Chapter XXX
XXX
In the darkest moment of human experience comes an opportunity. No one knows how a hand extends from the darkness and who gets the pleasure of the choice. But every once in a while a human finds it within himself to become something greater.
She fell.
And fell.
And fell.
As if falling in a dream.
Her body had no weight, nothing holding it together. But it was heavy and tumbled over itself as she sank.
She never jerked awake. Never felt plush comfort beneath her and the relief that this had all been a fantasy.
This time. It was not a dream.
It was real, and she was falling.
Falling and falling.
Deeper into herself.
Into a well in the unexplored caverns of her mind.
The space around her thickened as she fell.
Gray and thick, like smoke pouring from a late-summer fire.
She choked for breath, only for the vapor to fill her lungs.
Cold.
Shards of ice froze the blood in her veins.
An unintelligible wailing rent the air.
Screaming on all sides of her, overwhelming, the wails of the dead and the dying. The air itself cried at her for relief.
All around her, screaming.
Formless shapes swirled alongside her. Were they others like her, she wondered, falling through the nothingness?
She did not remember how she got here.
She did not remember anything.
Her descent slowed as the substance around her grew thicker. She gulped for air, but none came.
She hit the ground.
No different from the air around her, but it must have been the ground, because she stopped falling.
She lay gasping on the floor, in a desperate hunt for air she couldn’t find.
Black spots clouded her vision as she suffocated.
How many times was she going to die today?
Her arms and legs grew heavy against the ground, as if she were bound. She struggled to pull away from the gray mass, but her efforts were as futile as a fly’s, stuck in a web.
She fought and fought and fought and managed to squirm onto her stomach. She flattened her palms on the ground and pushed it away.
Her arms shook as she heaved herself up, and the atmosphere pushed down upon her like an open hand—pushing her back to rest, forcing her against the formless floor.
She wrenched herself up until she found herself staring down at a pair of hands.
She recognized those hands.
Those were her hands.
There was a sickle scar on the index finger of her left hand.
She remembered getting it.
She cut herself by accident while helping make dinner. So little she’d pulled a polka-dotted stepstool from beneath the kitchen sink. She stood barefoot on the flimsy thing and cut vegetables. She was seven. Eight?
Meredith had been there.
Meredith.
Her mom.
She could picture her. Honey-haired and full of energy. Mom had soft hands, which her own resembled more with every passing year, and she would grab her face with a palm on each cheek to plant kisses on her forehead.
Oh, how she loved her mom. Mom was the sun, and she the helpless planet caught in her orbit. She would have danced circles around her her whole life.
Mom had a big toothy grin across her face. When Mom smiled hard—and she always did—you could see her gums at the top real easy.
But Mom’s smile faltered when Vic cut herself. One fast slice and blood. She’d cut deep. Mom ran across the kitchen and pressed a towel into the cut to stop the bleeding. Mom held it, hard, saying I’m sorry darling over and over.
She remembered crying. Not hers, she didn’t think. These were someone else’s sobs.
It was Henry crying.
Henry.
He was little then, too. Even smaller than she was, in a high chair on the other side of the kitchen. Kicking little tyrant feet and screaming.
He cried when he saw the blood, or maybe his sister’s reaction to it. She was scared and in pain and it frightened him.
She realized that she didn’t want to scare him. She had to act brave so Henry wouldn’t be scared. She was learning then, little as she was, how to behave.
When she got scared, Henry got scared.
She had to stop.
She couldn’t be scared, and she couldn’t be in pain. She needed to make Henry stop crying. She could handle a little cut like this, couldn’t she?
“Wic!” he called, because he couldn’t wrap his tongue around the vee sound yet.
“Wic!” he wailed from his plastic throne.
Because that was her name, Vic, and he couldn’t stand to see her hurt.
He screamed loud and shrill until she went to him and wrapped her uninjured hand around his pudgy baby one and smiled.
“It’s okay, Henry. See?” Vic held up her towel-wrapped hand. “I’m okay.”
He smiled a gap-toothed grin at her, and she was okay. That time, she was.
But Vic wasn’t so sure anymore, as the past came back to her, that she would ever be okay again. And the more she remembered, the more certain she became. The castle. Leaving. The monster in the woods. Blood in the snow. Her blood.
It was all over. It was done. She tried to protect Henry, and she failed. She lost it all to the thing in the forest, to the Order, to the Brotherhood, to a world she didn’t understand.
Despair as thick as smoke clogged her throat.
How dare they take that from her?
Henry and her life and everything that made her unique. Everything irreplaceable, unrepeatable, about the life she’d lived.
How dare they?
It was hers.
They couldn’t have it.
Rage choked her.
Vic threw her hands against the floor. Again, again she pummeled it, until she realized that it was not solid. It was the same vapor that was filling her lungs, woven into a tight structure.
She started pulling at it. Grabbing handfuls of strings and tearing them out, as if she could dig herself free of this cage if she gathered enough of it in her hands.
She tore bits and pieces apart and cast them aside as they came undone in her palms. A threadbare blanket of ash fell in front of her.
She pushed her body through the hole she’d torn.
Inside it was darker, like the strings pulled tighter around one another. She was going deeper, not climbing out.
She pushed forward into complete darkness.
Her mouth opened on a breathless gasp.
Someone was here with her.
She felt the presence before she saw it.
The outline of a person sat in the darkness, their edges visible only because they were made of a different material than the wispy smoke surrounding them. Darker, solid. Another bug caught in the web.
When Vic pulled back in surprise, so did they. Vic watched, waiting for the stranger to do something, to move, to attack. They did nothing but sit still, waiting for her, in turn, to do the same. When she leaned forward, the other person leaned in toward her.
And they were eye to eye, inches from each other in the gloom.
A pair of red-rimmed irises stared back at her through the darkness.
Two points of light, the color of blood but twice as angry, trained on Vic’s face.
She screamed. But there was no air to make a sound.
The thing moved backward from her as the shape of its face lengthened on the bottom, its mouth falling open like it, too, was screaming. Its horror a mirror to hers.
Vic heard nothing, only watched the thing as it watched her, screaming in the dark.