The Kiss That Saved Me (The Tidal Kiss Trilogy Book 2) (37 page)

I am sure now that I’ve been played for a fool. Not surprising really when you think about it. You don’t make a deal with the devil if you want to get out unscathed.

I get up, flexing my tail in one powerful motion, propelling myself toward the still moving rock as the last speck of light vanishes from the basement level cavern. I hit the rock hard with my fist but it doesn’t budge. I hear murmuring from outside as I push my ear to the stone.
 

“Let me out!!!” I scream, the walls closing in on me, leaving an echo of my claustrophobic plea resonating between the walls of my skull. I pound on the boulder once more, trying to shift it. Nothing. Not even a smidgeon of give.
 

I wonder what I’m doing down here. Is this just a containment cell, are they keeping me for something worse? Torture perhaps? I cringe, wondering how well I’d hold up. Goose pimples rise in a wave across my flesh, travelling up my arms and down my spine as my senses heighten and my eyes adjust to the dark.
 

I turn away from the boulder, knowing there is no way I can shift it without some serious mystical help. I face the cavern, which is filled with old vents that don’t seem active any longer, exhaling heavily.
 

I’m trapped. Or at least, it seems. I swim through the dark water, feeling my way along the wall, looking for weaknesses.
 

That’s when it happens.

A shudder in the earth causes the cavern to shake and the water to vibrate in simultaneous motion. I find myself looking at the stalactite encrusted ceiling, fearing a cave in at the jerking, rumbling, grinding of crust beneath. I cling to the wall edge, my heart pounding.
 

That’s when I notice that something has escaped the vent. Like squid ink, a black plume of something has been released from each vent of the deep earth.
 

I inch forward slowly, fearing what it may be. As I get within touching distance, the black cloud takes on a life of its own, collecting in a dense stream and climbing up into my nostrils.
 

I blink a few times, my head feeling like someone’s shoved a balloon inside and is slowly inflating it. I clutch my temples, feeling my eyes burn with the pain. I lose the will to keep myself suspended in the water surrounding me as the smell of burning takes over and I fall to the cavern floor.
 

A shifting, burning, bloody mass is stirring in the dark. All shadow and night. I feel it infecting me with its ancient tongue. The taste of ash fills my mouth, the scent of death in my nostrils; it calls to me. Whispering words in shadow, forming ancient symbols on the back of my eyelids. The earth shifts, deep down in its molten core.
 

Something is coming for me. Something is ascending. Now.
 

I know it, but at the same time I cannot know it, do not want to know it. For it is what will kill us all.
 

I have been in this place before, but only in my dreams and only once. On the ocean floor, the night I had fled the city. When Titus had first taken grip of my senses.

“Girlllll,” it roars, deafening me. No longer a whisper but a shout.

“Why are you doing this?!” I scream at the beast, as it emerges through black clouds of smoke.
 

I do not question how there is black smoke underwater, for I know this isn’t a vision of the world I’ve just come from. This is a window into a prison cell. A kaleidoscopic, blood stained pane into something old and forgotten.

“Need… blood,” the monster snarls, wanton and hungry.

“I don’t understand!” I wail, clutching my hands to my head.

“Need, blood, need pure... blood.”

“Please, let me be!” I scream again, covering my ears, trying to keep out the blood curdling essence of fear. It clutches at me, causing my senses to run away in an evasive riot.

“Girrrrlll…listen!” The beast roars again and even though my ears are covered, the voice echoes inside my skull. There is no escape.
 

“Okay… Okay…” I beg, breathing deep and feeling myself wretch at the scent of rot and decay surrounding the Necrimad. It’s dark so I can’t make out any detail, just a great black mass, full of unrest, with two luminescent yellow eyes, like those of a cat.

“Need blood… Pure blood…” The beast repeats its request. My heart is in my mouth, pounding, racing, terrified.

“Blood? But why?” I ask it, suddenly finding my curiosity.

“To rise…” The two words are clear as crystal.
 

I know now what all this has been about. Solustus wants to raise the Necrimad using my scythe, to finish what Titus started. But how?

“Pure…” I utter the word like I’ve never heard it before, trying to clear my mind and ignoring the fact I’m in a trance like state, away from my body, the world I know. The only way is to listen and listen well. “What do you mean pure?” I ask the question and the Necrimad stirs, seemingly affronted by my forwardness.

“Untouched…” it says the word and I feel myself repulsed… does it mean what I think it means?
 

“I don’t understand,” I reply. The fog rolls forward and a blast of scalding hot air blows me backward, taking my breath from me. The beast banishes me back to my body with only one sentence in reply.

“You are not supposed to, dark one.”

AZURE

I’m meditating, trying to beat back the darkness within after losing my temper with Orion. My brother sure does know how to make some stupid decisions for someone entrusted with a whole Kingdom, I know I wouldn’t like that kind of responsibility in my hands, but even if I had it, I wouldn’t be making the mess of it he is. It’s almost like Callie took the last of his common sense with her.
 

As I sit on the sand, tail tucked beneath me, I shut my eyes, the Occulta Mirum becoming lost, insignificant, behind the black of my eyelids. It is time to focus. Time to find my centre.

I think back to where this had all started, being brave enough perhaps for the first time to think about the past. The visions hadn’t always been a part of me. They’d crept in for both me and Starlet after the death of our father. We’d always had a sort of foresight, but nothing compared with the clarity brought on by the visions from the Goddess. I was marked, always destined for this life, even when I was a human.

 
Starlet and I were terrified when the visions first started, nothing made sense and nothing would make sense again until our human lives ended. It was torture. Seeing things, things you didn’t understand, that terrified you. Images of your father, your brother, as strange new creatures beyond anything your tiny, sheltered mind could imagine, took their toll.
 

