Page 21 of Griffin Undone
I sighed at the pleasure of it. For a while there I’d have given my right arm for someone to hit me over the head with a sledgehammer and put me out of my misery. Thank God I didn’t have to go find the someone to do it.
A light laugh echoed in my ears, the sound tugging my lips into an unfamiliar smile.
“There she is. Finally coming back to us, little one?”
I liked his voice, liked the way he talked to me as if I really existed, as ifhereally existed.Wouldn’t that be nice.
“It is nice. Now wake up, sleepy Kat, and say hello to us.”
Hello? To whom? A soft touch brushed through my mind, and I remembered.Grim.The one from before, who’d told me he was real. He’d made the pain go away, and now he wanted me to wake up.
A heavy, calloused,physicalhand settled against my forehead as if feeling for a fever, but I wasn’t hot anymore, or cold—no, very suddenly, I was scared. My heart tripped, starting a pounding rhythm against my ribs, an echo of that bass drum that had beat in my head earlier.
“Come on. Open your eyes.”
I could feel myself frowning.“They are open.”Useless effort; everything was still black. And then, like a wire snapping into place, the lights blinked on and I looked up into the hooded face of my worst nightmare.
The scream was instinctive. Piercing.
In my head, anyway. I tried to scream, but the sound came out all mangled and my heart was jackhammering too hard to fix it. I had to get the heck away, move, anything, before he…he…
Lethargy invaded my body, and I faded back onto the pillow. He…
Who the hell was he?
The figure before me looked like the Grim Reaper, all hooded and black and pale skin and…well, he was missing his scythe.
“I’ll be sure to remedy that next time,” he said aloud, his lips curling into what I assumed passed for a smile.
He was reading my mind.
I tried to panic; I really did. Gave it my best effort. But it was just too hard when my body weighed the same as a small pony.
And for some reason that struck me as funny. As a weird little strangled giggle escaped, I turned my focus from this presence I couldn’t understand and searched the room for answers to the dozen questions suddenly flooding my mind.
Where was I? What was going on? What the hell was wrong with me?
I didn’t recognize anything. A narrow bed, a pillow and thin blanket that did little to stop my shivering. Nothing familiar. This wasn’t my apartment over the pawnshop. Not my bed or my covers. This wasn’t my room, my space, my stuff. The man hovering too close wasn’t someone I knew—although that would be a more certain deduction if I could actually see his face.
My head spun faster.
“It’s all right, Kat. I won’t hurt you.”
Should I laugh again or scream bloody murder? I’d fallen down the rabbit hole and been caught by the freaking Grim Reaper, who apparently had access to my innermost thoughts. But it wasall right?
Sure, all right. Fine.
Laugh it was, then. That slightly hysterical giggle made another appearance. I clamped my hand over my mouth.Keep it in. Keep it in. Keep it in.But between my lips I found a tight strip of cloth. A gag. I wasfine?With agag?I tore frantically at the offending strip, desperate to get it off, to get back control, to get out of this godforsaken nightmare.
A slow, insidious finger of calm entered the chaos of my mind, brought back the lassitude from before. It blanketed my senses, cut off the panic, soothed the overload. Oh, the fear was still there, but I was watching it from inside a glass bubble where it couldn’t truly touch me.
I remembered this, the disconnect. I might not feel panicked, but I knew I was, and I knew who was taking it from me. But without a weapon—and something other than a Raggedy Ann doll for a body—my only option was to glare at the blandly oblivious Grim.
“Just settle down, little Kat. I’ll explain everything—including the gag—if you would allow me to. There’s no reason to be afraid.”
I snorted my opinion of that.
“Yes, I guess that’s not a realistic suggestion, is it?” The numbness faded until it lay like a thin film over my mind instead of a suffocating blanket.
