40. Seraphina
40
SERAPHINA
“CACOPHONY”
I blink, my gaze coming into focus and landing square on the smile spread across Maggie's face. I’m back in my apartment, my vision hyper focused on the grinning girl in front of me.
“Do you see now?”
“See what?” I whisper, the blood draining from my face as I look upon my best friend.
“Silly Nina. Do you really not understand?” Her lips push out in a deep pout, her cobalt eyes glimmering with mirth as she plops down next to me on our mustard couch.
“I—you—” I shake my head, blinking rapidly as if to clear the sight of Maggie from my vision. “How can you be dead? I live with you. I talk to you, I?—”
“But has anyone else seen me? Spoken to me?” She takes my hand in her palm. And it's so warm, so real, I’m sure someone is playing a horrible, horrible prank on me. “Come on, Nina. Think. ”
“I don’t want to!” I stand from the couch, pointing an accusatory finger her way. “You… you’re playing a trick. You’re alive. You have to be. What the fuck was the point of all this—all this suffering if you’re not?”
“Nina, relax?—”
“I can’t!” I press my palms to my eyes as my headache rages. When I pull my hands away, the room is swimming, tilting, dripping. Maggie’s eyes grow to the size of her head until she’s just one giant, singular eyeball, and I let loose another scream as I stumble backward, slamming into the coffee table and sending the lamp crashing to the floor. “Magoo… what’s happening to me?”
“You’re remembering.” She takes a tentative step toward me. “It’s okay, Nina. Let it happen.”
“No!” I shake my head violently as images swarm my mind—things I’ve buried so deep over the years, I didn’t know they could ever resurface.
I take a misplaced step back, and suddenly, I’m falling, careening toward the ground. There’s a loud smack as my head hits the floorboards, and everything goes black.
“Don’t fight, girl. Everything will be fine.”
I struggle wildly against the restraints on my ankles and wrists, a warm river of blood pouring down my arms. Two sets of hands hold down my left arm, smacking the inside of my elbow several times before inserting a needle deep into the vein. An animalistic snarl leaves my mouth as a man in a golden bird mask steps up to my head, beady black eyes staring down at me as I continue to fight.
“It will be easier if you don’t fight. This is the design.”
“Fuck you!” I hiss, closing my eyes as the walls begin to drip. “I’m going to kill you. I’ll kill you all!”
“Save that anger for someone who gives a damn, girl. ” The man reaches over to the table and grabs a large sheet filled with squares of happy yellow smiley faces. He folds the rectangle and folds it in half, repeating the motion until the massive sheet is folded into a bite-sized square. “Open up.”
The back of my head slams on the table with force as I try to avoid it, but eventually, the man pushes the paper past my lips and teeth. Immediately, the substance dissolves on my tongue, and though I want to spit it out, the bird-masked man holds his palm over my mouth and nose, making that an impossibility.
I stare at him with murder in my gaze, every muscle in my body quaking with the need to wrap my hands around his fat neck and squeeze, squeeze, s q
u
e
e
z
e.
I shake my head, staring hard at the walls that seem like they’re… dripping?
The man in the bird mask starts laughing. Although, the longer I listen, the more I realize it’s not laughter at all.
It’s screaming.
And it’s coming from me.
I try to close my eyes against the barrage of color that swarms my vision, blaring, pushing, scraping against my skull, begging to be let in. It bounces off every dead and living thing, taking root in the masked man and imbuing him with a disgusting, puke-green aura.
My eyes are dry. So dry. So very, very dry. Yet I can’t take them off that light. Light that I could reach out and touch. Taste.
I stick my tongue out to test my theory, and the cackling grows louder. And this time, it is laughter that fills the space, and it makes me sick.
S o
s
I
c
k
.
I pitch to the side as my stomach flips, emptying the meager contents onto the floor as the drugs hammer my nervous system. Am I dying? Is this what dying feels like?
I try to stand, only to fall sideways onto the floor as the room flips sideways. My movements are sluggish and dreamlike, and when I pull my hand up to my face, I’m surprised to find it glowing. I twist it in the air, marveling how the moonlight dances off my skin in a gorgeous iridescence of color.