I think back to Arabella, something I don’t allow myself to do very often, letting myself be lost to the only memory I have of her.
 

“Push!! Push!!” The dark sweaty forehead of the midwife pops up from in-between my trembling, blood stained legs. Why the hell is she sweating? Aren’t I the one doing the hard work? My white woven undergarment is stuck to me, damp and cold against my bulging, hard, lump of a stomach. The pain is too much. I can’t do it anymore. Everything is just too excruciating and I am exhausted, it has been days since the pains started and my baby is still nowhere to be found. Maybe she’ll never be here.
 

The weather outside is stormy, the roof of the medicine woman’s hut shaking with the force of the coastal wind. I prop myself up on my elbows.

“I can’t….” I sob, screaming as another contraction hits. I feel myself weaken under its hold, crushing the life out of me.

“You don’t have a choice. Do you want your baby to die?” The medicine woman looks up at me with dark eyes, no sympathy, just a cold, hard dose of reality.
 

I feel tears running down my cheeks. Is it supposed to hurt this much? Take this long? I think back to the vision, to the image of me covered in blood and dying at the birth of my own child. It terrified me, scared me enough into telling Ethan, but he had simply shaken his head and walked away, saying that he didn’t care for women’s troubles. I want so much to hear my mother’s voice now. Telling me it will be okay, that it would be over soon, but she is dead, lost to me forever. I feel the next contraction coming and suddenly I don’t have time to wish for anything. The pain is too immense. I scream out, bearing down and pushing with every fibre of my being, praying that my last ounce of strength is enough to birth the baby I have come to love so much and yet have never met. I lay back, feeling a rush of wet and a scream of innocence so pure my heart swells, ready to burst with the need to hold my child. My baby is here.
 

A rush of cold enters the room, the burlap fabric that hangs over the doorway being brushed aside by my husband, coming forward to see his bounty. I lay there, my heartbeat weakening.
 

“The child… is it?” I hear him ask the medicine woman.
 

“A girl…” the woman replies. I have never met her before; I don’t even know her name. Ethan had brought me here when the pains hadn’t yielded a baby after two days, not sure of what to do with me as I sat, begging with him, telling him that I knew I was to die.

“Arabella,” I whisper, sitting up and moving, using the last of my energy to try and catch a glimpse of my daughter. I had known all along that she would be a little girl, the images in my head had told me that much. I had kept that knowledge to myself. I had attempted to tell Ethan about my visions once I had found out I was pregnant; I had all but given up trying to convince him. He takes my baby into his arms holding her, but there is no smile on his face. Only anxiety.

“Give her to me,” I demand, reaching out, the emptiness in my arms like a void.
 

The medicine woman moves forward, looking at me with a concerned expression.

“There’s a lot of blood here. I’m not sure…”

“What… what’s wrong?” I ask her, no longer feeling any pain, only weakness. The urge to hold my daughter is fighting any physical discomfort.

“You’re bleeding… I don’t know how much I can do.”

“Fix her up. I’m leaving,” my husband utters. Arabella grabs onto his finger but he pulls away. My heart breaks and panic clutches at me.

“Give. Me. My. Daughter.” I want to scream at him, how dare he keep her from me?! She is mine!

“I’m not giving this poor innocent baby to someone with the devil in her! Are you mad? She’s better off with no mother than one who’s possessed.” My husband’s strong, dark features are terrifying in the dim candlelight of the room. My Arabella lets out a cry and I physically ache.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“You’ve been seeing things, Azure… evil things. I’ve been waiting for the baby, but now… I have to take…Arabella,” he utters the name for the first time. I can’t tell if he’s disgusted or guilty from the expression on his face.

“Please… please don’t take her… I need her Ethan… please,” I beg, beginning to see what’s been happening right in front of me. He had believed my visions, but he had waited until his child was out of me to do anything about it.

“I’m sorry,” he utters, moving to leave the room.

“Please… please! I’ll do anything… at least let me see her,” I plead, my eyes streaming and heart hammering. I can feel myself weakening. How can he do this to me? He sighs and tilts the baby wrapped in burlap toward me. Her huge, icy blue eyes stare at me, runny from the shock of entering the world. I love her so much and I’ve never seen her face before this… how can that be? Ethan pulls away and I scream as he takes her out into the rain, into the cold…

“NO! ETHAN YOU CAN’T DO THIS! I NEED HER! SHE’S MY BABY! PLEASE… I’LL DO ANYTHING!!!” I scream until I’m hoarse. The medicine woman covers me over with a blanket. I cry until I have no energy left, weeping over the loss of my daughter. Slowly, under the stormy night sky… my blood trickles off the edge of the table I’m laid on and onto the floor, I bleed, letting out a final, slow and heartbroken breath, with my only thought before death being of the ingrained image of my beautiful Arabella.

I return from the memory, a single tear falling down one check. She would never have known who I was, who her own mother was. I had failed her in the most important way. I only had to be there, but I never was. Ethan had taken that chance from me. I wonder about my Arabella, what she had become. I’d like to think she went on to be happy, but in the world I had grown up in, where having visions left you bleeding to death or in a convent, I wonder how likely that really is. For a moment I let myself fantasise, wonder how it would have felt if I’d ever held her in my arms. Had her tiny eyes looking up at me, her little fingers clutching mine.
 

I ache, intensely, deeply, letting my head fill with the image of her. The fog rolls in, pushing the image away, instead putting something else in its place… something bad. My eyes snap open. The time for meditation is over. I need to get to Orion and fast. The time for evolution is upon us.