Текст книги "Hemlock Veils"
Автор книги: Jennie Davenport
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 24 страниц)
Chapter 21
Elizabeth gave herself permission to explore Henry’s home for the first time—at least this section of it. Gold-trimmed crown molding; a wide spiral staircase made, again, of heavenly white marble; high ceilings painted with demons and angels, a mural depicting some heavenly war: every inch, even those ceilings, was clean and immaculate. The house even smelled clean, like exquisite, natural pine.
When she entered the sitting room again, she was surprised to see the floor around the beast had been cleared. Even her jacket and shirt were gone. The sight of a large, feral creature in a room so full of luxury was strange. The room had a Victorian theme, but kept with the gold theme of the rest of the mansion. Everything seemed lined with gold; even the plush chairs that appeared to never have seated a soul were golden velvet. And Elizabeth would have bet the décor was older than Henry.
Arne wasn’t in sight, and the beast still lay in the same position she’d left him in, limp on his right side, his ribs lifting with each inhalation. His fur appeared to be dry now, unlike her shower-soaked hair. She’d frequently wished to see him in the light, but not like this, not injured. He was beautiful, still, even in his unconscious state. His dark fur shone, reflecting the chandelier’s light, and even the coarser, spikier hair of his spine was a striking color: a blunt pitch-black, so stark it looked like the color of nothingness.
She knelt before him, checking his incision. Already it looked better. Was her mind playing tricks, or was it actually healing? She stroked his silken fur, feeling her hand over his large ribs as they rose and fell. Whatever Hell he lived internally at the moment, she prayed the morphine would dull it.
Her hand found his face. “You’re going to be all right…Henry.” Calling him by name in this form felt out of place, but it was the only right thing to call him here.
Then it entered her mind, distant and unclear, but definitely a voice. Her hand paused, her heart startled by it. Elizabeth, he said.
“Yes, Henry,” she whispered. “I’m here. I’m not leaving.”
Where are you, Elizabeth?
“I’m right here.”
Run, as far as you can.
She paused again. He didn’t communicate with her here. He sent his thoughts to her, but it was a her that lived in his head, a her from his dreams. She continued to stroke his fur. “I’m not going anywhere.”
So…stubborn…
She smiled, just briefly.
Run! His animal eyelids twitched. She’ll kill you if she finds you. His eyes jerked beneath his lids again and a breathy sound emerged from the back of his throat. If you die I can’t…
Then she heard nothing. She searched his face that was suddenly lifeless again. “I’ll never leave,” she barely whispered while feeling her hand down his neck, her fingers getting lost in his fur. “You’re going to be all right.”
“He’s going to be all right only because of you.” Startled, she turned, finding Arne staring. She wondered how long he’d been watching. “If it wasn’t for you, he could have died, Elizabeth. Thank you…for saving him.”
She looked back to Henry. “He saved me first. More than once.”
Arne sat in a Victorian-style chair a few feet away and sighed. “Elizabeth, I know you want to be here to make sure he’s all right, but…”
“I said I’m not leaving, Arne.”
“Does Henry know you know?”
She hesitated. “No.”
“Then he will be livid when he wakes.” His voice grew firmer, more insistent. “Trust me, it won’t be pretty. This is not the way to tell him.”
“I don’t consider his life saved until he wakes up, and you better be damn sure I’ll be here when that happens.”
Sighing again, he looked away.
“What if there is some complication in the night? I will not leave him, Arne, not like this. He’s my responsibility now, and if something were to happen to him…” She trailed off.
“Then,” he began, a tone of forfeit, “I suppose it will be both our heads, not just mine.” He stood, and she just now noticed he wore a different robe and pajamas. “There are plenty of beds. As I’m sure you have figured, Henry’s is hardly ever used, so you’re more than welcome to it.”
“I’m not leaving his side. I’ll sleep right here, beside him.”
“Now, Elizabeth, that’s just—”
“Arne, you know as well as I do, I won’t give in.”
He half-smiled, shaking his head. “Very well. I just think Henry will have more than my head if he knows you were here and I didn’t make you as comfortable as possible.”
“Blankets will do just fine.”
“And some tea. I have something I think you’ll want to see.”
***
When Arne returned, three of the plushest blankets Elizabeth had seen filled his arms. Atop the stack of blankets that were probably more expensive than every blanket she’d ever owned combined, was a pillow with a plain white pillowcase. Under his other arm, a bedroll that didn’t look much different than the ones she and her father and brother used to camp with.
