Chapter 43
Nelle
The flashlight trembled in my hand, its beam skittering across the last steps in nervous, broken flashes. I reached the final step…
…and stumbled.
A shriek tore from my throat as my foot slipped out from underneath me. I lurched off balance. The flashlight flew from my hand, clattering against stone as it rolled away, its beam spinning in wild, dizzy arcs.
No, no, no…
One flicker.
Another.
Then the light died.
An ocean of darkness rose up and swallowed me whole, its jet-black waves of nothingness submerging my being.
My heartbeat fluttered like a frantic bird trying to escape flesh and bone. I gasped for breath, unable to pull enough air into my lungs. It felt as if I stood on the summit of a mountain, eternal snow caressing its craggy peak. Too high up. The air too thin.
I swayed where I stood, shaking, staring into the pitch-black landscape as my past stalked me like an old foe. My mind collapsed inward, and I was gone, dragged back into the memory I feared most.
My mother’s fingernails dug crescents into my arm, and she ignored my wails, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…
I didn’t mean to…” as my feet tripped along the flagstone path that cut through the twisted trees, their limbs thrawn and skeletal, trunks misshapen and sickly looking as if the darkness of the tithe prison had leached into the ground and corrupted its roots.
Momma’s grip on my arm was fierce, but her other hand clutching the round, flat stone shook. She tugged me along, staring dead ahead, unmindful of my ashamed sobs or my sister chasing after us.
“Momma! Momma!” Evvie cried out. “Stop. Stop!”
Evvie whirled in front of us, pretty ballet shoes filthy from running across the muddy lawn. “It’s just a stupid Barbie doll. She didn’t mean to hurt Lise!”
I’d wanted the doll, but Lise wouldn’t give it to me.
Lise had held the Barbie high above her head, out of reach, laughing spitefully as she teased me.
A plague of fury surfaced. I’d stamped a foot, unleashing an ear-shattering scream.
And heard the crunch of bone as the Barbie doll fell from Lise’s limp grip, her scream joining mine. But hers was one of pain.
“She fractured Lise’s wrist. She wasn’t even touching her!” Momma cried back.
Evvie struck out at Momma’s hand on my upper arm, trying to free me. Both of us knew exactly where she was taking me.
“Get out of my way.” Momma thrust an elbow into her, hard. Evvie stumbled backward, her arms flinging wide to right her balance, but her ankle rolled as she tripped over a jutting root. She fell beneath an oak with a strangled cry.
I struggled in my mother’s tight grip, digging in my heels and reaching a hand toward my older sister. “Evvie! Evvie!”
“Nelle!” Evvie shrieked, pushing to her feet, wincing as she hobbled toward us.
But my mother’s pace quickened as she yanked me along.
The tithe prison was much like a silo, but this one was made from adamere that glittered with silver in the gloom. It was enormous, stark, and foreboding.
Momma pressed the stone against the curved wall, and a sudden ripple of greenish light scored up and across and down, creating an outline of a doorway. She pushed against it, and the door yawned wide, and all I could see inside was black.
My eyes went wide. No, no, no.
I tugged and flailed, trying to yank myself free.
The wind stirred, and the earth trembled beneath our feet.
It wasn’t a natural quake.
It came from me.
Momma jerked me closer. That’s what terrified me more than if she’d shouted at me in anger. Her deeply rooted fear. The panic shining in her eyes. “I’m sorry.” The flat of her hand met my back, and she shoved me inside.
I stumbled into the dark and spun around, about to run for the door and freedom. But it shut with a rumbling thunk, and daylight winked out.
My nightmarish screams ricocheted off the walls and rebounded in the darkness.
I gasped in relief when the door reopened shortly after, then whimpered when my mother shunted a box of food and water inside, along with tissues for the toilet—clearly meant for the human tithes we captured—before the door slammed shut with heavy finality.
I screamed in terror and shrieked and sobbed until my tears ran dry.
No one came to free me.
Time was endless without the sun to count the passing of days. I had no idea how long I’d been capsized in darkness.
A day or two? A month? A year?
