Chapter Forty Inana
Chapter Forty
Inana
The pain is blinding. I’ve never felt anything like it, and I nearly lose consciousness.
Henry pulls out the blade, eyes widening at the wound he inflicted upon me.
He whirls around, muttering to himself, and my blurry eyes move from him to the edges of the room, where shadows are alive with movement.
I focus on that growing darkness, the Shades I attracted when I hummed against Henry’s palm. Maybe I can’t kill him. Maybe I can only wound him. But if this is my end, I will go out with violence. I will do whatever it takes to inflict as much pain as I can with my final breaths.
Henry turns back to me, knife raised, but I slash out with my needle again, opening a gash in his cheek before I stab him in the side of the throat.
I lose my grip on my frail weapon, which means I no longer have anything to cut through the ropes binding my other wrist. He staggers back, and the Shades writhe with interest, hunger.
His eyes lock on mine with a hateful glare.
Never could I have imagined the man I loved would look at me like this.
Never could I have imagined love would turn so ugly.
So deadly.
I meet his hatred with a wicked smile as the Shades grab hold of his heel, the one planted at the edge of the lantern light. He flails as they climb up the leg of his trousers, and his motions jostle the light dangling above.
That’s when I notice the Shade just off to the side. It isn’t hungry like the others. It’s quiet. Patient. Curious.
But as its hollow black eyes meet mine, something changes.
I’ve earned its intrigue. I clear my throat, choking on the sobs that try to escape my lips.
But instead of crying, I hum. Then I sing.
I don’t know what words I utter, but with them I convey my rage.
My thirst, as deadly as any Shade’s, is for vengeance. Death. Violence.
The Shade rises to its full height, a creature of gangly limbs and a blank, featureless face.
It approaches Henry with its shadowy fingers outstretched.
My eyes jump back to my former fiancé, who now claws at his neck where a wisp of shadow slithers into the wound I gave him.
Tears stream down his face, eyes bulging.
The Shade behind him steps closer.
Henry freezes, and a squelching sound reaches my ears. Blood dribbles out of his parted lips.
Then several things happen at once.
A sliver of shadow, like an elongated claw, slices overhead, cracking the ceiling beam and sending the lantern tumbling into a pile of straw, casting half the cell in darkness.
Another sliver leaps toward my remaining bound wrist. A minor slash of pain, and my wrist is free.
Henry collapses to his knees. Then falls face-first on the floor.
The Shade stands behind his body, a human heart clenched in its fist.
I gasp, slumping down the wall, just like I did then.
What the hell was that?
What…
the hell…
was that?
The Shade killed Henry. I could say it wasn’t my fault, but I remember now, the way I pleaded with my song. The way I wove rage into every note, every word, calling to the creature.
And the creature obeyed.
I catch my breath, staring at the bloodstained ground where Henry’s body fell. My legs beg me to run, to scramble off this moldy pile of straw and not remember a single moment more, but…
I can’t run.
I need to remember.
Slowly, I drag my eyes from the blood to where I recall the Shade standing, holding its gruesome prize.
“You…killed him,” I say, voice hollow. With both hands free, I press them to my abdomen. Hot blood seeps between my fingers and my vision goes blurry at the edges.
The Shade drops Henry’s heart to the floor and scampers closer. I try to sit up straighter, to stand, to run, but I can’t move.
What’s the point, anyway?
This wound…I won’t survive it. Not without a healer, and who the hell would take me—the duke’s disobedient sacrifice—to a surgeon? Especially once they see Henry dead before me. No, this can’t end well. It can only end.
I’m just glad I took him out on the way.
I flinch as the Shade crouches before me. Its spidery fingers extend toward my chest, and I expect it to reach inside my rib cage and pull out my heart next. I wait for the shock of pain to come…but it doesn’t.
The Shade presses its semitransparent palm over the cut across my breast, and I get the strangest sense of sorrow radiating from it.
“Are you showing me compassion right now?” I could laugh if I wasn’t in so much pain. Here I was taught to fear the Shades, yet the man I loved, one of the Sinless I was taught to admire, was the real monster.
The creature rifles through the straw. I blink, my eyelids growing heavier.
When I force my vision to focus, there’s a glint of silver between the Shade’s fingertips.
One of my sewing needles. It holds it toward me, and I shake my head.
“This isn’t a wound I can sew shut,” I say, but I wonder if it even notices my abdomen. Its attention seems fixed on my chest.
Something like frustration ripples through it, and in the next blink, I see my own face staring back at me. A perfect replica. A shadowed mirror.
Terror dawns, but it’s short-lived.
