THIRTY-NINE #2
Lost in the kind of helpless freefall that emptied her lungs and turned her legs into water. She gripped Father Michael’s hand hard enough to feel the bones of her own fingers and tried to scream, but there was no air to put behind it.
And then she was standing.
Underground.
In an amphitheater that grew around her like a closing fist. Stone benches were carved in tiers.
A ceiling of raw, cavern-like obsidian rock pressed down with the weight of everything above it.
There was no visible light source, yet she could see everything with horrible clarity.
The walls pressed in, laced with an oily air that eerily spread across every inch of her skin.
And the smell.
She gagged before she could stop herself. Sulfur and brimstone along with an older, sweetly putrid aroma beneath it. She knew that smell.
Evil.
It was the smell of a hundred Black Cloaks concentrated into black stone, bleeding into the air and putrefying the deep shadows that surrounded them. It hit the back of her throat and made her eyes water. She pressed her free hand over her mouth and breathed in short, shallow pulls.
Just a dream. It’s just a dream. Just a dream.
“Breathe.” Father Michael’s voice was quiet beside her. “Hold the medallion if you need to. Focus on it. Use it to center you, so you can breathe.”
She clutched the medallion. The metal warming under her fingers somehow helped take away the edge of her terror, making it manageable enough for her to stand straighter. But even then…
“Don’t black out,” Father Michael warned her.
Oh, she wanted to. “Is this…”
“The part where you always black out and then wake up screaming and never remember? Yes. But in this dreamscape, it is time for you to remember.”
She didn’t want to. She wanted to be back in bed, or beside Zarek, or back in her bookshop repairing books while bantering with Aunt Claudine over what was magic and what was real.
When none of this was real.
Yet it was in startling, pristine clarity that made it oh-so-terrifyingly real. Her heart hammered as her pulse rushed blood through to her brain that stars started encroaching along the edge of her peripheral vision.
She was going to pass out.
“Don’t panic, little one,” said Father Michael as he squeezed her hand. “Don’t let it take you. Face it. Look at what frightens you.”
She didn’t want to.
But she made herself look.
Only for it to get worse…
The stone benches were filling with Black Cloaks.
They emerged from the dark edges of the amphitheater as if shaped from shadows, faceless and red-eyed, moving with that unhurried fluidity that was so inhumanly wrong.
She recognized those same movements, the over-long limbs from that first night in the alley right before she’d met Zarek.
The chilling sensation of those icy fingers wrapped around her throat like the memory of that first Black Cloak lifting her by the neck. She grasped the medallion tighter, desperate not to run. It’s just a dream. Just a dream.
“Good. Breathe, Angela,” urged Father Michael.
She nodded, not because he was right, but because she couldn’t speak and was doing everything she could to stop blacking out from the lack of oxygen and that putrid smell, along with claustrophobia and the Black Cloaks.
There were so many of them, and they all turned to face her.
She stepped back across the highly polished obsidian floor that reflected her frightened expression as she searched for an escape.
“What’s this? An uninvited something-something who dared to come into my realm? Now isn’t that something.” The voice came from above and below, in the kind of sound designed to creep under her skin and make her tremble all over.
And yet, her feet moved without instruction, making her turn to face the source of all evil.
Katarra.
It had to be him. She just knew it. All those stories, the warnings of this creature coming after her, forcing her from her home, to face the man who controlled the Black Cloaks. Of course, it made sense that he’d be her nightmare.
It didn’t dampen the terror that turned her legs into cement, stopping any chances of her ability to run.
“You can do this Angela, breathe.” Father Michael’s presence, his hand holding hers, was the only reason she didn’t run. It was enough for her to finally face what she wanted to forget.
Standing at the center of the amphitheater, Katarra’s height bent the rules of biology.
His hooded cloak was a deep crimson, the color of the underworld, which looked like dark blood against the obsidian stone that made up the cavern.
The cloak’s fabric moved like liquid, his hood drawn low to reveal a pair of burning red orbs for eyes—glaring directly at her.
What’s worse? The part that squeezed her ribs and stopped the air in her throat, making her wake every night with a scream trapped in her throat, where her mind refused to let her remember this part…
Was that he didn’t look surprised.
“Well, like a wraith you’ve come to visit me again. How long before you scream? Cry? Faint? Or flee?” Katarra taunted her as he walked around her once, twice, three times, while twisting the obsidian ring on his bony finger.
Then Katarra stopped and tilted his head, showing an impossible depth to the darkness under the hood, except for those red eyes that bored into her, as he leaned closer, suffocating her with the stench of rotten meat and death.
“Finally, you can see me, too. And now I know the something-something you are. Angela Duboise.”
The panic hit hard, realizing she was all alone with no idea how to get away from him. Her lungs finally filled as her hand locked around the medallion, and she screamed.