And finally it was too much when eight, maybe nine, maybe ten of the hooded figures found enough of their senses to pin me to the table I now knew was a stone altar, splaying my arms to my sides, fully exposing my chest. I clawed at the stone with blood-slicked fingers, a silent scream begging to work its way out of my body. The dagger fell.
I don’t like recalling how that felt. I don’t like rewinding to that night and bringing back the sensation of cold metal already wet with my own blood first pricking at my skin, then sliding further, deeper down as it cut its way through my flesh. To say that it was excruciating would be an understatement. I was a frog on a dissecting table, a patient under some mad doctor’s scalpel, caught between the instinct of struggling to free myself and the knowledge that every buck and twitch of my dying body meant that the knife would only have a chance to bite deeper, faster.
That night I learned that the coolness of metal saps away quickly when it’s brought against heat, say, when it’s sheathed in human flesh, when it’s drinking blood. Tears blurred my vision as I watched my chest blossom crimson, blood mingling with the sweat on my skin, warm, thick, inviting. Strange that my dad and I had an altercation over my sense of purpose just earlier that night. This was my purpose, to become a sacrifice. I groaned against the pain, at the sensation of agonizing fullness stuck inside me. Finally I had amounted to something.
At some point, I knew that the tip of the blade had entered my heart. It might have been around the time when the pain faded to numbness, when the searing heat of my own blood pooled across my body cooled to ice. The room felt like the inside of a freezer, the stone at my back like a slab of frost. It went dark, and for the very first time, I knew what it meant to die.
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Chapter 3
And as clarity and stillness follow the storm, so did light pierce through darkness. Dramatic, maybe, but give me a break. I was dead. Or at least I thought I was. Who survives a knife in the heart?
Me, as it turned out. Me, as the Lorica gently explained.
It was scorchingly brilliant when I opened my eyes, and I’m sure you’ll forgive me for thinking I was in heaven. Some place like it, if you don’t believe in that sort of thing. Of course, that gave me no end of confusion. I wasn’t a bad guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I wasn’t an angel, either.
But she was.
For a moment I hesitated, squinting through the haze of eyes still gummy with sleep. “Muh,” I muttered, swallowing the word as soon as I realized what sound my mouth was trying to form. Mom.
It was impossible. She’d been gone too long now. I was there when they buried her, and dad was too. This woman could have almost passed for her in the murk of the filter between wakefulness and sleep, but as I forced my eyelids to lift, I saw the starker differences.
She stood against the light, the pale perfection of her short-cropped hair like a halo bathed in florescence. Her lips were tight with concern, but her eyes smiled, and in the light of things they seemed to glow golden, peering out of a face as smooth and as white as hewn marble. Like I said, an angel, and not at all the woman I thought would be my future boss.
She smiled, and everything seemed all right.
I opened my mouth to say something, instead finding my lips smacking from disuse and dryness. I think I moaned for a good second before I remembered what it was to speak, but even when I found the words to say, they came out in a tumbling slur.
“I – wha. Where?”
The woman’s smile grew wider. It kept me safe.
“Someplace you won’t be hurt. Everything’s going to be okay now, Mr. Graves.”
That’s right. Dustin Graves. I still knew my name. That was a good sign at least. I tried nodding, except that it felt like I did nod, except that whatever drugs were still coursing through my system stopped me from actually tilting my head. I planted my elbows in the mattress, lifting my head off my pillow – and screamed when my chest ripped like fire.
The woman raised her hands placatingly, resting long fingers against my shoulders. I resisted, straining against her touch, but the exertion of movement raked like talons across my skin. I screamed again.
“We’re only trying to help, Mr. Graves. You’re wounded. We’ll give you something for the pain, but for now, you have to rest.”
She was right. Maybe it was the drugs, or maybe it was the shock of it, my mind misremembering events and shoving them way to the back of my memory, but how could I have forgotten so soon? The last time I was conscious there were six full inches of metal sticking out of my chest.
How the hell had I survived that? I winced as I tilted my head lower to glance at myself, feeling the pinch in my chest as I did. And I tried not to gasp. Couldn’t tell you if I was more bothered by the pain or by the sight of fresh crimson bleeding into the bandages wrapped across my torso.
“Thanks,” I groaned. “I think.”
The woman smiled, and somehow the room went brighter. “When you’re ready, I’ll call in a cleric to deal with your injury.”
What was this, a role-playing game? Clerics? “Don’t you mean a doctor? Or a nurse. A medic? And you can call me Dust.”
“No,” she said, half-chuckling. “I meant a cleric. I know you’ve seen a lot of strangeness already, Dustin, but you may as well be prepared for things to get stranger still. There is much you don’t know about the world.” She paused, then gestured to me, then to herself. “Our world, now.”
“I don’t understand. Uh – ”
“Thea,” she said. “You can call me Thea. And of course, yes. It’ll take some time for you to understand yet, which is why we need to ease you into things.” She folded her hands and laughed, an easy, melodic sound, the kind of laugh someone might use to break the bad news to a patient. “We can’t just take you from zero to twenty, as they say.” Somehow the words hit me with all the gravity of a doctor announcing that they’d found that my body was half tumor, and I had minutes to live.
“What are you trying to say?”