Page 84 of The Reaper's Vice

e

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e.

I shake my head, staring hard at the walls that seem like they’re…dripping?

The man in the bird mask starts laughing. Although, the longer I listen, the more I realize it’s not laughter at all.

It’sscreaming.

And it’s coming from me.

I try to close my eyes against the barrage of color that swarms my vision, blaring, pushing, scraping against my skull, begging to be let in. It bounces off every dead and living thing, taking root in the masked man and imbuing him with a disgusting, puke-green aura.

My eyes are dry. So dry. So very, very dry. Yet I can’t take them off that light. Light that I could reach out and touch.Taste.

I stick my tongue out to test my theory, and the cackling grows louder. And this time, it is laughter that fills the space, and it makes me sick.

S o

s

I

c

k

.

I pitch to the side as my stomach flips, emptying the meager contents onto the floor as the drugs hammer my nervous system.Am I dying? Is this what dying feels like?

I try to stand, only to fall sideways onto the floor as the room flips sideways. My movements are sluggish and dreamlike, and when I pull my hand up to my face, I’m surprised to find it glowing. I twist it in the air, marveling how the moonlight dances off my skin in a gorgeous iridescence of color.

I am made of light. It’s seeping from me, pouring out of my skin.

I have no doubt it’s due to the drugs, but I’m so enamored with the sight, I don’t even notice the bird-masked man hauling me from the ground by my armpits. Nor do I notice him placing me in the small black chamber filled with water. I don’t even notice when he slams the lid closed, bathing me in pitch black.

It takes me a while to notice I’m weightlessly floating in the water. When I do, every nerve in my body twinges, begging me to get out of this contraption. To be free of my mind.

I press my hand to the ceiling, and cool metal greets my palm, sending me into a downward spiral as the material refuses to budge.

Oh God. I’m trapped. Trapped in here. Trapped in my mind.

My breathing picks up pace until I’m about to pass out, which only spreads gasoline onto the wildfire that is my anxiety when I realize if I do, I’ll drown in this cursed chamber.

“No.” I bang my fist bloody against the ceiling as I refuse to believe what I know to be true. “No. No. No!”

The walls start to close in the more my breath picks up, the metal sliding, crunching, crushing my body closer together with every blink. It presses into my skin, into my bones—squeezing, squishing, twisting my organs into raisins.

My ribs pierce my insides, bleeding me from the inside out as my skull is crushed to a pulp, my brains spread out with the rest of me—a treat for the vultures circling above.

Only, when I blink, it’s not a vulture circling—it’s a crow. And it opens that terrible toothed beak and inches closer, whispering darkness into the air.

“Worms,” it whispers. “Tasty, juicy worms. Ripe for the picking.”

“No, please!” I try and fail to raise an arm to shield the most delicate part of myself. “Please don’t.”

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