Page 157 of Their Blood Rite

Three days and I live it all as she did. My bones break. My organs pop.

I die slowly… For three whole days.

When the death-delivering stone falls and my chest collapses, filling my mouth with thick blood, I return to the forest. To the arch of bones. I’m still on the floor. The moon is still high.

Moments have passed here, but for me, it’s been three days of torture. I’m so tired. So hungry and thirsty. Pain is all I know. I longed for death and it came. Now I'm alive again. My heart breaks.

My bones click and grind, and sweet air fills my body as I heal. I went through what she went through. I died how she died.

How Dorian murdered her.

‘You’ll heal. I promise,’ Archie says desperately. ‘You can do this. I know you can do this. Keep speaking the spell.’

I look at the book lying beside me. If I don’t read, he’ll trigger me.

‘I c-command thee,’ I whimper. ‘Mistress of darkness and death. Hel, of whom w-we serve. Our mother in the nothing. Return what was taken. Let them cross.’

I lift from the ground, struggling against an invisible noose.

The forest is gone. It’s dawn. Rain falls, and grey clouds swarm the sky. I’m atop the gallows with a rope around my neck, my feet twitch and kick.

Archie looks up at me, smiling at me with his hands in his pockets.

I hang for hours, slowly choking as I dangle from the rope.

I can’t breathe. I can’t think.

My eyes bulge, and my tongue swells. I feel my blood vessels pop.

Archie steps closer and sighs with relief as I finally die.

I jolt, and I’m back in the forest.

‘You’re almost there,’ Shaw calls over. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says sadly. ‘We will make this right. I promise you.’

‘Y-you said it would only be a m-moment of pain,’ I cry, rolling onto my side.

‘It’s been a moment. One more to go,’ he comforts. ‘Be brave. You can do this.’

To him, it’s been a moment.

Not to me.

‘Keep reading, Ashe,’ he says.

‘I c-command thee,’ I whimper. ‘Mistress of darkness and death. Hel, of whom w-we serve. Our mother in the nothing. Return what was taken. Let them cross.’

My arms rise above my head, and I’m lifted again from the ground. The invisible rope is not around my neck but my wrists. I hang there, seeing the guys look up at me.

Lightning flashes, and I’m here, but in a different time. I’m naked and tied to a cross, looking at Shaw as a storm rages in the distance.

He has a blade in his hand.

‘I sentence you to die,’ he says. ‘In a manner befitting your kind.’

Cut.

I scream.

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