her do that to herself, but there was none. When faced with the truth, when standing before another, placed with the responsibility of my own actions, what could I say but I was glad she did it.
“Ara!” David grabbed me, coming up out of nowhere.
“David!” I spun into his arms and wrapped mine so tightly around him that he coughed. “Where were you?”
“I’m so sorry I scared you.” He kissed my head. “Scared everyone, I guess.”
“Where did you go?”
“I came here.” He nodded to the cell. I could only see Drake now, his back to us, as he tried to restrain his daughter. “I wanted to kill her, Ara, but…”
“But?”
He drew back and looked down into my eyes. “She started hurting herself… she…”
“She apologized?”
He nodded.
“You don’t seriously forgive her, do you?”
“No.” He looked over at the cell. “But I couldn’t stand there and watch her do that to herself either, and I couldn’t find it in my own dark mind to hurt her after seeing that.”
So he hadn’t done that to her. Any of it. I thought I’d feel relieved to know that, but it was more like my soul shone. I wanted to hurt her in the worst way, but seeing her do it to herself made me glad I hadn’t, and that David hadn’t. It would only haunt me later, worse than recalling what she’d just done to herself.
Drake fought desperately with Morgana as she screamed and kicked like a demon had possessed her, his voice breaking in despair. “I’m sorry, Morgana,” he whispered, holding her head tightly in his arms before a sickly cracking sound ended it all.
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