He set them down beside her and with a smile was gone again. While she waited, she laid a blanket over Henry, since he would appreciate it in the morning, when he was himself again. Though she doubted that would do anything to dull his anger.
She opened the bedroll beside him and laid the second blanket atop that, then topped it with a pillow.
Arne paused upon his return, eyeing the white blanket over the beast. The look in his eyes said he understood. He placed the silver tray of tea on the Victorian table—legs curled up in a way that brought it to life—wedged between the two chairs, and motioned for her to sit. She rose to her feet with some difficulty and sat in the chair with even more difficulty, the golden cushions almost too soft for her spine.
Only one cup sat on the tray, she noticed, and Arne didn’t sit. Instead he left without saying a word, but was back quickly, this time holding a large leather book in his arms. It took her aback, threw off her reality for the briefest moment. Her book. She straightened as Arne brought it to her lap. Not her book exactly, but one just like hers. Sticky notes emerged from numerous places, and the pages appeared more worn than the ones in her copy. “I understand you and Henry have similar reading tastes,” Arne said with a smile.
She met his eyes, bluish-brown and bordered in wrinkles. “Is that…his?”
He yawned, nodding. He appeared exhausted, even older. “During the many years he was holed up here, leaving everyone to believe he had moved away, he spent hours with his nose in those pages. It has been a helpful tool.”
“How many years?”
“We came here soon after his first transformation, where it would be easier to hide. He was here as Henry Senior for ten years before disappearing, then didn’t make his appearance again as Henry Junior until ten years ago, after the accident with the Portland teens. He hid away in this place for twenty-nine years, his only escape at night, when he could roam the forest as the beast. I was his only connection to the outside world—the human world. People believed I lived here alone, keeping up Mr. Clayton’s property.”
“Almost fifty years…” Elizabeth mused with a sorrowful ache.
“Henry has been thirty-five years old for forty-nine years. And I worry that it won’t be long before he will want to hide away again, Elizabeth. You can’t let that happen.” She had no time to form a response to his request, since he added with another yawn, “Morning comes soon. I will leave you to his notes. Is there anything else I can get you, Elizabeth?”
“No, Arne, thank you.”
He hesitated. “I do think it would be wise to tie him down, just in case…”
She hesitated. He’d once crushed a bear with his jaws, out of mere instinct. “No,” she said with a subtle swallow. His instincts were natural, but the man in him could fight them.
Behind his eyes, Arne deliberated.
“Arne, as long as I keep morphine in him, he won’t wake again—not until the poison’s left his bloodstream.”
“Well,” he started, turning to leave. “I’ll say it again. I’m beyond grateful he has you to care for him.” He paused, gravity weighting his words. “I’ve spent many nights praying you were here. I just thought you should know that.”
Her chest warmed and eyes welled. She swallowed through the lump in her throat.
“Goodnight, Elizabeth,” he said, and she could only nod as he left the room. She looked down to the book, wide and thick and heavily-bound, with sticky notes sprouting from every direction. Forgetting about her tea entirely, she opened to the most curled of page markers. It was the section she’d read many times. Elizabeth wondered if Aglaé was as hypnotizing in real life as she was in the picture. She wondered how many there were, how they came to be.
Nearly every word had been highlighted with rushed yellow strokes—sentences about unbreakable curses and even the cross-reference to Diableron. She turned the page, skimming over more highlighted passages, and almost skipped over the four paragraphs that had been left alone, the dull typeset standing out against the rest, with its colorless background. The way the highlighter had deemed it too irrelevant to mark made it seem that much more significant, and she found herself reading it more carefully than the rest, her brain catching certain terms like a filter catches particles.
The bond of Cursed and Curse Breaker: Reversals, cures, or antidotes to Aglaé’s curses are never easily found. In rare instances, the antidote is simply an act that must be performed by the Cursed himself, and only the Cursed. But most often times, the curse can be broken only through the specific act of another, and when accomplished, a special connection between the Cursed and the Curse Breaker is created. In those cases, both the Cursed and Curse Breaker undergo a chemical change, creating a bond both physical and literal. Some have explained it as a oneness or a sense of belonging to the other, their lives becoming one in the same soon after the curse is broken—as in the legend of Absolon and Elvire.
