A Girl in Black and White (Alyria 2)
“You’re right,” the girl whispered.
Isadora watched hesitantly as her granddaughter caught the drops of blood dripping off the table in her little hand. “How so?” she managed to ask, the hair on the back of her neck raising.
“The princess does kiss the prince,” the little girl said, looking down in her cupped hand.
Isadora stared.
Her granddaughter’s dark eyes met hers, a small smile playing on her lips. “And then he stabs her in the heart,” she whispered, holding her hand above her; the blood dripped from her clenched fist onto the bodice of her dress in red rivulets.
Isadora froze, a chill sending ice down her spine.
“You told me you’d tell me a story, Grandmother,” the girl shook her head reproachfully, “you didn’t say you’d tell me mine.”
Goose bumps raised on the old woman’s arms for the first time in years, cold fear gripping her heart.
Blue began to tint the little girl’s pink lips like frost over glass. “Do you believe there is a place we all go when we die, where all our dreams come true?” she asked.
Isadora swallowed, holding her hand over her beating heart. “Yes.”
“If that’s true, then why is it so cold here?”
A tear dripped down Isadora’s cheek, her throat thick with a heavy sense of dread.
“There’s something you should know, Grandmother. A lesson to put away in your books.” The girl smiled white teeth and blue lips. “Not everyone gets a happily ever after.”
Isadora stood frozen to the floorboards, a cold draft seeping into her bones.
Her granddaughter noticed her discomfort, and cocked her head, running her bloody hands down the front of her dress, leaving a messy red stain in the center. “It’s okay, Grandmother. Nobody will get their happily ever after . . .” The fire flickered behind the little girl’s body as she glanced at the dead man on the table with an indifference that would always haunt Isadora.
Her granddaughter glanced up at her—eyes empty voids, deeper than the dark pits of Lake Clare. Ice trailed up the cottage walls, the fire dissipating with a hiss before the little girl’s eyes rolled back into her head as she fell to the floor.
Isadora was swept back in time, snippets of the past flashing through her eyes.
“If he finds her, she’ll be . . . she’ll be a calamity to us all. Don’t forget, Mother.”
A chill went down Isadora’s spine with the vague memory of the last time she’d seen her daughter.
“A calamity, huh? She looks innocent to me,” Isadora had said, glancing at the bundled infant her daughter had pushed into her arms.
“Then name her Calamity if that’s what it takes for you to remember, Mother. But don’t forget.”
Reina was more often wrong than right. So, Isadora hadn’t thought much of it until she pulled back the blanket, taking a good look at the infant. A shiver danced under her skin as she looked into the child’s eyes, seeing something dark in her gaze that told her caution first.
“Calamity,” she said softly.
“Calamity it is . . .”
One year ago, a stranger told me I would die.
She was right.
But my existence didn’t end. It was only different. Time had been measured by the burning of my lungs. The tick, a stinging blink in the dark. The tock, a swallow of salt water. And the pendulum, blond hair waving like a piece of lonely algae.
My existence became nothing but a burning cold that caressed with an abusive hand.
And then the silence.
A quiet so deafening I could still hear it when I closed my eyes, as if putting my ear to a shell. But instead of hearing the ocean waves, I heard nothing. Nothing but a silence running its finger down my spine.