Page 364 of Alchemised
CONSCIOUSNESS SPLIT HELENA’S MIND OPEN.
She lurched up, head throbbing, mad with pain. All she could think was Get away, run. The need to escape consumed her. Everywhere she looked, it was all darkness.
She tried to move, but her body failed her. Her motions jerked, and pain bloomed from her wrists, across her hands, and into her arms when she tried to get up. She struggled to breathe as her ribs had clamped tight around her lungs.
It wasn’t the tank, but it was still so dark, and she could barely move.
A hand brushed against her shoulder.
She gave a strangled scream, her head snapping up. It was Kaine. He was leaning over her, his pale hair and silver-bright eyes visible in the dark. His fingers trembled as he stared at her.
She studied him in shock.
He was different. Older. He wasn’t old, but his eyes had a look as if it had been decades since she’d last seen him.
She gave a sob and reached for him.
“You’re alive,” she said.
He flinched back as despair swept across his face. She didn’t understand why. Then Grace’s fearful voice rose from some distant corner of her mind.
“Lila Bayard was the first one he brought back.”
It all came rushing back: The manacles. Transference. Imprisonment in Spirefell. Everyone was dead because the High Reeve had killed them.
He was the High Reeve.
Her blood ran ice-cold and she snatched her hand back, shoving herself away from him, ignoring the screaming pain in her wrists. Something was tangled around her elbow, and she ripped it out as she scrambled away. Her arms and legs shook under her own weight, and she nearly toppled off the far side of the bed. She slid onto the floor and knelt, peering across the mattress at him in that dark room in that dark house where she was a captive.
Kaine was still alive.
But if he was alive, that meant he had not come for her, and she had waited.
The mental dissonance made her want to scream. The past and present shattering against each other as she knelt in their ruins.
It couldn’t be him. Ferron had hurt her. He’d raped her. And he killed everyone.
Kaine wouldn’t.
He’d promised he’d always—
Pain lanced through her brain. Her vision disappeared. An anguished moan escaped her. She buried her face in her hands as it grew, boring through her mind, so excruciating she could hardly keep conscious.
Her head was on fire, skull cut open, pressure emulsifying her brain. She screamed, trying to let it out. She kept screaming until she was gasping for air. When she looked up again, she was alone.
Perhaps she always had been, and Kaine’s face had been an apparition she’d conjured.
Perhaps this was all a dream. He was dead, and she was still in the tank, rotting and forgotten in the dark where no one would ever find her.
She slumped, and a hand grasped her shoulder before she hit the floor. She started, and he was there again. As their eyes met, his expression crumpled.
“You’re remembering, aren’t you?”
She managed a nod, reaching up and gripping his wrist, feeling his skin and bones beneath her fingers. He was real.
He was still alive. She’d been so sure that everyone was dead, but he wasn’t, and yet that felt worse.
She turned her face away, pressing it into the duvet, wanting to scream again. All the contradictions and horror clamoured as she tried to untangle her mind. Nothing felt real. Everything was lies.