She went on to read the brief account of Absolon and Elvire, whose story she remembered reading as a child: the story of how true love can conquer the barrier of any outward appearance. It was a tale with a moral, a story that had always taught her to look at one’s soul, not at their physical exterior.
It was the story of a man who was cursed by Aglaé to the confines of a dark cave for the remainder of his life, and the baker’s daughter who brought him bread. A man with skin transparent enough to see his insides, skin so sensitive that even a flicker of light left burns, and a woman who was so frightened by his hideous form that she at first left him bread only at the entrance of the cave. But eventually her pity turned to a compassion that drove her inside, and in the dark of that cave, Absolon and Elvire developed a love so deep that she never left him. It was her love that broke the spell, but in the moment the curse broke, a mob of angry villagers raided the cave and crucified her for loving a Cursed. Absolon, though alive—and a new man—had then been stabbed. He’d cradled his dead Elvire and, when his blood dripped into hers, her life was restored—all thanks to the bond that formed between them after the release of the curse, when the chemical change in the blood of the Cursed and Curse Breaker was most powerful. By the grace of that short window, and the magic in his blood, she was made whole. It was the first time such a power was realized and the only time it’d been used. According to record, that was.
Beneath the fourth paragraph was a Baroque-style painting: a pale man sobbing over a dead woman, both faces dramatic and both bodies naked amidst crimson robes, his blood pouring into hers.
Elizabeth lifted her eyes to the beast asleep on the floor, and she knew then why he hadn’t highlighted this section. He was one of the rare beings it mentioned in the beginning: a Cursed whose only antidote was an action of his own, a Cursed who could never have a Curse Breaker.
***
The blurred edges around Henry’s vision darkened, as though he looked at life through a black fog. It made concentrating difficult, made seeing her face nearly impossible. Elizabeth, he thought as he stared up at her. He hated when she cried, hated how unjust it was for someone like her to feel any kind of sorrow, but the sensation of her hands on his face felt like home. Elizabeth.
I’m not going to leave you, she promised, except the sound was trapped within the confines of his head, warbling as though her voice traveled through water. I’m going to get help. Her face left then, replaced by a shattered china plate: the moon, obstructed by twiggy, spider-like branches.
It felt like a dream. A nightmare, more precisely—given her tears and the way flames licked his side. They scorched, sizzled his flesh, yet he couldn’t move. And still, with his eyes closed, he stared at the moon. Then red, flowing hair; crimson, seductive lips; lavender eyes. Her face flashed in his mind over and over again, first expressions of anger then those of unbridled rage, making her hair appear as flames behind her head. Flames all around—on the witch, on his body, on the trees.
She screeched that awful sound, and even with his eyes closed, he couldn’t escape the glaring fire and her face—her face that held every evil captive behind her beauty.
His head caught fire, his brain like kindling in his skull. He screamed but nothing came out, nothing changed, and still he slept. The witch’s laughter: it was a disturbing sound, mixed with her deafening screech. I’ll kill you before you can kill her, she kept saying, and even though he knew what she meant, it didn’t make sense. I won’t let you do it. You’ll always be mine.
He wanted to say he wouldn’t do it anyway, but his vocal cords caught fire, too. Then he realized he was nothing more than a monster and had never been able to speak.
Like a reel of photographs set on automatic scroll, her face lit up his psyche, expression after expression. It wasn’t her face anymore, though, but the face of evil: a Diableron, as repulsive as the soul Aglaé lacked. Elizabeth, he thought again, sending his thoughts outward, to wherever she might be. Elizabeth, run!
He saw her then, suspended above by the curling branches of a hemlock that appeared more alive than Diableron herself. He called to her but nothing came out, and through that black mist of his vision, his fur was aflame. The flames spread from his body and licked their way across the forest, where the trees—suddenly bare and dry—ignited with an explosive force.
Elizabeth screamed, agonizing and drawn-out, and amidst the wretched sound were pops and crackles, noises that would usually remind him of fresh logs on a campfire. Her screams made his own pain intensify, made the flames on his body turn a mysterious blue. Elizabeth, he called out. But she didn’t hear, for her flesh began to bubble and melt away, dripping from her skull. Soon, her screams stopped all together until a charred figure lay lifeless in the arms of the hemlock. Somehow, every strand of her silken hair had been untouched, if only to remind him the blackened, fried body was hers.
