Page 13 of Of Monsters Of Kings

July.

I’d lost my job in June.

Three weeks.

My gaze returned to the hole as if dragged back in the same manner I’d left it. Fearful, horrible reluctance choked me.

I didn’t want to know.

“Please release my arm,” I asked softly. “I won’t do anything.”

The gagging man surprised me by obliging. Maybe there were benefits to stinking like death.

I lifted my cleaning apron to my nose and sniffed. Bile rose in my throat at the stench, leaving a burning trail behind. Rot, decay.

Dread pitted in my stomach. Doom lurched in my heart.

The agent shoved through the larger hole, and I strode to the wall, then stopped. I couldn’t quite find the strength to crawl inside when I knew what would be in there.

“There’s a body,” the agent shouted. Nothing could mask the sound of his horror. “There’s a rotting body in here, Jace!”

That got the second agent moving again. I was shoved face-first against the wall, and my arm cranked high between my shoulder blades.

“Who is it?” the agent hissed in my ear as the first one staggered free of the rotting prison where my mother had withered and died.

My mother is dead.

I was spun around and shoved against the wall again. The agents shouted in my face, and the landlady’s gleeful gaze popped in and out of view between their blurred features.

My mother was dead.

She’d died as I rested beside her. She’d rotted as I rested beside her for three weeks. Only the stench of her decay had alerted others to hunt us down.

My mother is dead. She was gone, but I’d been with her the whole time. I hadn’t thought that was a fear of mine, for her to be alone at her end, but I sagged with relief that wasn’t the case. I’d been with her, as close as could be. I’d kept her company even as she’d decayed beyond the gates of death. I shouldn’t be comforted by something so abhorrent to others.

Yet I was. She hadn’t been alone for a second.

Except now my mother was gone, and I’d lost three weeks of my life, and the difficulties of my current situation were overwhelming, to say the least.

“Who was working with you?” screamed one of the agents.

I focused on him. “No one.”

“What did you say?”

I said louder, “No one.”

“Who brought you food?”

“No one.”

He scoffed. “You’re telling me you haven’t eaten in three weeks and you’re still healthy as an ox?”

Ox.

My brows drew together. I’d forgotten the skeleton crew and their terrifying skull. I’d forgotten how Ox’s eyes had drowned me, and I’d lost my memories for a time.

He’d done something to me. I knew it suddenly. Why else would I sleep for three weeks on the exact day I’d interacted with him? He’d done something, and I’d slept through my mother’s death and decay.

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