Chapter 7 Wearing Her Skin #2
Penelope let out a terrified squawk, her feathers flattening against her body. I scooped my frantic hen into my arms, clutching her against my chest. I had to find shelter for us. Now.
It was too late. The wind hit me, driving the air from my lungs and making my knees buckle.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” I tried to tell Penelope, but the storm ripped the words away before I could properly form them.
Penelope’s tiny heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic counterpoint to my own.
I turned, shielding her with my body, and fought my way toward the relative safety of the cottage.
My boot caught on something. I looked down and saw it. The thread, pulled taut, was entangled around my ankle.
It was too late to prevent disaster, but as I pitched forward, my free hand shot out to break my fall.
At the very least, I needed to keep Penelope from being crushed beneath me.
This wasn’t the first time I’d taken a tumble because of my gift, nor would it be the last. The important thing was keeping my little hen safe.
My palm slammed into the ground, the impact jarring my teeth. Dirt and pine needles scraped my cheek. Yet the sensation of falling didn’t stop.
The earth vanished, replaced by an endless, terrifying drop into nothing.
Penelope dissolved from my arms, her final, choked cry swallowed by a roar of wind that drowned out all sound.
My yard, my body, my entire world were gone.
Instead, I was hurtling through an endless, black sky toward a sprawling city I recognized with a fresh wave of horror.
Asphodelia.
I squeezed my eyes shut, bracing for the impact, for the end.
It never came.
A band of iron strength locked around my waist, bringing the fall to a jarring halt. Heat pressed against my back, soaking through the thin fabric of the dress I now wore. The scent of storm-charged air and worn leather filled my nose, drowning out the terror of the drop.
Phonos. He had caught me.
“The first flight is always overwhelming,” he said, not unkindly. “Open your eyes when you’re ready.”
I forced my eyelids apart. The world had transformed into a terrifying tapestry of black glass and distant lights, spread thousands of feet below my dangling boots. Nausea rolled through me, but it felt distant, muffled by a foreign sense of wonder.
Phonos was still holding me, my protector of shadow and power. But there was something different about his expression, a tentative wall I didn’t know what to make of. “You feel alone even when surrounded by people who care about you.”
The syllables formed in my throat, but the voice belonged to a stranger. It sounded soft, melodic, and terrifyingly familiar. It sounded like Callista.
Understanding crashed into me, so shocking I barely dared to process it. I was wearing her skin. This memory didn’t belong to me. It belonged to them.
This had never happened to me before. Never had one of my visions displayed another person’s life so intimately. But maybe it made sense, if fate had deemed us entwined.
Phonos looked right through me, at her, and the raw vulnerability in his gaze flayed me open. “Yes. I thought you might understand that feeling.”
He wasn’t just comforting her. He was reaching out. He saw a kindred spirit in her brokenness, a mirror to his own isolation. He truly believed that he’d found the one creature in all the realms who could understand him.
“Maybe we could help each other find what we’re missing.”
Whatever intrigue I’d felt at the strange situation vanished as if it had never existed. Phonos’s words fractured something deep inside me. He was offering her the very foundation of the life he was building with me. He was offering her the “we.”
The distance between Phonos and Callista shrank. His hand came up to cup her cheek. His thumb brushed across her skin with a gentleness that made my own phantom flesh burn. The pull of him was magnetic, undeniable, demanding a surrender I’d already given him.
But the woman I inhabited recoiled.
“I’m sorry.” Callista pulled back, her cheeks burning with a shame I could feel but not name. “I can’t... not yet.”
I waited for his anger. I waited for her rejection to break him. But his arm only tightened around her waist, securing her against the drop.
“It’s all right.” Patience, profound and aching, colored his tone. “We have all the time in the world.”
He brushed a strand of golden hair back from the face I wore. “You’re worth waiting for, Callista. However long it takes.”
The promise echoed in the hollow space of my skull, a death knell for the certainty I had found in the Weavers’ Hall.
You’re worth waiting for.
He had loved her. He had waited for her. He had looked at her with the same worship, the same desperate hope, the same absolute certainty he’d shown me. He’d told her the exact same beautiful things, shown her the same kindness that once made me trust him.
If I’d had a body of my own, I’d have screamed. I’d have demanded some kind of explanation, anything to make sense of the madness.
But I didn’t get the chance to say anything, neither as myself nor as Callista. The wind howled, rising into a scream of unbearable chaos. The vision folded, and I was thrust back into reality, snapping awake in my bed.
For a few moments, I couldn’t move at all. My muscles ached, as if I’d had one of my old episodes. A crushing weight clamped around my skull, grinding bone against bone. The air tasted of stone and stale fear. And Phonos wasn’t there.
The nest lay empty. The warmth beside me had turned cold, leaving only a depression in the furs where Phonos had been. And in his place, the threads had returned.
Every single speck of dust in the chamber was teeming with them, with the intruders I’d thought I’d escaped.
Glowing lines sliced through the gloom of the chamber, searing with a cruel intensity.
They pulsed in time with the throbbing in my temples, weaving through the walls, through the air, through me.
I grasped for the silence. I grasped for the peace that I had found in the Weavers’ Hall, the quiet that Asphodelia had given me since the day of my arrival. Only agony awaited me.
