Page 59 of Slaying the Vampire Conqueror

My voice was tight. I regretted my tone the minute the words left my lips. I didn’t know what was wrong with me tonight. Showing all kinds of things I shouldn’t.

The night was damp and foggy. The mist clung to my skin, indistinguishable from the faint sheen of sweat. The heat of the fire licked at the tip of my nose.

With eyesight, the flames would have been too bright to allow me to see the corpse of the rabbit, flesh melting, lick by lick, in the flames. But the threads allowed me to see it perfectly. The rabbit’s open eyes ran down its cheeks like cracked eggs.

“Your heartbeat is fast,” Atrius said.

I gritted my teeth. Suddenly, I understood acutely why he had been so short with me the first night I helped him. It was unpleasant for someone to see things about you without your permission.

“I’m focusing,” I muttered.

Normally, starting a Threadwalk was like walking into a lake, step by step, allowing the water to accept you with each one.

Tonight, it was like my toes touched the water and froze.

The tension pulled tighter in my muscles. My heartbeat quickened another beat.

Weaver damn this.

I gritted my teeth. I did not walk into this Threadwalk smoothly.

I leapt into it like hurling myself off a cliff, crashing into the water below.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The water was blood.

I was drowning in it. I drew in a gasp, and it pooled in my lungs, burned in my chest. The impact of my body hitting the liquid hurt, the force of stone against flesh. The threads blurred past me.

I was falling.

Falling past them.

Falling into this sea of blood.

Move, Sylina. Move move move.

I thrust my hands out just in time.

Pain ripped through my palms—but I’d caught a thread, barely, against what felt like an avalanche of pressure pushing me down. It took all my strength to pull myself up as the thread ate into my palms.

My head broke through the blood. I drew in a choked gasp of air and wiped it from my face—or tried to, while my palms bled, sliced open from the razor-sharp thread.

Center yourself.

But it was difficult to do that here, with the world swirling in chaos. An overwhelming sensation of…nothing, smallness, helplessness weighed down on my shoulders. I managed to get my feetpositioned on the thread, but my entire body reviled the idea of taking a single step.

Enough.My inner voice sounded so much like the Sightmother’s, a single harsh command.

I walked.

Every step was labored, difficult, as if fighting against harsh wind. The mist grew thicker. The blood around my feet rose with the slow inevitability of an incoming tide. The dread in my heart rose, too, beat by beat, step by step.

Show me something, Weaver,I whispered.

Her words were distant, intangible, like a collection of sounds of the wind.

Perhaps you do not wish to see.

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