Page 121 of Wicked Tides
Dahlia’s noises turned to strained, agonized screams as the xhoth turned with her torn tongue in his grasp, dripping with hot blood. Whitton held out his hand and the xhoth dropped the strip of raw, bleeding meat into his palm.
“Whitton, you bastard! You know not the pain I will inflict on you,” I roared.
The xhoth returned their attention to a coughing, whimpering Dahlia as Whitton turned feral and bit into the raw tongue like an animal, covering his mouth with her blood. Dahlia screamed, gurglingas blood filled her hollow mouth. The beasts ripped her from the wall and threw her to the ground before me. A red pool formed beneath her mouth when she rolled to her stomach to spit it up.
“We break body,” one xhoth said, his voice just as unnerving and grotesque as I remembered it.
“Then father break mind,” another said.
In the corner, Whitton was now crouched over his gory meal, tearing the tongue to shreds between his blunt teeth.
“What the fuck?” I rasped.
Dahlia was crawling forward, blood continuously gushing from her mouth. I tried to get to her, but my irons kept me back and I couldn’t help shouting in desperation. Two of the xhoth grabbed hold of her ankles and dragged her back so that another one could rip into her dress. He tore it right down the middle and sunk on top of her, pinning her body to the floor as she screamed.
A coward would have turned away. I was no coward. I pulled on my chains until my wrists were bloody and ground to the bone. Until I’d stripped the skin from my hands, but still I could not get to her. I watched as they violated her. Sadistically. Aggressively. It was only when Whitton appeared in front of me, his face covered in blood and pieces of Dahlia’s shorn tongue between his teeth. He had but a tiny piece left and he quickly grasped my hair, shoving the bite down my throat with a stream of boisterous, infuriating laughter spilling from his mouth.
The moment I felt it slide down into my stomach, my mind imploded with fury and madness. I tugged once more on my binds and felt my arms break free. I rushed at Whitton and took hold of his fat throat, digging into him with my fingers until his flesh gave. Blood spurted from his neck as I drove him up against the wall. I slammed his head back. Once. Twice. Again and again, I smashed his skull into the stone until it no longer made a thumping sound, but a noise akin to tossing a slab of meat onto a stone cutting table. His body slumped against me and I stepped away with disgust, my vision red.
Pivoting, I saw Dahlia straddling one of the hissing beasts. The others lay dead around her, their insides on the outside as she continually jammed a sharp piece of metal into the corps’s chest. She was covered in blood. In dirt. In soot. She was an animal.
I moved toward her, grabbing her arms before she could bring the shard down on the xhoth again. She jerked around to look at me, her eyes red and swollen, but she did not truly see me. She was panting, her face awash with blood.
And then realization dawned and she quickly got to her feet to embrace me. I would have embraced her back. In that hellish place, I wanted to.
Only she couldn’t. The darkness swallowed us and tore us apart like the current of the ocean on a stormy day. Then everything fell quiet and still as if I’d returned to that nothingness from which it all began.
Dahlia’s screams faded into a dense silence and the pain on my skinned wrists ebbed, leaving me feeling empty and weightless… until I opened my eyes and saw the wooden thatches of my hut above me. A thin layer of sticky sweat made my shirt cling to my chest as I rose up from my bedding to find I had returned to what now seemed a forgiving reality.
Taking in a few deep breaths, I came to my senses. The horrors in the dream faded and what I felt for Dahlia there transformed. She was in my head, just as Meridan said she had been many times. How many times had she invaded my sleep without me knowing? How much of what I was feeling was by design?
I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes and groaned.
I had been a fool.
~ 41 ~
Dahlia
Empty silence may greet you in death
But in life, memories never leave you
~ Hugh Teller
I burst from the warm water with a gasp, my body trembling with memories of the son’s slimy hands on me. In me. The dream was a horrid one and I felt it all as if I were there. I’d stumbled once more into a nightmare that wasn’t mine and found myself the subject of torture. Torture at the hands of the things I’d been running from my whole life and a fat man in a gaudy blue outfit. The rage I felt at seeing him devour my tongue as if he was better than the sirens he plucked them from ate a hole in my chest.
But the sons. They were my nightmare, not his.
None of it made sense, but it didn’t have to. Dreams didn’t often build themselves with plain weaves. They were crooked and askew and that particular one was a deformed disaster of tangled webs. A hybrid of two people’s twisted minds, I suspected.
I felt sick as I moved my still attached tongue in my mouth. When I had opened my eyes to see the sons standing over me, jeering withtheir jagged, crooked teeth, I wished for death instead. My greatest fear was being used, tattered, and emptied out by their sadistic hands and there I was, their fingers down my throat, wishing it would all end.
I waded toward the edge of the pool, looking around at my surroundings. I was alone, from what I could see.
My heart was racing, sending blood through me so fast it was almost painful. My mind should not have gone immediately to Vidar, but it did. He’d been screaming my name as the sons ripped into me. He’d been fighting thick chains trying to intervene.
And I vaguely recalled him meeting me at the water’s edge and carrying me into the village when I returned with Ligeia’s head.