A million whispering tones layered over one another until they became a single, agonizing shriek. I pressed my palms hard against my ears, but it didn’t help. The noise came from beyond, deeper than the marrow of my bones, all the way into my very core.
Denial lodged in my throat. “No… Why? Why is this happening again?”
Charon had taken this. He had gouged it out of me on his altar. The ritual should have been the end of the nightmare.
But the threads remained. They burned brighter, louder, more violent than they ever had. They seared into my skin, vibrating with a raw power that made my teeth ache.
I tried to feel for the bond that should have anchored me, but my search yielded only chaos. The steady presence that had been there only hours ago was gone, replaced by a cry lost in a storm. I couldn’t feel Phonos anymore. I couldn’t feel his certainty. I couldn’t feel his love.
The vision of Callista crashed back into my mind, so powerful I almost threw up. “You’re worth waiting for.”
The way he’d looked at her, the way he’d spoken to her… It had to mean something. The threads had never truly deceived me. If I’d had a vision of Phonos and Callista, there was something about them I needed to find out. Right now. And if Phonos wasn’t here to answer me, I’d find him myself.
The room pitched and swayed as I stumbled toward the door. Glowing filaments of light crisscrossed the air like a web of fire, pulsing with a grinding thrum. Unlike the threads in my dream, these ones didn’t try to trip me. I wished I could find that comforting.
I threw my weight against the door and the heavy wood crashed outward. As I stood in the doorway, two dark shapes moved toward me, blurring into defensive stances. Alecto and Megaera blocked the path, their wings half-unfurled.
“Daphne?” Megaera frowned, eyeing me from head to toe with a concern I now found grating. “What is it? Are you unwell?”
I blinked, trying to clear the haze from my vision. Phonos’s sisters looked solid, anchored in a reality I was rapidly losing grip on. They didn’t see the threads coiling around their ankles. They didn’t hear the screaming.
“Where is he?” I slammed my hand against the stone wall to stay upright despite the vertigo. “Where is Phonos?”
“He’s left the Spire, but he’ll return soon,” Alecto replied. “You should be resting. You’re perfectly safe here, with us.”
I bared my teeth at her, feeling like a wounded animal. “Am I? You know nothing. This is not about you.”
Megaera lifted her hands, as if trying to show she was harmless. “What’s it about then?”
Her level tone infuriated me. I didn’t want any more fake reassurances, fake promises, fake kindness. “Callista,” I snapped at them.
The name fell between us like a stone dropped in deep water. Alecto and Megaera only stared at me in confusion. “What about her?”
“He loved her. He wanted her. Before me.”
I didn’t want it to be true. I wanted to be wrong about this, about what my threads had told me. Even if Alecto and Megaera knew Callista, that meant nothing. Callista was probably familiar to almost everyone who lived in Asphodelia.
But after that first moment of surprise, Megaera exchanged a sharp look with her sister. She moved closer, her tone soothing, soft and careful. “Daphne, listen to me. That… that was a complicated time. The Weave holds many paths.”
“Many paths…” The roar of the threads rose to a fever pitch, drowning out reason. “Did he claim her?”
Alecto crossed her arms and pursed her lips in displeasure. “He wanted to. But none of that matters now, Daphne. It’s in the past.”
The past and the future were always two sides of the same coin. I’d forgotten that, when I’d thought I could leave my own behind. The threads had just given me a brutal reminder of how wrong I’d been.
“It matters. I need to know.”
“There’s nothing more to know, Daphne,” Alecto answered. “Callista chose the Cerberus. Phonos accepted the loss. And then he found you.”
Perhaps she meant it to be a reassurance, but I understood the truth. He didn’t choose me. He lost her.
This was what the threads had been trying to tell me. I wasn’t the destination. I was the consolation prize. I was the creature he had settled for because the golden-haired woman who understood his loneliness had walked away.
“He told me… He told me I was his fate.”
“You are.” Megaera reached for me, her feathers twitching in anxiety. “The bond is real, Daphne. You saw the mark appear. It’s right there, on your hand.”
I didn’t need her to tell me what I already knew. Right now, I couldn’t even bring myself to think about the mark I’d taken such pride in. “Believe me, I saw plenty. Far more than I would like. What does a simple mark mean, if his heart belongs to someone else?”
“Daphne, you can’t honestly believe—?”
A thick, golden thread snapped into existence in the air, distracting me from whatever Alecto was about to say. It didn’t pulse like the others. It pulled. It tugged at my navel with a physical force, dragging me toward the stairs, toward the city. “I need to find her.”
Megaera and Alecto spread their wings, forming a barrier in front of me. “It’s too dangerous, Daphne. Just be patient. Phonos will come home soon.”
I had no interest in waiting. They couldn’t keep me here, not if I didn’t want to be kept.
With an angry huff, I swept past them. A human shouldn’t have stood a chance against two Keres warriors, but I’d never been an ordinary human. For once, that worked in my favor.
Alecto and Megaera stumbled, their legs tangling in glowing lines they couldn’t see. They still tried to grab me, but their hands stopped inches from my arm, as if held back by iron chains. “Daphne, wait!” they called out.
But their words fell on deaf ears. I ran, following the threads that had been honest with me. I’d get my answers, or die trying.