Page 94 of The Blood we Crave

Two shitty fucking options.

My life had come down to the total of this. Everything I’d ever done would be overlooked and I would become a gory newspaper headline of a girl who was killed at the Nightmare Circus.

Another ghost story to haunt the streets of Ponderosa Springs.

With the last bit of my dwindling hope, I reach into myself. Willing my voice to ricochet off the fabric of this tent, will my body through tears to call out for help.

To scream for the only name that existed in my brain right now. The one I felt could save me from this damned ending. My last chance, the boy who’d frozen the horror with his wintery steps the last time death floated above me.

My angel.

“Thatcher!”

It was a banshee shriek into the void. Praying by some act of divine fate, he was nearby. That he’d come looking for me, noticed me missing. That somehow he’d hear my voice over the whirling circus music, over the howling wind.

I just needed him to come for me. To save me this one last time, because I wasn’t ready to die. Not like this—not before I graduated, or watched my friends walk down the aisle. I wanted to develop a career, to grow up, I wanted to live.

I didn’t want to die before I—

“Thatcher, please,” I shout, blood spilling out of my mouth. “Thatcher!”

“What a beautiful corpse you’ll be.” One of them mumble, before the force of someone’s boot slams into my side.

It sends me tumbling into the tank; the blood welcoming me with its sticky arms and metallic perfume. Pulling me beneath the surface to a watery death.

The world became a magnificent shade of red as I sunk to the bottom of the tank. Crushed roses that leaked through my shut eyes and tasted of sweet pennies. My senses spun in brilliant hues of the familiar color. Cherry, garnet, vermilion and ruby.

It was everywhere. Soaked through the strains of my hair, stuffed inside of my grappling lungs, and wedged within the walls of my throat. It was consuming me, eating me alive, swallowing me fucking whole.

My chest burns, desperate for air. Hopelessly trying to tear through the rough material that circled around me, but without oxygen in my lungs, my limbs are weak. The tank is deep, too deep, and I don’t have enough energy to keep myself afloat without my legs.My head is dizzy, the burn in my lungs turning into one of comfort. As if my body knows what is going to happen in a few brief moments.

I feel arms curled around my waist, reminding me of the night I danced with Thatcher a year ago at the All Hallows Eve ball. What he’d done as a distraction for our friends had been a memory engraved deeply into my mind.

Meeting Briar for the first time. How innocent her eyes had been. Burning down a tree with Rook and catching Alistair in my shower after he’d stayed in our dorm. Seeing Sage sitting in the dining hall after she’d come back.

Memories I kept safely tucked inside played on a reel. Flash after flash. A playback of my life’s best moments, one final comfort movie before I was welcomed into the afterlife.

My subconscious seemed to fade towards the light, a bright stark light and the taste of air making me choke. All the blood wedged in my mouth pours out as I gasp.

“Grab her.”

Hands touch me, coiling around the rope still wound around my body. My brain tries to decide if I’ve entered immortality, or if my call had been answered and I was still alive.

I try to blink past the streaks of red, clinging to my senses, trying to clear the fog of crimson that blinds me.

“What the fuck do you think I’m doing? Playing checkers?”

“You’re useless.”

“If you don’t shut up, I’ll drop her and you can both drown, jackass.”

“Just—” A pause, “Just help her.”

I can feel my chest heaving up and down, gobbling down oxygen as quickly as possible. The pain remains, and it’s this that tells me I am still alive. That somehow, I’d made it out of that liquid grave.

Voices hum around me, the feeling of cool metal resting against my back. The ropes loosen, my arms able to move freely.

“Lyra, Lyra, Lyra…”

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