The screams inside him were so earsplitting his skull cracked under the pressure, fracture upon fracture. And as though they went hand in hand, the pain in his heart and the burning of his flesh only scorched hotter. He would kill the witch when this was all over, when his spirit was freed from this inferno of a prison.
Water shot from his eyes in a pressurized stream, like a leak in a hose. Tears? They sprayed everything, even Diableron, and through his cries the fire extinguished, the forest turning green again. Even Elizabeth’s skin became supple and alive.
He jerked at the face in his black, foggy consciousness: Arne, frantic and sleep-deprived and telling him everything was all right. Was it? She’s all right, he said through the ocean in Henry’s ears.
His chandelier, his ceiling, his windows draped in the golden silk he hated. Elizabeth’s face, her hand, her faint and distant promises that he would be all right, that she would never leave him. Had she saved him from the fire, or had he saved her? I thought maybe we could save each other, she had once said, though every memory seemed lumped into one and he couldn’t recall when.
All the pain, all the anguish, extinguished by the touch of her hand and her eyes as green as his forest. At last, waves of weightlessness flowed through him, his limbs floating on a choppy, rhythmic sea of slumber. He let it take him, the sea—let it sink him, pull him under. It was then Aglaé haunted his dreams. Red flowing waves, lavender eyes: she was enchanting and alluring, and he followed her.
***
Elizabeth hardly remembered laying her head on the down pillow, because she was out before she could close her eyes, exhaustion pulling her under like the drowsy current of a narcotic. Now, just after sunrise, she awoke with low sunlight behind her eyelids. It didn’t take long to remember where she was, with high windows and golden drapes, and she twisted to her other side, her heart worrying a hundred frantic worries all at once.
But beside her lay a sleeping Henry, in his real form. She sighed a relaxing sigh, sitting up. He lay in the same position, on his right side. The sight of him in morning light took the breath from her chest, and he was even more beautiful than the beast had been under the light of the chandelier. His dark hair fell low on his forehead and his face looked more peaceful than she’d ever seen, and before she could get too swept away in watching him, she lowered the blanket ever so slightly, checking the incision on his side, just over his hip.
Regardless of what she knew about him, she was surprised at how advanced the healing was. It was a healthy, pink scarring color, and even surrounding the injury—where she expected to see puffy redness—was a normal fleshy hue. With caution—and an elated, quickened heart rate, she admitted—she lowered the blanket a little more, trying to keep his private things private, and saw the same thing had happened with the marks on his thigh. They were pink in the same fashion, suggesting healing.
She put the blanket back in place and found her eyes traveling his perfection—his masculine hands and fit, strong arms, and the muscular tone of his abdomen and chest—where they ended on his ominous tattoo. Except it wasn’t ominous, she realized. It was beautiful, just like the nighttime version of him, and it made him that much more attractive as a man, regardless of the reason she was sure he’d gotten it.
Her eyes traveled up his neck to the gentle pulse of a vein beneath his ear, and to his face—to his stern but peaceful brow and the way his short, dark beard, thinly grown and peppered with a silver that revealed the secret of his true age, added so much allure to his already charming features. She gently swept the hair off his forehead and drew her hand down his face, the smooth yet bristly sensation of his facial hair satisfying her fingertips. She wondered how long the poison would hold his consciousness. With a panicked heart, she wondered if he would ever wake at all. What if she had taken the wrong steps to revive him?
She ran her hand into his soft hair. “You have to come back, Henry,” she whispered. “I know you don’t want me here, but…I need you.”
Lying down, closer to him, she decided to let the poison run its course without extra morphine, since that’s what her instincts told her. She took his limp but warm hand and fit hers—hardly more than half the size of his—inside it. Holding it and curling it to her chest, she closed her eyes and allowed herself to drift back to sleep.
Chapter 22
Something about black satin rubbed Henry the wrong way. Perhaps because the trend had become so common among women of his class.
“I’m glad I caught your eye,” the woman wearing it drawled. Her lips were the color of red wine, and her extra-long lashes were glued on. She put her hands on her hips and Henry smiled, backing her into the corner. At least she wouldn’t be wearing the dress much longer.
