Page 189 of Flirting with Darkness

I’d barely told my feet to turn, to get me away, when its glowing eyes flared.

I didn’t have time to gasp.

Its claws closed back around my arm and sank in.

Tighter. Deeper. Lancing through skin and muscle, piercing veins, spilling my blood in a thick, bright tide.

I choked and shouted something incoherent to Ma as it pulled upwards until my arm was taut.

An inch more and all my weight would be on those four claws. Amid the pain, I couldfeelthe fibres of my muscles tearing and splitting.

My face, my neck, my shoulders and back—every part of me was slick with blood or sweat, and some places both. Hot and cold at once. Grey blotches spread across my vision like dough rising out of control, threatening to blot out everything.

I hung in its grip, the final ounce of energy I had left going into keeping my tiptoes on the floor, holding a fraction of my weight.

I had nothing.

I couldn’t save myself or Ma.

My head dipped, grey darkness filling the edges of the world, leaving just a circle visible—the monster’s hooves sinking into the silty banks of the stream and my toes straining.

The drip of water, the drip of blood. The slow thud of my pulse. It all formed a macabre accompaniment to Ma’s lament and the scrape, scrape, scrape of her washing. Why didn’t she run? Why didn’t…?

No. That wasn’t Ma. She wasn’t that old. This was some old lady, some old fae who looked like Ma.

Somewhere far away, the song shattered. Then came a tinkle that sounded like bells.

And I teetered, grey creeping in, threatening to swallow me whole.

27

MONSTER & BEAST

The monster roared and snarled, except… the sound didn’t come from in front of me. It had a friend.

I blinked, face tingling, toes barely touching the ground as I fought to cling onto thoughts as they scattered in the face of this ringing agony.

Not bells. And not the song shattering.

Glass.

First breaking, then hitting the ground.

I lifted my heavy, heavy head and caught a flash of something metallic and beautiful, before the grip on my arm twitched.

The pain rose a pitch with that slight movement and there was a sound, a weak cry. My mouth was open, so I guessed it was mine.

Then there was a moment of freedom, no grip pulling me taut, but only for the briefest instant before gravity claimed me. I slammed into the floor, but even that bruising impact paled against what the monster had done to me.

With a wet thud, something else fell beside me.

I had to blink at it several times before I made sense of the white bone, the jagged flesh, the inches and inches of slender claws.

The monster’s hand. Severed. Bleeding a sludgy green-black blood.

As if that realisation were a door opening, the grey tunnel of my vision expanded.

Blood-spattered rock. The liquid dripping down to mingle with the mud. Hoof prints, but no sign of the monster. A sword lay in the dirt, its blade covered in the monster’s blood.

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