Chapter 31
Might you stay a while in this dream?
For reality is the torment.
~Alyssa Jons
My heart was racing with such ferocity, I thought it might rip through my chest and leave my body gouged and twitching on the ground.
My muscles were like sacks of stone. As I sat there in the dirt, things started to blur together.
The colors. The sounds. I held my breath, staring down at the soil.
Slowly, I reached toward it, letting my fingers gently press into the soft ground until I could feel the grit against my skin.
“This is real,” I muttered to myself, closing my hand into a fist to gather up the earth.
I lifted it, opening my fingers to watch it sift through the spaces.
I did it again and again, waiting for it all to disappear, but it didn’t.
Then, the sounds began to separate. The whisper of the wind and the hushed drag of water sliding over stone.
The crackling of campfires along the clearing.
My pulse thrumming in my ears. I gradually panned my gaze from the soil to the trees and then to the cage standing in the shadows where Lyla was trapped behind bars.
Yes. She was in a cage. I remembered.
She stared back at me, no discernable emotion in her eyes.
She looked… different. Her voice rang in my head, speaking of suffering and pain and all the ways Akareth would force my submission.
All the ways he’d forced hers. Her eyes seemed less like holes and more like mirrors now and it made my stomach turn, but I had nothing else to expel.
Akareth’s touch lingered inside me, in places I did not think a person could be touched.
I shivered at the fuzzy memories when someone stepped between us, blocking my view of her.
I blinked, coming out of a trance, when I saw Vidar crouching down in front of me.
His eyes were not black. They were brown. The color of tea or earth.
I stared at him, waiting for the shadows to blanket him in darkness.
For the screams to start. For the pain to begin.
Instead, he just looked back at me as if waiting for something.
I strained to take a breath and found his familiar scent surrounding me.
Leather, rum, and oak. Rain. Salt. I’d never smelled him so vividly and gods did it feel good to fill my lungs with him.
I slowly raised my hand toward his face, letting my fingers brush the short hair on his jawline.
“You’re real,” I whispered.
He lifted his hand, cupping it over the top of mine and pressing it to his warm cheek.
“I’m here,” he said. “I’m real.”
His body shifted toward me and as if a metal rod was between us, I leaned backward.
Vidar ceased immediately, drawing back like I’d slapped his hands away.
Nausea gripped my stomach again, a sickness toward myself.
I was so filthy. Infected. Twisted up. I couldn’t even accept the touch of the man who’d been my savior.
Or perhaps it wasn’t him at all and just another trick.
Perhaps the illusions were simply getting more real.
I furrowed my brows, trying to put the pieces together in a way I could understand.
Echoes of my dreams—my nightmares—were like polished shards in my head, unclear but still haunting me every time one of them caught the light just right.
The disgust and fear were making me want to peel off my own skin and die.
“Dahlia…”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m sorry, Vidar. I didn’t mean to.”
“Don’t apologize to me.” I looked up at him, my pain reflected back at me through his eyes. The eyes I knew. “Don’t ever apologize to me, love.”
His voice. It was his voice, clear and unique to him. Deep with a slight, casual rasp to it. It could not be replicated.
“He couldn’t do it,” I said, my voice trembling.
“What?”
“He could not copy your voice. It’s why you never spoke. I understand now, I think.”
Vidar shook his head, not comprehending, but I didn’t need him to.
He carefully reached for me again, opening his hand to invite me to him.
I slowly rocked forward, curling against his warm body.
Instantly, his arms were around me, pulling me into his lap.
I pressed my head to his shoulder, staring out into the trees where darkness stretched on forever save for the half-moon hovering in the sky.
I didn’t want to close my eyes. I didn’t even want to blink for fear of falling into a pit I could not get out of again.
I gripped Vidar hard, holding on like I would fall otherwise, and he held me just as tight, his body the armor I’d lost when I slept.
My own armor was something Akareth could so easily penetrate, I realized.
Tears stung my eyes, blurring the night, but I kept them open, forcing the burn away. I could endure that mild discomfort if it meant I did not slip into that unfathomable abyss again.