They’d just left the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, or the “Schnitz,” as the Portland locals called it. Halfway through the Oregon Symphony’s rendition of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 in D major, he’d spotted her in the balcony adjacent to his, eyeing him over her binoculars. She knew who he was, he could tell, but that didn’t surprise him since everyone did. He hadn’t planned on taking anyone back to his hotel tonight, but she was pretty enough. He had given her a single nod, and when it was over she waited outside the lobby. They’d walked up Main Street then turned left onto Park Avenue where Arne would meet them with the car. He never introduced himself since he didn’t think it necessary, and neither did she. He preferred it that way.
It was near midnight and beneath a canopy of trees, he wedged her into a red brick corner, the exterior of a local attorney’s office. He placed his hands on the bricks, cooled by nighttime air. His eyes traveled over her, down her long slender neck to the low, swooping neckline of her dress, revealing cleavage that did nothing special to his pulse.
“I’ve heard so much about you,” she said.
“And what have you heard?”
“That it would be a pleasure to make your acquaintance.” Her thin lips grew mischievous, and he moved his hands to her satin-clad hips, his mouth traveling down her neck. She breathed a satisfied, “Mr. Clayton.”
She smelled of Chanel No. 5. The scent was everywhere.
For some reason, even though he’d smelled it on other women like her, he knew from this moment on, that scent would always remind him of her—the woman he’d just met, the woman who was nameless. Her black hair had been trimmed short, which made tasting her that much easier. As he descended her neck, she said between aroused breaths, “Surely, there’s somewhere else we can take this…”
He moved his hands down the roundness of her behind and gripped it firmly, pushing her into him, and with her diamond-studded earlobe between his teeth, he said, “My driver will be here shortly. Until then, I’ll take it where I want.”
She murmured, wrapping her arms around him. They usually liked when he took charge, but there had been a few who hadn’t, a few whose eyes swam in teary regret and humiliation when it ended. It probably should have been more difficult to forget those eyes and the brief sting of guilt, but he never saw the women again and frankly, when his successes outnumbered the few failed attempts at pleasing his partners, it was easy to forget the way some women felt taken advantage of.
He straightened at the sound of footsteps. The interruption bothered him, but it brought a strange presence. Turning, he squinted at the curvy silhouette, one he at first thought was naked. But she wasn’t truly naked, he saw when she stepped beneath a streetlamp; just clothed in something so scanty it could pass for lingerie. Heat and arousal flourished in his abdomen, and his eyes widened at her red, flowing hair and supple lips. It was like nothing he’d ever felt: so intense and sudden, it didn’t feel natural.
“Mr. Clayton, why’d you stop?” the unnamed woman in satin said, still holding his neck and not noticing the goddess approaching.
With his eyes on the goddess, he shoved the black-haired woman off of him, and she gasped in offense. Still, he couldn’t take his eyes off the red-head’s smile, off the way her lavender eyes nearly hypnotized him. He’d never seen eyes like hers, and a power lay behind them—a power he wanted to get lost in but didn’t want to be controlled by at the same time. He stared, dumbfounded.
She touched his bowtie, and her scent was that of exotic flowers. He closed his eyes, his head spinning in a deadly but euphoric daze. “I see your reputation precedes you,” she said, her voice raspy and slight. He opened his eyes. In his peripheral vision, the black-haired woman who paled in comparison placed her hands on her hips.
“My…reputation?” he asked with a deep swallow. Her index and middle finger walked up his neck.
“You’re a bad boy, Henry. You’ve hurt many women.”
“Excuse me,” the woman in black said.
The mysterious beauty looked at her, then back at Henry. “Which one do you want, Henry?” she asked, her head tilting and eyes narrowing as though she knew him better than he knew himself, knew what he would do before she even asked it. “Her or me?”
The corner of his mouth lifted. His charm had gotten him far in the past. “Both?”
She laughed, continuing to draw her finger up his neck, and the sound was…actually quite unsettling. “That is not an option.” He exhaled at the overpowering surge of heat that overcame him. Why was it he wanted to run from something he wanted so badly to be swallowed in?
“Then you, of course,” he answered. She smiled, and he could have sworn blackness lurked inside her mouth—as though one of the universe’s black holes existed solely behind her lips. From the corner of his eye, he saw the other woman sulk, her heels clicking on the cement as she stormed off. And all he could think was good riddance.
“Not very wise,” the red-haired woman teased, even as the spell she’d put on him led him to grasp her waist. He pulled her against him, roughly, and lowered his lips to hers.
