Mortala (Sotiras Duet #1)

Prologue

Today

“L… Lias.”

His name is on my lips as a whisper, tasting of earth and something I can only imagine is whiskey. Slightly harsh, but oh so sweet. One syllable, a low and playful vibration of a name; a hymn I’ve never sang in church but it still brings me to my knees, to my senses, back to sanity—I hope.

He is salvation stacked tall with a rugged exterior, rough hands, and a gravelly voice the howling cowers from.

“Someone restrain her legs!”

Four words, twenty-two letters, and I’m pulled away. His name turns to ash in my mouth, drying my throat. In my lungs, fire consumes my breath until the weight of a thousand suns presses on my creaking ribs.

Pressure bellows in violent waves from the center of my body, straining the joints in my arms. It’s agonizing, pins and needles confine me to a bed of glass with each contortion of my writhing body.

“I have her on the left!” a man shouts.

“Got the right!” calls another.

What was once a whisper has become a roar; a burnt scream from the hells hiding in my marrow.

Serve the Lord.

Serve the Lord.

Serve the Lord.

Words I used to flee from echo within me, haunting my every waking moment.

It doesn’t matter—it never mattered. I meet them with unbridled hatred and refuse to accept what is demanded of me.

I’ll never serve, fuck the Lord. What has he ever done for me?

He took my mom, hid my father, had me abducted by the only family who understands the noise in my head.

He had me rip my adopted family apart, and now?

Now he has me chained in my own body, drowning on false promises and the prayer that is Elias’s name on my rotten tongue.

You’ll never survive. Your family will beg for your maker to devour you. They will forget you, an abomination. A complicated clump of cells. Pathetic human waste. The product of sin. In the end, your meat and sinew will melt from the bone as demons lick the tallow from charred flesh.

Vile, corrupt, persecution snaps in my innocent ears.

Mixing with ongoing shouts from people I cannot see beyond the grotesque faces of my demons staring at me.

They’re haloed by a repulsive glow of halogen lights, the shadows of their existence blanketing me in a putrid sludge.

To my right, Kate stands. Her face drips and oozes, the blackened flesh liquefies in globs before hitting me with a gut-churning splat.

At my left is Liz, covered in a chin-high glaze of youthful blood—my blood, I know it.

My body may not bleed, but my soul and my mind do.

She soaks in my misery while Kate shreds my synapses into bite-sized chunks.

Without Naamah here, these two rot me from the inside out.

Serve the Lord.

They repeat in unison, forever feeding the insanity. My body is so tired, the exhausted thump in my chest—my heart—is at its breaking point. This battle, the constant fight for my mind and soul, is destined to end. One I will lose.

“Someone dose her! We can’t hold her much longer.”

“No…no…NO!” My words screech through my blistered throat. Kate jerks to the side and swipes her hands across the arm of a man who then shouts in horror, his weight suddenly vacating a limb.

“You crazy bitch!”

A brutal yank dislodges me from the center of my bed—that’s where I’m at, right?

In a hospital. The light, the overpowering stench of too many mixed cleaners, cheap laundry detergent, and unknown voices.

I’m…I’m locked away. That’s what this is.

Someone put me here, took me away from my mom, my dad, myself!

I blink rapidly, combating the haze over my eyes before Kate dismantles the people around me; fearful they are harming me.

I need to see; I need to make sense of what the hell is happening around me.

If I don’t—fuck. Lifting my now-free arm, it swings to push Kate away, but I’m met with a dreadful pain that rockets from my elbow to my shoulder.

It coerces a scream from my split lips as lightning pulses down to my fingertips and through my chest.

People roar around me, battling a frenzy, but still I escape.

Kate crouches over me, her muddy feet staining the sandpaper-like bedding under me as she sneers and snaps at who I finally realize are medical staff.

She’s furious, crumbling teeth snap at them in the midst of their ruckus—threatening to chew through them to free me.

Now I understand what the weight is, why I feel like half of me can’t move.

They’re holding me down, trying their damnedest to staple me into place.

Multiple people bear down on my legs, a few more securing my arms, thrusting me into the hole I’m terrified of.

I can’t go back into the dark, not where I don’t have control.

Where demons run free and my body is no longer my own.

“Someone dose the Haldol!”

“NO! DON’T, DON’T DO THIS TO ME!”

“Doctor! We need the sedation order STAT. She’s exhibiting symptoms of excited delirium.”

Am…do–does nothing I say make sense? What does that mean, delirium? I’m pleading and they only want to medicate me, to wash away all that I am and leave the scraps for picking.

Child, if you do not fight, you will die.

“I’ll die anyway!”

Then save yourself.

“I can’t…. I can’t!” I cry.

Scorching tears flood the corners of my eyes and spill back into my hair as they finally pin me. In unison, my demons and I howl as pain roots deep in my left thigh. Kate swats her claws and bares her teeth again. Liz shrieks while holding her face as if she took the brunt of the force.

Useless beings. They have invaded me for most of my life and suddenly they can’t—no, they won’t—help. Kate kept me alive when my uncle strung me up like livestock. She even protected me at the hospital, from…Elias.

Elias.

“Elias!” His name’s a sob from lips too broken to beg anymore. The cavity my heart resides in barely holds it intact now as I fray into pieces.

“Please…please! Don’t…don’t let them put me under. S…save me from th…e d…dark.”

Shhhhhh, Sunshine. I’m here. I’ll always be here.