Freeing Lilia

Distractions.

Unedited. 

Chapter 26: Distractions.

The dark basement finally went silent.

The bars that I leaned against were so cold that they seemed to burn through my clothes and into my skin. The only light came from the flicker of one pitiful torch that swung gently, illuminating dark stone and splattered blood.

Vampires bled just as much as humans, it seemed.

Blood crusted my nails and I picked at the crusty flakes, wondering who this blood belonged to. Who had Zosia fed from before she died? Was this Beryl's blood? The room was doused in the scent of it, and in its darkness, my mind festered.

Beryl.

To think of him just caused pain. Such ragged, brutal grief that I felt it as if it was a physical blow. It hurt more than Bashkar's knives carving my skin did. It hurt more than the time Desmund cut open my neck and I lay beside my dying mother.

The world just hurt and no matter what I did, these things just kept happening. In the darkness of the cell, I could help but see their faces. My mother. My baby half-brother, born wrong and killed because I refused to give the last piece of myself to my fiancée.

Beryl.

He wouldn't peruse the markets again, searching out herbs and talking for hours about remedies and poisons and filling parchment with scribbled notes. I couldn't tuck myself in the corner of camp and talk with him about problems I would never discuss with anyone else. There would be no singing around the camp-fire. Red wouldn't grumble and groan about the missed notes and goad Beryl about his age.

Beryl.

That name burned in the back of my throat and it was a struggle to focus on the silent room before me. A broken body lay slumped in chains. Zosia was a smudge of her former beauty, darkened with blood and filth. The Sage stood over her and the swinging torchlight illuminated the planes of his beautiful face and the darkness in those slanted, exotic eyes. A slim blade was clenched in his hand and his ragged breathing had not quieted.

"She was a screamer." From the corner, Red roused.

Grey and Red had arrived too late to find the street littered with bodies and the rest of us in the house, swaddling Beryl's body. Zosia had been dragged down to the tunnels that ran under the town, locked in chains she could not escape from. Together, we had descended into the dark pits to join her.

Zosia had spat insults at us, her face a mask of rage and fear. That fear had only deepened when I shook off my coat and bared my arms to her and my throat. I let her imagine how I got those map of scars, and how I ever survived them. Monster, she had called me over and over. I had no words to say to her and that time that ticked by was filled only by the sound of her rage, desperate and overwhelming. The spitting insults, the hollow apologies.  The begging.

A part of me would have felt guilt, but then I thought of Beryl with his hollow eyes. How he was older and weaker than the rest of us.  His warm smile as he bade me goodbye before we left him. How they stuck him with their blades over and over again when he could not even defend himself.

That swallowed any guilt. Any humanity.

I glanced at Red's face – at the bleak eyes. The stark grief that he could not mask with anger. Grey was a ghost in the room. He had said very little, but I knew he would find a corner to drink away that biting pain. I flexed my hands, wincing at the smarting of my bruised knuckles.