I tentatively paced, walking tight circles in my circular cage, my breathing shallow, my mind teetering on the verge of spiraling into insanity at being submerged in the dark. Other times I pinched my inner wrist with sharp, stinging nips to remind myself that I was alive, whole, I lived in a body.
But it became too much…too much to endure…
And my imagination spun at what our House had trapped inside the prison walls over the years.
Mortals with a taste for killing.
Others with terrifying powers.
Otherworldly beasts that liked to feast on the bones of little children.
My mind whispered that those things could be imprisoned with me, and I fell into mindless terror. I collapsed in a tangle of limbs onto the floor, my mind turning inward to protect me.
How long I lay there, I didn’t know.
When I rose to consciousness, it was because I’d sworn a slender shard of sunlight pierced the darkness, and my sister’s face had been hovering over me. But when my mind awoke fully, I was alone in the dark, unable to see my hand in front of my face.
And then I heard her.
Whispering behind the thick stone.
It shouldn’t have been possible for her voice to breach the dense wall, yet her words reached me. I scrambled to my feet, edging closer.
Tears of relief leaked down my cheeks. “Evvie! Evvie!” I banged my fists on the prison wall until they throbbed in agony, but she didn’t hear me. And yet, not hearing anything in return, Evvie never left my side.
I curled up at the foot of the wall and pressed my ear to the icy stone and listened to her tell tale after tale of the old gods to keep me company.
Evvie’s favorite had always been our goddess of birth, of life.
Skalki could entice seedlings to unfurl from barren earth simply by striding across desolate wastelands scorched by the sun.
I sniffled, wiping my tears on the sleeve of my dirty dress as Evvie spoke of Skalki defying her brother Hazus and braving Nine Hells.
She went in and saved her mortal lover, dragging him back to the world, breathing life into his lungs once more.
And afterward she’d stolen him away, hiding them both where no one, not even another god, could find them.
And one day, the door opened, sunlight flooded in, and I was set free.
My freedom, I discovered, wasn’t for very long.
Every single time my father left the estate that year, my mother dragged me sobbing and begging not to be cast into the tithe prison …
Please, please, please…I promise I won’t hurt anyone…
I promise to be good… My mother never heeded my tears and wails.
She shoved me into the deep well of pitch-black nothingness to protect my sisters from someone so strange and alarming she couldn’t even begin to understand what I was or how to deal with me.
And every single time, Evvie returned to keep my terror of the dark at bay.
Slowly, so slowly, the past loosened its grip, and the present rushed back in.
And now, here I was, once more within a nightmarish crypt.
I wanted to spin around and run back the way I’d come. Throw myself into daylight and never venture down here again. It was too much. The absence of light too cruel. My fragile sanity threatened to snap like a twig.
And then something unexpected burst through me.
Strength, warm as sunshine, strong as iron.
Courage infused my very being, rising deep inside, swift as a meteor’s blaze. It lasted only for a moment. But long enough for me to grab hold of those thrumming strands of might and take my first step forward before it bled away.
Just one footstep, one after the other.
Just one more.
I inched my way forward until my foot kicked the flashlight. I scooped it up, releasing a shaky breath of relief as I switched it on and a thin beam pushed back the dark.
The staircase spiraling beneath the earth was so deep down, I obviously traveled well beneath the Keep and its dungeon.
The flashlight trembled in my sweat-damp hand.
Yellow light flickered over the iron-braced walls and ground frosted in dust. If the battery died, darkness would fall over me like a shroud.
I have more.
Other batteries.
A spare flashlight, remember.
A passageway stretched before me, long and straight.
As my flashlight swept over a gap carved within a wall, I realized why Jett had said there is ‘an entrance’ to the tunnel.
I poked light into the other passageway that connected with this one.
Obviously, there was a second entryway somewhere inside the Keep.
Where it was no longer mattered because I’d already found the path to freedom.
Before me lay the way off the estate.
I forced my legs to move. One step. Then another.
On…
And on…
And on I walked.
Stale air infused my lungs. My feet scuffed through the thick layer of dust that billowed like dirty fog as I edged onward, unable to burst into a faster pace, my terror of the dark too great.