Before he could kiss her, in an oddly cool breath she said, “I’ll give you one more chance, Henry,” and that was when he heard the voice of the man and the cocking of his gun.
He turned, where a man in a dark overcoat held a pistol against the woman in black, her back against the bricks and the tip of the barrel over her heart. Henry panicked inside as the woman in black began to cry, but his feet were glued to the ground, his consciousness elsewhere. He wondered if the sight of him and the temptress had been veiled to the mugger, because the gunman seemed to not notice them. Or perhaps the gunman was a figment of his own imagination.
The woman in black sobbed, begging for her life, convincing the man with the gun that she had no money on her. It was the scene of a film, surely, rather than a reality only feet away.
“Me…” the temptress said, getting Henry’s attention. She smiled crookedly and he knew that’s what she was: a temptress. “…or her?” She tilted her head, studying her psychological experiment, and her arousing power overcame him again, taking his breath. He wanted to save the woman in black—the one from the scene that couldn’t be real—but he wanted the temptress more. He wanted to know what it would be like to be under her power, for it to overtake him. He wanted it, just one time.
The woman pled for her life.
The mugger yelled that he wanted everything she had.
But all Henry could do was breathe into the mouth of the temptress with flowing red hair. “You,” he said again, his every extremity in a weightless tremble. The most carnal desire trapped him, and though he tried to fight it, in the back of his awareness he knew he didn’t try hard enough. Because he didn’t want to fight it.
Her smile stretched, and her breath grew cool and peculiarly moist. “Very well, Henry Clayton.”
A startling shot cracked through the air, jerking him from whatever spell she’d put over him, and his eyes shot to the man with the gun. A faint trace of smoke lifted from the barrel and the woman in black now lay on the ground, blood pooling beneath her on the cement like a hole slowly widening in the earth. And for the first time, he realized it was real—the strange veil that had made it as a film scene, gone.
“No,” he breathed. Every sense of desire that had been forced upon him was gone, leaving the harshest of sicknesses in his gut. The mugger’s eyes found Henry’s then, expanding as he noticed him for the first time.
Before he could run, Henry was on him, fighting him to the ground, and Henry’s knuckles slid over the man’s facial sweat as he slugged him. When a well-dressed group of bystanders laughed their way by—probably leaving the concert—Henry called to them, demanding they get help. They scurried away in a panic, and after he hit the man over the head with the grip of his gun, the man’s eyes closed in unconsciousness and Henry crawled to the black-haired woman.
But she was already dead, her eyes open and mouth hanging as though she’d been frozen. How could you let this happen? her expression said.
This couldn’t be real. Could it?
He shook her, yelling for her to wake up. It was because of him she never would; really, that gun may as well have been in his own hand.
He felt the temptress’s destructive air behind him.
He looked up at her, at the way she smiled, and a breeze cooled the wetness around his eyes. “You…” he said. “What did you do to me? I never would have…”
“I didn’t do anything, Henry. It was all you, all your choices that led to this. Because of you, an innocent soul is dead.”
He shook his head, even though she was right.
“For that reason, you will forever be cursed. From here on out, the nighttime will show everyone what you really are.” She grew angry, her gleaming teeth now bared and her raspy voice a gravelly roar. “A monster, Henry Clayton, that’s what you will become.”
A mass of footsteps made him turn. Two police officers, surrounded by a crowd eager to see the destruction, ran toward them: vultures with mink shawls, silk pocket squares, and suede top hats.
“What happened?” one of the officers barked.
“He…shot her,” Henry said, his voice weak and unstable. He stood, backing up and letting them surround the dead woman in Chanel No. 5 and the unconscious mugger, the silver gun at his side. He watched them, then watched the blood on his hands.
“A monster,” a breath from behind said, and he twisted. She smiled again.
Words escaped him, since he didn’t know what she meant.
“Go home,” she commanded. “It will begin soon.”
“What will begin?”
She closed in on him, staring into his eyes without her neck even slightly craned. She was either very tall—too tall for a normal woman—or her feet hovered above the ground. Neither seemed possible. None of this did. This time he felt no desire for her cool breath—only repulsion. “The pain,” she said in answer to his question. “The excruciating pain that will accompany you the rest of your life. The rest of eternity.” Her laugh made him recoil, and he didn’t understand.
