Page 57 of The Pureblood Princess
Though she doesn’t look at Nadia, there’s still a feeling of awareness about her, as if she knows she’s there but cannot see her. She moves to leave the room, and Nadia turns to watch her go.
Vera pauses in the doorway, one hand placed on the frame, and says over her shoulder, “Find the book, and everything will be made clear. Right the wrongs that were done to us. Restore our clan’s former glory.”
Then she’s gone, and Nadia is cast back into nothingness.
Gasping, Nadia jolts awake. She’s once again in the dark basement bedroom, the thin blanket making her itch. The air is cold, and she shivers as goose bumps dance across her skin.
Grief washes over her, and she draws her knees into her chest. She had one chance to escape, and she floundered it. Now they’ll never let her out of this room again, and her time to decide must be running out.
She wants to cry, but there’s nothing left. All she can do is hug her knees to her chest and rock, sadness and fear and rage swirling within her, making her heart beat faster.
And then she remembers the dream. Her mother. The manor. Thebook. And her fear recedes. It gives way to a desire so strong, it’s all she can focus on. Sheneedsthat book. Somehow, she knows with absolute certainty that it will answer the questions she’s had since Theodore first showed her his fangs on that rainy moonlit night.
Theodore.
Konrád’s words come back to her.
“It dulls the body and the senses, and in your case, it left you completely... alone.”
Is that why Theodore won’t respond to her? Has the hemlock severed her connection to him? Perhaps this realization should shatter her, but instead, it gives her hope. If this is all the hemlock’s doing, and if Theodore truly is searching for her, like Konrád said, then he must still want her.
He’s stillhers.
She yearns suddenly for his arms, for his lips on her cheek and his hands in her hair. But if she ever wants to feel him again, she must first escape her imprisonment. Andthatthought cultivates her rage once more.
An icy chill runs over her skin, and her eyes widen as shadows gather about her hands. She sits up straight, watching with a mix of fear and intrigue as the darkness swallows her ivory skin, turning it into a dark so black, so dense, that no light can penetrate it. When she tries to wiggle her fingers, she finds herself unable to, as if separated from the parts of herself that have succumbed to the darkness.
“You’ve nothing to fear. You need only awaken and claim what is yours, what they have tried for centuries to steal from us.”
Her mother’s voice echoes in her head, and it empowers her to step from the bed and face the shadows fully.
I’ve nothing to fear.
Instead of trying to shake the shadows off, she encourages them, picturing them growing, spreading up her arms and across her chest. She imagines the cold, the feeling of being disembodied, separated from her corporeal self.
And the shadows obey.
Slowly at first, they spread from her hands to her wrists, then her elbows, leaving a kiss of ice as they writhe across her skin. They creep to her shoulders, then reach for her neck. Asthe tendrils touch her jaw, she holds her breath as if about to be dragged underwater, and then the shadows spread across her face, pulling her into the black.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Everything is cold, and yetnothing is cold.
She has no body, her consciousness floating like a specter in her dingy prison cell.
The shadows have engulfed her.
And Nadiaisdarkness.
Chapter Twenty-Six
At first, fear floods her.
She’s like a feather floating on a balmy breeze, weightless and unencumbered. There’s nothing to hold on to, and she has no fingers with which to grip the nightstand or bedframe to hold herself in place.
She finds herself drifting to the ceiling, becoming wedged in the corner. And there she stays, trying to move, to reclaim her body, to doanythingbut hover in darkness.
Time passes. Minutes, hours—she has no idea.