It was like traveling on the road, headlights spearing through the night but only showing so far, a blur of asphalt, of painted lines.
I’m okay…I’m okay…
My fingers bunched into my shawl, but I couldn’t stop trembling in fear.
I’m not alone…I’m not alone…
A truth the Uzrek shared down in the catacombs when I’d tripped into a panic attack after Graysen had left me to fight the deadly warriors trying to claim me.
The ancient monster hadn’t specified it.
But now, on the other side, I knew what it meant.
You’ve never been alone, Wychthorn.
It had spoken of the wyrm inside me, that had been with me since birth, growing, maturing with my age. Though the rope bound its might and buried it so deep inside I couldn’t feel its presence, it was still part of me.
I’m not alone…I’m not alone…
I could do this, just one foot in front of the other.
But what Jett had said earlier amplified my fears.
Even if I got the collar off, the wyrm’s powers would be reduced to nothing. I’d be unable to use its brutal might to obliterate the Crowthers. To tremble the ground so violently that the Keep would crumble like a mountain, nor turn its insides into an oven and burn it, melt it, destroy it.
A distant part of me worried the collar would stop me from escaping. But there might be some kind of loop in the conditions that bound me to the estate. Maybe down here, deep below the Keep, Zrenyth’s magic would be void.
I desperately wished to cross the tunnel and keep running to freedom.
To climb to the surface on the other side and make a run for it. I’d run and run and run, and no one would find me.
On and on I walked through a layer of dust that proved no soul had passed here in ages while liquid darkness pooled around me, saturated with a sense of time that had no beginning and no end.
Surely I’d be close to the edge of the estate by now. And almost as soon as the thought crawled across my mind, the collar twitched.
A cold weight settled in my gut, but something bright flared beneath it.
There was no escape while the collar bound me here, but the twitch meant I’d reached the border. So close to stepping over the threshold, where beyond lay freedom.
How far would the escape tunnel go before it curved back up to the surface?
The collar snagged tightly around my neck.
I stumbled to a stop, stepping back until the pressure eased. With a hand trembling with exhilaration, I raised my flashlight. All I wanted to do was peer through the tunnel and see where it led, even if I couldn’t yet. Freedom was right there, right in front of me.
Hope spun through my bloodstream.
My torch slid through the darkness and then…
Struck a wall directly in front of me.
A solid wall.
The escape tunnel was blocked by a wall of dark stone that gave off the subtlest of shimmers and sent a shiver of dread down my spine.
I knew with certainty that this wall differed from Graysen’s tower with its wild magic.
There would be no trigger either, like the secret entrance at the library.
This was much like my father’s treasure trove, the tithe prison too, and I’d need a special key to get past it.
I realized now why Jett didn’t give a fuck if I found the tunnel, because there was no way through it.
Hope obliterated into fragments as a myriad of thoughts, all of them dark and twisted, rushed through my heart.
Here in the darkness, with only a feeble light staving off the black inkiness, a wail wrenched from my throat.
So much like the terrified cries of the small, frightened child I once had been.
I couldn’t get into the armory to find Zrenyth’s mites.
I couldn’t get this collar off my neck.
I couldn’t move past this wall.
There was no escape. Even beyond the rope, beyond the wall, there was something more sinister than everything combined—the Alverac.
A darker part of me, one I’d refused to acknowledge, rose in bleak waves and whispered that I’d always had a greater problem than Zrenyth’s collar.
The Alverac would bind me to Graysen’s will in two weeks’ time, and there was no freedom when that happened.
Desolation crashed upon me, and I did something I promised myself I never would.
I broke. Horribly. With violent, ugly tremors that rattled my bones. I heaved great, shuddering sobs of misery and wretchedness that split apart the eerie silence.
My knees cracked against stone as I crumpled, falling forward, my palm slapping the cold floor. The flashlight escaped my limp grip, growing dimmer as it rolled out of reach.
Salty tears of anguish flowed down my cheeks as darkness folded around me. Not to soothe but to mock and claim me.
You are nobody. And you are nothing—whispered the darkness.