I am made of light. It’s seeping from me, pouring out of my skin.
I have no doubt it’s due to the drugs, but I’m so enamored with the sight, I don’t even notice the bird-masked man hauling me from the ground by my armpits. Nor do I notice him placing me in the small black chamber filled with water. I don’t even notice when he slams the lid closed, bathing me in pitch black.
It takes me a while to notice I’m weightlessly floating in the water. When I do, every nerve in my body twinges, begging me to get out of this contraption. To be free of my mind.
I press my hand to the ceiling, and cool metal greets my palm, sending me into a downward spiral as the material refuses to budge.
Oh God. I’m trapped. Trapped in here. Trapped in my mind.
My breathing picks up pace until I’m about to pass out, which only spreads gasoline onto the wildfire that is my anxiety when I realize if I do, I’ll drown in this cursed chamber.
“ No. ” I bang my fist bloody against the ceiling as I refuse to believe what I know to be true. “ No. No. No!”
The walls start to close in the more my breath picks up, the metal sliding, crunching, crushing my body closer together with every blink. It presses into my skin, into my bones—squeezing, squishing, twisting my organs into raisins.
My ribs pierce my insides, bleeding me from the inside out as my skull is crushed to a pulp, my brains spread out with the rest of me—a treat for the vultures circling above.
Only, when I blink, it’s not a vulture circling—it’s a crow. And it opens that terrible toothed beak and inches closer, whispering darkness into the air.
“ Worms, ” it whispers. “ Tasty, juicy worms. Ripe for the picking. ”
“No, please!” I try and fail to raise an arm to shield the most delicate part of myself. “Please don’t.”
“ Please, please, please,” it croaks in a voice that doesn't belong to it. “Please. I’ll do anything. I’ll do ? —”
“Seraphina!”
I blink up at Maggie, trying and failing to raise a hand to place on her soft cheek. Somewhere in the distance, a voice is calling to me—urging me to wake from something I don’t understand.
The air around me shudders, going in and out of focus as I stare into the baby blues of my best friend's eyes. Eyes I don’t want to lose. Eyes I don’t want to forget now that she’s?—
She’s dead.
“Hold on, ma’am! Just hold on. I’m going to get you help!”
I groan, trying to open my eyes and finding they’re crusted together. My throat is dry—so, so dry. But my lips are sewn together, and I can’t se e m t o
O p en
M
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Blinding light flares under my closed lids, forcing me to open my eyes. A man bathed in a beautiful dark aura kneels over me, his beautiful face twisted in a way it shouldn’t be.
Not natural. Not the design.
I reach out as the world spins around me, blinding me with color and taste and smell and touch and?—
“Someone restrain her!”
The ground beneath my feet fractures as I fall to my knees, a great scream leaving my chest, shredding my throat on its way to the heavens above. I can’t open my eyes, yet I can’t look away. Can't look away from Maggie—my dear, sweet Magoo.
What have they done to you? I wail, my hands reaching toward her broken, lifeless body. Bruises pepper her porcelain skin like constellations, her arms and legs twisted in unnatural angles, the bones protruding from several places along her extremities. Her skull has been smashed like a melon—her beautiful brains spread out along the clearing for the crows to feast upon. And feast upon her they do.
“ Worms,” they whisper. “ Tasty, juicy worms. Ripe for the picking.”
“ Please!” My eyes are wild as I clutch at the pant legs of the Reaper standing to my left. “Please don’t! I’ll do anything! I’ll do—I’ll do anything you want—just make it stop!
“Please, please, please,” Madam cackles, the sound far too much like the crows crowding Maggie's dead body. “Please. I’ll do anything! What the fuck would you do, girl? She’s gone. Dead, like I told you she’d be. You shouldn’t have messed with the design, Seraphina. This is what happens when you do.”
“ Why? ” I rake my fingernails down my face as the crows pick at my best friend. “ Why? ”
Madam sneers, gripping me by the back of my hair and dragging me across the ground, kicking and screaming. She dumps me next to Maggie’s body, and the crows scatter as my heartbroken sobs fill the clearing.
