Page 15 of Devoured
Those crimson points of light found me—piercing through dimensions to where I shouldn’t have existed. Everything froze. Not slowed. Stopped. His regard pinned me. Just that hellfire gaze through the iron mask. But whatever consciousness burned behind the metal recognized me. Knew me. The way he studied me wasn’t carnal. It was worse. Like a creditor coming to collect an ancient debt written in my bones before I was born.
I felt naked in a way that had nothing to do with clothes. Every thought, every memory, every piece of myself laid bare. I tried to look away but couldn’t. My body just froze there, pinned by his gaze.
He kept staring until I felt like I was dissolving. Coming apart piece by piece. Not dying. Just... unraveling under that gaze.
Then those red slits closed. Just for a second. A blink, maybe, if things like him could blink.
When they opened again, the whole dream shattered like glass.
I woke up gasping in my cell, all sweaty. I looked around. The lights were back on. I thanked God and tried to calm myself.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. The mattress beneath me was soaked through, and when I pressed my palm against my chest, I could feel my heart hammering so hard it hurt. The dream clung to me like wet clothes—the screaming, the blood, those red eyes cutting through dimensions to find me.
I pulled my knees to my chest and bit down on my wrist to keep from sobbing. The pressure helped, grounding me in the pain of here and now instead of there and then. But even with my eyes wide open, even with the lights blazing overhead, I could still feel him out there. Waiting.
Those burning slits had marked me somehow. Tagged me like prey.
My skin crawled with the certainty of it—I’d been seen by something that shouldn’t exist, in a place I shouldn’t have been able to reach. And now there was nowhere left to hide.
Chapter 6
First morning at St. Dymphna. The sky through the narrow window had gone from black to gray to pale yellow while I lay there, too afraid to close my eyes again. I still felt those red eyes looking at me, even though I was alone. But I wouldn’t tell anyone about the nightmare. Not on day one. I knew they’d mark me down as hallucinating, up my meds, make me easier to control. Better to keep quiet and figure out the rules first.
The door made a sound and opened, and Nurse Sela entered.
“Up.”
She stood with a chart in one hand, pen in the other. Click. Unclick. Her hair was scraped into a bun so tight it dragged the corners of her eyes upward.
“Go get a shower. Breakfast is in twenty,”she said.
Click. Unclick. Click.
Then she was gone.
No greeting. No eye contact. Just the next task on her list and that damned pen keeping time like a metronome. I wondered if she’d always been like this, or if St. Dymphna had worn away whatever softness she’d once carried.
I swung my feet down. The concrete floor was ice cold, shocking up through my soles. I sat there for a minute, waiting for feeling to return to my legs. When I could walk, I shuffled to the exposed toilet in the corner. Afterward, I moved to the sink. I splashed cold water on my face, fingers finding puffy skin and a sore jaw.
The door to my room wasn’t locked from the inside. I pushed it open slowly, peering into the hallway. Other women moved past in pale blue scrubs with their heads down, silently. They knew where they were going. I didn’t, so I followed them, staying close to the wall. At the end of the corridor, I found the showers. A row of stalls with no doors, no curtains. Nothing between you and whoever walked by.
Two women were already washing, steam curling around their bodies like ghosts. The hiss of the water echoed sharply against the tiled walls. I waited until one left, then peeled off my clothes and stepped beneath the spray.
The water struck me like punishment—first scalding, then icy, then scalding again, in cruel rhythm. I bit down on my lip, hard, to keep quiet. The taste of blood mingled with steam.
My fingers fumbled with the slick soap. It slipped from my grasp and hit the floor with a wet thud that echoed too loudly. I snatched it back immediately, spine pressed to the cold tile, unwilling to expose my back to the room.
Then I saw it.
Near the drain. A stain.
Dark. Coiled. Dried at the edges, but the center gleamed, viscous and sticky. Blood.
I reached out before I could stop myself. Just one finger.
It was still soft.
The air changed. The steam grew heavy, charged, like static before a lightning strike. The thick liquid clung to my fingertip, strangely warm—wrongly warm.
