Page 26 of Resting Witch Face
I learned that if some magical entity is trying to kill your ass, you should just keep your mouth shut and let it have at it. Definitely not something I practiced, keeping the trap shut, but solid advice, nonetheless. As I was gulping my own life fluid, I found it important to point that out to myself, just in case it was wisdom I could take with me to the next life, or afterlife. Whatever was waiting for me on the other side, in any case.
I was going insane.
Instead of fighting to stay alive, I was having conversations in my head about wisdom and afterlife. The rage was still skin deep, so I reached for it and used it to fight the control the entity had over my limbs. I could’ve shouted in victory when I lifted my shaking body on my hands and knees, blood dribbling down my chin. Fat drops hit the open pages of the book splattering and staining the cream paper. Before my blurry eyes, the blood disappeared, sinking into the words like the cursed things were lapping it up. My mind was screaming shit on repeat when the whispers abruptly stopped. I’d never heard a silence so loud in my life.
And then it laughed.
A joyful, beautiful sound that froze my attempts to crawl away from it. It was impossible something so beautiful but made my chest hurt could be evil, right? Terror ripped through me when I found myself smiling from ear to ear while blood dribbled down my chin, and my limbs shook hard enough to rattle my teeth.
“Yessss.” I’m not ashamed to say I peed a little when the voice hissed in triumph like a venomous snake. I might be a stubborn mule, but when my bladder gave up on me, I was out. “Now we bond.”
The hold on my body vanished, and I crumbled in a heap, my hip taking the brunt of it along with my thick skull. I deserved the knock to the head for being in the library in the first place, though I didn’t appreciate it at the time.
“Wait,” I squeaked like a mouse, which pissed me off. “Bond? No,” I barked.
“Yessss.” Another hiss had me scrambling away from the cursed thing, crab-walking the hell out of its reach.
“You are losing your mind, Hazel. Books don’t talk.” I wished there was more conviction in my tone, but I wasn’t going to nitpick.
The book in question was sitting open still, quiet, not at all chatty, and unassuming. I was eyeing it like a snake in the grass while I waited for it to pounce. When minutes passed and all I did was watch it unblinking, my locked muscles relaxed. I was hallucinating. That was the best explanation for what happened. Too much espresso, no sleep, a fight with not one but two demons, and stress would make anyone snap. The pep talk helped to unfreeze the rest of me, and I plopped heavily on my tailbone. If I wasn’t numb from fear all over, it would’ve hurt.
Wiping the blood painting my chin with the back of my hand, I grimaced when I saw how much of it was there. My tongue wiggled in my mouth to check if I bit through it, but apart from the sting on the left side, I didn’t have any pain. I gave up on cleaning my face and gingerly crawled back toward the book. The thought of me hallucinating was firmly at the front of my mind like a shield. Or maybe Rakshasa magic made me imagine things since it burned me. If it had a longer-lasting effects, it would be totally possible. By the time I was poised above the open pages I had myself convinced.
A bright light like someone turned a flashlight on an inch from my retinas blasted me in the face, throwing my body backward. The back of my head made a sickening crunch when it smacked the stone like a melon, bouncing on it a few times. My mouth was open in a scream, but no sound came out of it. All the shrieking was done internally where it felt like my body was being ripped apart on a molecular level. Waves of scorching heat washed over me from head to toe, followed by a current of ice that made me wish for death that never came. My organs were melting, turning into puddles before reforming and regrowing themselves.
Through it all, I was locked inside a tiny box in my psyche, held prisoner in my own body, and forced to watch the torture in explicit detail. I flopped around like a fish out of water, seizures raking me one after another. My eyes rolled to the back of my head, but that didn’t prevent me from seeing it all, the bastard who did this to me making sure I had an out-of-body experience and a front-row seat. The pain was something I’d never felt, and it was so much that at one point it didn’t hurt at all. Seeing what was probably my last moments of life didn’t scare me anymore.
Nor did the dark stain forming around my head like a halo.
After a lifetime, or maybe a blink of an eye, my body went still and I was sucked back into it like an elastic band snapping. My awareness slammed inside my meat suit, and I gasped, filling my lungs with so much air it made me cough hard enough to puncture a lung. Hacking and spitting, I rolled on my knees and stumbled to my feet. Hand pressed on the bookshelf to keep my balance, my other hand reached for the back of my head to see how deep the gash was. Halfway up my arm, I froze and stared at my skin, my jaw hitting my chest.
Sigils lit by some inner glow I did not possess before the cursed book sunk its clutches in me blinked in and out of existence. The symbols flickered and died only to be replaced with others, all of them with a faint, deep golden glow just like the words of the book when they came to life. My stomach dropped to my feet, and I couldn’t even swallow from the tightness in my throat. A distant laughter rekindled my rage, and my head whipped around to search for it. Again, I was alone, and the book was silent a couple of feet away from me. It took effort to realize where the laughter was coming from.
It was me.
I was laughing like a crazy woman, deep belly guffaws that shook my shoulders. Tears streaked down my cheeks, and still I chortled, unable to stop. When a stitch developed in my side and I didn’t stop, fear stabbed me that the torture was not over. Maybe I would laugh myself to death.
Talk about irony.
For someone who barely smiled, it was quite fitting to kill them by way of laughter. Wasn’t it?
The library door opening sounded like a bullet being fired in a closed room.
The hinges were too loud, and the air rushing in through the barely formed crack pelted my overheated skin, which still flickered with strange sigils. Every sense was amplified, overwhelming me to the point I couldn’t see which way was up and which down. The fear I pushed down after the book released its hold reared its head, and something foreign and powerful enough to steal my breath burst out of me. My arm flicked to the side in a wide arc, slicing the air, and a cloud of light exploded from my fingertips.
I screamed.
My shriek was drowned by the impact of the magic with the barely opened door, and whoever was trying to enter had tonsils of steel judging by the strength of their shout. Panic was strangling me that Danika would walk through the damn door and she would see me lit up like a damn Christmas tree in the middle of her library. I had no idea what was happening to me, but I sure as fuck didn’t want her to know about it.
The ground under my bare feet started shaking.
Panting like a feral animal, I realized one thing. The higher my fear climbed, the stronger the quaking of the ground became. The problem was, I couldn’t stop it.
I couldn’t stop any of it.
One, because I had no idea what was going on.
Two, I was freaked the hell out and in shock.