“Get yourself together!” she barks, kicking me in the ribs in a fit of rage. “You are the next Madam! This behavior is unacceptable!”
She yanks me by my hair and shoves my face within inches of Maggie's bashed face, and another sob of agony tears from my mouth as I gaze upon those dull, cobalt eyes that once held so much warmth. So much life.
“Please,” I whisper. “Please, please, please. I’ll do—I’ll do anything,” I bargain with the gods above. Hoping this time they will listen. Will give a damn.
But they don’t.
They never do.
I blink up at a pair of chocolate-brown eyes, deeply set in a face I barely recognize. My neighbor’s mouth is moving, but I can’t understand a word of it. At least, no more than the phrase “ambulance is on the way.”
No. No, they can’t find me. I have to get out of here.
Struggling to a stand, I close my eyes against the dripping walls and stumble in the general direction of the front door. The woman calls out something behind me, but I’m too far underwater to understand. Too tired to give a damn.
I make it halfway down the steps when my legs collapse. I tumble down the rest of the stairs, numb to the pain as my vision shudders and fractures like a kaleidoscope.
The back of my head smacks against the concrete. My limbs are heavy—so, so heavy—and though I try to raise them, I don’t have the strength. Not now. Not anymore.
I blink up at the gray sky, wishing for something—anything—to take away the storm brewing in my mind. But it’s too little, too late.
And I fall back into the dark.
“Congratulations, Seraphina.”
There are ants in my head, and they won't get out—ants in my head and under my skin. The moon is too bright and too hot and too salty on my tongue. The beauty of it burns my retinas, and I want so badly to blink, but I’m frozen in time. Frozen to this singular moment stretched between somewhere and nowhere.
“You are the last one surviving.”
My body twitches, something deep in my subconscious remembering—but then the memory fractures, falls away like shards of glass—and I forget.
The drugs did something terrible to me. Something irreversible.
Something unforgivable.
I raise my head, finding Calathea, the Madam, dressed in her full regalia, her gold Venetian mask obscuring the hateful features beneath. I blink, and a deep purple haze blossoms around her, filling the room with her noxious stink. Her aura flutters between mud brown and purple as she gazes at my crouched form, and by the way she jerks back, I know she realizes what she’s done to me. Finally, she understands the monster she created.
“Rise, Seraphina,” she commands, taking a tentative step back as I do just that. “Rise and take your place at my side as the next Madam of the Sanctum.”
I glance over her shoulder, the ringing in my ears subsiding just enough to let in the high-pitched yowling filling the space. A small gray cage sat atop Calathea’s red oak desk, perfectly unassuming save for the fuzzy white paw stretching through the slots in the bars.
“Ah. You wish to see your children.”
I clutch the scar on my abdomen, a shot of pain running straight through my marrow as I’m reminded of what the Sanctum took from me, what they stole from me.
“I cannot have children.” My voice is low and robotic. “As the Sanctum ordained.”
“Perhaps not biological children, but now that you are chosen to be the next Madam, you are allowed certain… privileges you were not before.” She motions to her side, where her twin tigers, Nix and Niege, sit dutifully. “I remember when I was given my tigers… I’m quite certain I felt just as you do now. Angry. Confused. Unwilling to accept the path that lay before me.”
She looks up, and for once, the look in her eyes is pure anguish. “It was all taken from me, too, you know.”
Calathea shakes her head violently, and when she looks at me again, that piece of humanity is gone, replaced with her usual cool malice. “No matter. You will accept your place. You will raise these tigers as your children, as your ultimate protectors. When the time comes, you will replace me and train other young girls to replace yourself one day. You will take this all in stride without complaint or refusal. And when your time comes, you will die.” Calathea takes a step forward, gripping my chin in her ice-cold fingers. “Is that clear, Seraphina? ”
I don’t respond. I can’t—I’m frozen. Rooted to the spot by my anger. My hatred.
“Seraphina?” she asks, her grip tightening painfully along my jaw. “I asked you a question.”
Suddenly, she rears back, her eyes widening in alarm at whatever she sees in mine. “Seraphina?”