What does it matter whether I’m killed by a knife wound or an Incarnate?
Still, it’s uncanny to see my reflection made of shadow.
The Shade with my face flourishes the needle, then points to the matching wound on its chest. Just like I suspected, there’s nothing on its abdomen. It doesn’t understand that I’ve been stabbed.
It offers me the needle again, pointing from its chest to mine.
With a sigh, I accept the needle.
Its lips—my lips—pull into a satisfied smile, and it scampers back, mirroring my posture and sitting across from me.
It occurs to me now how intelligent this Shade seems to be. It knows what a sewing needle is and what it can do. And its replication of my face, my clothing, my body…
Something warm and sad and dreadful pools in my heart. “You’ve been watching me a long time, haven’t you? Are you the one I’ve always whispered stories to?”
It doesn’t respond, and I don’t expect it to. Shades can’t talk. They don’t have voices.
The creature gives me an encouraging nod, eyes lowering to my chest wound again.
Then it takes up Henry’s discarded heart, plucks my other needle from the bloody ground, and threads a strand of shadow through it.
My stomach lurches as it stabs the needle into the heart, pulling the thread through. Then again.
Again.
Again—
I’m pulled out of the memory with a lurch.
My body is racked with tremors as I reach inside my bodice and extract my patchwork heart.
I stare at the even stitches, the colorful array of fabrics. I constructed my hearts with so much passion, so much fervor, so much…familiarity. As if I’d done it before. As if a beating, pulsing patchwork heart was something I’d seen and felt, not just in the story I told at the Wretched Lair.
I remember—
“Stop,” I say, unable to handle another moment of the macabre tapestry the Shade is making of Henry’s heart. It’s now threaded with veins of shadow and sinew, a patchwork monstrosity.
The Shade halts its efforts, cocking its head to the side. Tendrils of shadowy hair fall over the face that looks just like mine. I sense agitation wafting from it, so I soften my voice.
“Try something else,” I say, choking on the last word. I can’t tell if my wound has stopped bleeding or if I’m merely losing feeling. All I know is this isn’t the last sight I want to see. I lift one hand, so heavy and weak, to my chest. “Try stitching that up first.”
The Shade looks from me to its own cut. It gives me a pointed look, as if to say, “You too.” The expression is so human, so real, I wonder if maybe I’m the replica.
I pretend to obey, bringing the needle to my chest and mimicking stitches.
Satisfied, the Shade copies me, but far more convincingly, threading shadows through the wound.
I don’t know how much time passes. I think I might close my eyes for a while.
When next I open them, the Shade beams at me, pointing at its imperfect line of stitches.
“Look at that,” I say, coughing. “You’ve created art. That’s all it takes, you know. Even mending something broken is art. Whatever you mend becomes new.”
I don’t know what I’m saying.
Where even am I?
The Shade crawls back over to me, grinning with my lips. It holds out a hand as if it wants me to take it. As if we might entwine our fingers and skip through town like sisters. What the hell does it want from me? Can’t it see I’m dying?
Yet beneath my irritation there’s tenderness too. This monster killed my enemy. It tried to help me, in its own twisted way.
I slump farther down the wall, feeling a strange numbness settling over me.
“Are you going to eat my body when I die? Turn Incarnate with my face?”
The creature lowers its hand, its shoulders slumping. Finally, its eyes dip down to my abdomen. Shadowed hands frame my face, and my own eyes stare back at me, filled with terror.
“Are you grieving for me?” I let out a bark of laughter, and I realize this still isn’t the last thing I want to see or feel. And I don’t want it to feel the way it feels now either. I don’t want my apathy or its sympathy.
I want fire and rage and victory.
The embers spark in my chest.
Infusing my final breath.
“Go ahead,” I say. “Eat my body. Just promise me one thing.”
A shadow tear trails down the Shade’s face.
“Kill the guards on your way out.”
The Shade presses its forehead to mine, its wrath rising to meet my own. And when I speak next, so does the creature.
Our voices are one.
“Get revenge.”
The memory ends there. I stare down at my patchwork heart, my vision overlaid with that gruesome shadow-stitched heart held in the Shade’s hands.
My hands.
The Shade’s hands.
What does this mean?
It can’t mean…
That I’m…
Footsteps sound on the floor, coming down the hall.
I don’t stiffen. I’m not even surprised. I knew it would be a matter of time before Dominic found me. I didn’t try to hide where I was going, for I only wanted a head start. I lift my eyes, my lower lip wobbling. “I was expecting you—”
My voice locks in my throat.
“Were you?” Henderson steps into the cell.