Page 148 of The Mask Falling

My scream cracked into nothing. But then something drew my hand to the pendant. The æther quaked. In a strange, detached state—acceptance, perhaps—I exhaled through my nose. When the water had almost filled the tunnel, I took the deepest breath I could. Then I kicked off the ceiling and propelled myself back into the passage, hard and fast.

This was it. No way back. With no light, I used my hands to navigate, keeping one above my head to protect it from crags. Suhail materialized in front of me, here to watch the death I had denied him once before. Bubbles erupted from my lips. Fatal panic crested again. I tried to swim through him and shatter his image. My headlamp flared, banishing his face for an instant, but in my head, he was still laughing.

To disappear between shadow and stone.

My legs thrashed. My fingers groped for purchase. Just as water burned my nose and I thought my chest would rupture, I shattered the surface. Coughing and weeping, I crawled out of the second pool, and with a violent retch, I brought up the last meal I had eaten.

I gasped for breath. My headlamp flickered on again. I raked my soaking hair out of my eyes and looked back to see the pool already surging in my wake. The lake was coming. With a panic-stricken sob, I shoved myself up and ran. I clambered up walls and lurched through more tunnels, ascending now, always on the rise. Chips of limestone cut my soles, but I couldn’t stop. The lake was still after me. When a tapered crack in the wall appeared, I twisted sideways and writhed my way through it, scraping half the skin off my hip.

A ladder. My hands clapped onto it. Somehow, I had found my way to the carrières. Arms shaking, clothes stuck fast to my skin, I scaled the mine shaft. The muscles in my thighs and calves scorched, but I kept going, rung after rung, until I could crane myself over the top.

To rise from the depths, never seeking the sun.

I had gotten up the ladder, but the effort had squeezed out my last drop of strength. I lay unmoving. Weakness would finish me off. I was going to pass out. Eventually, the water would take me.

The headlamp went out for good. The blackness of my tomb closed over me. I listened to the distant swash of the water, closer by the moment.

When I heard the voice, I thought I was hallucinating. Then a lamp half blinded me. Cool and bony hands found my arms. I looked up to see the silver-haired voyant who had entered the mausoleum with Léandre and Ankou.

His face was distinctive, the skin almost stretched. Something about his dreamscape was familiar, even to my fear-addled senses.

“Wait,” I slurred. Everything was spinning, his face sliding in and out of focus. “I know— I know you.”

He offered a gentle smile. I looked down to see an empty syringe in his hand. A milky drop hung from the tip of the needle.

“No, darling,” he said. “You never did.”

My bones were disappearing. When my hand dropped to my side, I could have sworn his face came with it.

I have shed my skin many times, he had told me.Underneath, I remain a serpent.I heard my own hysterical laughter. Darkness came to claim me yet again, but this time, I embraced it.

20

A Promising Start

Candlelight. Softness under my back. My eyelashes were sticky, but I could feel enough to tell that I was lying on a rug. Someone had peeled off my wet clothes and covered me with sheets. I was warmer.

Too warm. Scorching with fever, worse than before. A listless throb filled my leg, and my hair smelled of bonfire smoke.

Shh, Paige, it’s okay, lie still.Deep, gut-wrenching coughs.Dangerous . . . sepsis . . . she needs a hospital . . .

Still underground. Not lost anymore. I tried to recall how I had gotten here, to wherever this was, but all I could remember was the roar of water and the sound of my own screaming.

Paige. A voice I trusted, a hand cradling the back of my head.Paige, you must take this.

Lip of a glass. Bitter pill. Trickle of water over my tongue. All around me, waking nightmares: a golden blade, the soldiers, the anchor. My final glimpse of my grandmother, her face riven by fear, as if she had seen everything that would happen if I slipped between her fingers.

My breath caught fire. To quench it, I swallowed. I wanted it to stop. All of it. I was deep under a sea of my own making.

So I fled to my dreamscape—to my flowers, wilted, swamped by water. As the fever flashlighted my limbs, I relived the moment I had asked if he still wanted me. The heat in his eyes that set me alight. I dreamed his hands to my tender skin, to places no one had ever touched.

I must have made a sound. A figure came into my mausoleum, and there was relief on my smarting back, some kind of liniment. The fire melted it down to water, and the water seeped inside me again, beaded on my face, drowned me from within. I was molten. Trickling back to the bottom of the earth, too loose and shapeless for the floor to hold me. Then a hand took mine—breaking my fall—and I pressed my brow to its scarred knuckles.

Paige. His voice.Stay with me, little dreamer.

I wanted to stay. So I clung onto that hand, to that voice, to him. I fought with everything I had left.

Darkness banked the flames at last. I cooled back into a solid form. When my eyes cracked open again, the inferno in my flesh was gone, supplanted by fatigue.

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