Page 16 of Consume
Poh jerked me against the wall and flattened herself next to me. “I’ll deal with it.” Taking one of her knives from her sheaths, she dragged me behind her for a peek around the corner. “Absidy.”
“What?”
“There’s no one there.”
“A ghost—” I hissed as white-hot pain twisted up my stomach. I doubled over, unable to make out Poh’s frantic whispers over the excruciating agony ripping me open. Something was happening inside me. Something terrible. My baby. My poor baby. “Poh!”
She threw her hand over my mouth and wrenched me sideways, through another narrow door. I barely made it inside before I sank onto my hands and knees and threw up everything.
Poh knelt next to me and swept my hair behind my head. “Are you all right? Talk to me. Do we need to leave?”
A knock sounded from below the floorboards, then another, louder, so loud it surrounded me. So hard it jumped me into the air for half a second.
I scrambled to my feet and backed away. “Someone’s trying to get in.”
But it was no longer my voice, my words. I’d thrown up the iron too.
Poh reached for me, seeming unaware that the entire floor juddered and shook beneath her. The knocking persisted and echoed against my skull. With trembling hands, I patted my pants pockets, twice, three times, where I’d stashed more iron cubes and glass cylinders with stoppers to put the ghosts in. Empty. All empty. When had I done that?Whyhad I done that? The only iron I had was in the pile of sick in the corner, and every shudder throughout the room dripped it closer to the edge of a floorboard where it would vanish forever. I leaped for it—or tried to, but the quaking room tossed me to the floor once again.
“Poh!” I shouted, whipping around. “Poh!”
But she was gone. With stinging eyes, I searched the entire room, but she’d left me. I was all alone here in this continuous spasm.
As soon as I realized it, laughter bubbled up over my tongue, nasally and familiar, and not mine at all. Terror punctured my heart. Oh Feozva, no. What was happening to me? I crushed my hands over my ears and rolled myself into a small ball, praying, hoping that none of this was real.
“Nesbit, get out of my head,” I ordered, most of it a series of clicks.
You’d rather I hurt your baby?
“NO!” I rushed to my feet and tore out the door like I could outrun him. But of course I couldn’t. His ghost lurked within me, and I had no idea how to get rid of him. His laugh both followed after me and ripped free from my scaled mouth.
The lights blinked above my head as I hurtled myself out into the servants’ passageway. A gust of frigid air tainted with a rotten fruit smell swept over my face and stalled my feet. With my heart shredding through my rib cage, I stopped at the bend in the corridor.
I had no iron. I was all alone in a house where both the dead and the living would kill me without a second thought. The ghosts inside me had free reign.
And around this corner, something waited for me. I could feel it, a creeping cold.
I glanced behind me at the closed door of the spasming room. There hadn’t been anything in there I could pick apart for iron, and even if I did go back, that room would knock my wits from me, such as they were. That was the only door in this dead-end part of the maze I was in, so forward was the only way.
My breaths plumed in front of me as familiar dread needled down my skin and scales. I didn’t have to be afraid. I’d faced my terrors aboard theVicious, and nothing could compare with those experiences. I steeled myself for what I needed to do in the very next moment—and turned the corner.
From around it, soulless black eyes tracked my movement. I skidded to a stop. A tall, emaciated man with a black suit and white gloves stood there waiting for me. A bloody gash slashed across his mouth.
“So...hungry.” His voice sounded rusted out...and desperate.
I took a step backward, shriveling away from him.
“They...starved...me,” he croaked.
Another step back.
“You know what I did?” A covered silver tray appeared in his white-gloved hands.
Another and another step, my heartbeat skipping.
His voice dropped to a low growl that rippled toward me from all directions. “I ate them.”
The lights blinked out.