I sat in front of one of the campfires, a thin blanket wrapped around me as the flames danced weakly on blackened logs.
Vidar held me for far too long. I’d never needed to be cradled like a weak little babe and the shame only added to the thousands of other disappointments.
The biggest disappointment was that I was weak.
I did need him to hold me because I felt like my flesh had been torn away and all my soft insides were spilling out to be devoured.
I’d been taken apart and left for the sharks and Vidar’s embrace gave me the time I needed to gather all of me back up and sew up the wound.
It felt sloppy, but it would have to do.
Meridan sat beside me, keeping a bit of distance, but I could tell by her constant side glances that she was being tortured by her inability to fix whatever had been done.
Vidar was a victim of the same torment, but I did not know how to soothe that agony for either of them.
Everyone else on the beach seemed eager to avoid me and, be it out of fear or uncertainty, they gave me space.
I preferred it that way. Though the dreams were slowly fading into whatever back room most dreams locked themselves in when we woke, I could still hear the dying cries of everyone I cared about.
I could still smell their blood and see their body parts strewn across the ground.
The world was dark, but the detail of their deaths was vivid.
Their pain and mine became indiscernible at times.
When Vidar appeared, a plate with some kind of shredded meat and toast stacked on top of it in one hand, the scent of food sent my stomach into a freefall. Meridan reached out to take it, but the moment either of them turned to speak with me, my body unfolded from the log I was sitting on.
Damn my legs. They acted before I could think and now I looked ungrateful and distant.
I didn’t want to be distant. Just one glance at Vidar or Meridan or any of the crew from the Weaver made me feel sick.
I could see their bones shattering and their flesh being torn from their bodies.
I could see them falling into the abyss, reaching up and crying my name.
“Dahlia,” Meridan said, her voice soft and tragic.
“You should eat,” Vidar said.
He spoke like he was speaking to a child. Did I really look so fragile? Of course I did. I cowered from every touch. I cowered from food.
“Of course,” I said, sitting back down.
As I picked at the meal, the camp fell silent.
The first taste of what was salted pork went through me like a dash of rain on a parched flower.
I chewed slowly, my eyes wandering across the clearing to Boil sitting next to what was obviously the designated cooking station, divvying out plates for others.
The badly scarred man had never shied from me, even when I first came aboard Vidar’s ship.
He met my eyes and although nothing was said, I knew he could hear my thanks.
He inclined his head politely and then continued cooking, the quickly growing Billy next to him adding wood to the cook fire.
I ate another small bite, staring down at the dirt by my feet. I hated that I could feel eyes on me. Eyes of people who wanted to ask what was wrong. Why I wasn’t talking to anyone. How I was feeling.
I could scarcely answer any of those questions. As the dreams faded, the emotions they left behind became more and more confusing. Displaced. Muddled.
“How?” I asked.
“How what?” Vidar asked.
I glanced up at him, but I could not look for long. “How did you wake me?”
He swallowed, standing over the fire. He had a twig in his hand and as he picked at it, he tossed little bits into the flames.
“I killed you,” he said, looking at the fire instead of me.
“Aleksi brought you back,” Meridan added. “I don’t know how.”
“Some medical trick,” Vidar said.
“You killed me?”
Vidar lifted his gaze to me, his eyes apologizing while his words said something different.
“You said once that the only way to break this bond between us is for one of us to die. It stood to reason that it was the same with Akareth. I had no other choice, Dahl. I—”
“No,” I said. “I…” Pausing, I shrugged the blanket off my shoulders and swallowed whatever was left of the meat in my mouth. “I can only hope I would have been strong enough to do it if I were in your position.”
I watched as Vidar and Meridan exchanged a sorry-filled glance.
“I…” Meridan said. “I tried to stop him.”
A breath of silence passed around the fire until I reached out, placing my hand over the top of hers.
She was fiercely picking at her nails until I stopped her.
On contact, I remembered how cold her skin was.
It was aways that way. Warmth did not grace her blood like it did most. I had grown so used to it, but while I slept and weeks passed in a nightmare that stole all sense of reality from my thoughts, the feel of her skin was almost foreign to me.