Chapter 41 Off-Key Lullabies
Off-Key Lullabies
Her knees weren’t quite reliable; Liv staggered drunkenly away from the hole with her head full of an endless ringing, echoing chord.
Gramma Poe had taken little Liv to the orchestra a few times, and if the great swell of tuning, instruments suddenly becoming part of a chorus instead of a babble of disparate voices was ever dropped into a bathtub full of champagne it might have felt like this.
A deep wash of incredible warm wellbeing she hadn’t felt even in childhood tingled in her arms and legs, filled her head, and made each swaying footstep a joy.
Still, she didn’t ever want to do that again.
Erik lay on his side, curled up like a snail. His fallen knives glittered sharply; there were shapeless mounds of scented ash clogging the doorway.
It was dead silent, and she could see him because the necklace was glowing.
So were her hands, gold-edged rainbow light like a living glove moving between her fingers, pooling in her palms, dappling her knuckles and casting strange underwater reflections against the ribbed walls and dome of this stupid, hellish vault.
She suspected the rest of her skin was glowing under her clothes, too, and dropped to her knees next to Erik with a jolt. “Hey.” Her voice sounded thin and piping after all that deep immensity. “Oh, God. Please don’t be dead.”
It was a ridiculous thing to say, but what else was there when you’d just been thrown in a deep hole, and somehow…
…what exactly the hell had happened? She couldn’t quite remember beyond a sudden burst of golden light and that deep, inescapable feeling that everything was going to be all right, as if Mom had come in her room again after a bad dream bringing warm milk and a soft voice, stroking little Livvie’s fevered forehead and singing a soft maternal off-key lullaby.
How do I know I’m not already dead? Well, it was simple—Liv was breathing, she was glowing like a light bulb at a drugged-out rave, and she still had to pee.
Badly.
“Hey.” She touched his shoulder with two fingers, then clutched at his shredded jacket. “Hey. Erik. Come on. Don’t…” Don’t be dead, she was going to repeat, but it wasn’t necessary.
His eyes snapped open, he inhaled so sharply the sound was like a cough, and he sat up so fast they almost cracked foreheads.
She sank back, her ass meeting the floor with a tooth-clicking thump, and thank God she didn’t piss herself right there, because his dark eyes were wide, haunted, and she had the odd feeling nobody was home behind them.
He stared at her, in fact, like she’d just shaken him out of the mother of all nightmares.