Airel: The Discovering (Airel Saga Book Two)

Chapter IX

I WAS STANDING OVER the crumpled body of Stanley Alexander when I heard the most awful wrenching sound, a scream that ripped at the heavens and was cut short, as if the soul of it had been torn right out midstream. I was still trying to figure out what was real and what was not—vanishing doors, then disappearing Swords—seriously, what’s next?

As soon as that unholy scream rent the air, Stan jolted wide awake in a spasm, lurching up from the ground. I jumped back defensively. I reached out in my mind to Kreios and got nothing. Is he dead? I didn’t know.

When Stanley Alexander opened his eyes, something was different. It was very bad and it was very new. She was sending me warning signals without words, and I understood that what I was looking at in Stan was unprecedented. What he had become, then, had never been seen under the sun before.

He got to his feet wearing a wicked smile. “‘We’ is now me.” He moved so quickly that I couldn’t do anything. Before I knew it, he had stabbed me in the heart. I felt overwhelming pain dashing against my chest. He stepped forward, pushing with the blade, deeper. I heard Kim scream from a long way off.

He pushed harder, the black blade digging in further, and I fell to my knees. I gagged, wrapping my hand around the blade to try to stop it from going farther. I felt a pumping, gushing, leaking sensation in my chest that was all at once hot and cool, and my strength faded rapidly.

Stan pulled the dagger free and walked slowly around me as my wound gushed, blood running down my skin and soaking my clothes. He stood behind me then, with his dagger raised. I sensed what he was going to do, heard the voice of She screaming out in agony and grief, and searched with all my heart for the mind of Kreios, but I couldn’t move. My heart had been pierced. I was mortally wounded.

In the background, I heard Kim screaming, footsteps running toward me, but her voice sounded distant and vague. Somewhere deep within, I knew she would be killed—it was inevitable—but I was now bound to my fate, and a prisoner of the events of my life. So short. I turned to face the unspeakably evil thing that had stabbed me, that would finish my life and end it. His eyes had become livid—death had skinned them over. I fell to the earth on my side and rolled to my back, my legs askew.

Stanley turned to face me, crazed and twitching, his muscles stuttering as if fighting rigor mortis. He raised the dagger for the final blow, the severing of my head from my body, and all I could do was wait for it.

The sound of tearing flesh, a sloshing wet sound, filled my ears. I couldn’t tell what was happening, if the sound had come from inside my body as my heart tore itself apart on the line that had been cut into it, or if the sound had come from somewhere else. I wondered abstractly how long a person stays conscious after they’re beheaded.

I now longed for the end. My life had been so very confusing. And filled up with pain. And short. It made, all of it, no sense to me. The most random bits of memory flashed into my mind and skipped right out again. Things I would have sworn I had forgotten, things that did not exist to me anymore. Memories of my mom canning apricots in the kitchen, old classmates from kindergarten, a lonesome bike ride when I was seven, an old book I had loved, a doll I used to play with. Everything around me was becoming hazy.

A garbled exclamation broke the silence. My eyes flew open. From the open mouth of Stanley Alexander, protruding like an obscene black tongue, was the broken tip of a sword. His eyes rolled back in their sockets and blood dripped from the tip of the blade.

The immense and crushing drain on my strength stopped—but I was left with a shattered heart, the violence done against it now complete and total. I both felt and believed that my life had now run its course, the time left to me now a handful of moments.