Page 71 of The Quiet
This wasn’t Peter.
From the darkness strode an oil-soaked creature, an extension of this massive beast and likely the most human thing this monster was capable of producing. Worm like ripples vibrated through its skin as if even now, it struggled to keep such a form.
“Ba-ker.”
She recognized the name and then, with deep and powerful horror, she recognized the voice.
Purple light radiated over Amiel’s form in a sickly glow. She was taller than Peter with black, jagged looking hair that framed her face and shoulders like a lion’s mane. She wore a long, layered coat with bloodstained fur and high collars.
“It is an ho-nor,” she said, speaking words brokenly as if her teeth snapped and cracked them upon release. She wore the uniformed boots of a Rider of Saint East she’d eaten, resting a forearm across her knee as she hunkered down to Ella’s level. Ella’s eyes moved from her eyes to her fingers, the broken arrow on each finger covered by a different ring. They were gold and silver, with gems and designs, no consistency seemed to matter. Blood was caked into every crevice of them, the rings taken like trophies from hands she’d eaten.
“Ah, ah, ah,” Amiel breathed. “Look-k at me.”
She tilted Ella’s chin up with dark fingers, searching her eyes, back and forth as if she were reading them.
“Where is-s-s Peter?” Amiel said, and Ella started to feel strange, distant, occupied.
“He-llo,” Amiel whispered.
Ella gasped, feeling as if the word had been spoken through her. She jerked back hard, her skull knocking back against the wall.
Memories of her and Peter surfaced to the forefront of her mind as if called violently forward.
“I want to talk-k-k to him,” Amiel whispered, placing a hand on Ella’s face. Amiel moved one of the rings slowly across her cheek and Ella winced as it cut her.
She felt a warm bead of blood slide down the side of her cheek, and urged her body to move, but Amiel’s eyes held her as if she’d reached in and grabbed Ella’s bones.
Amiel rubbed her fingers together as liquid formed between them, dark as night like oil.
“Madness will eat-t your blood,” Amiel said. “Peeling people back-k in layers. I’m sure you will remember him then.”
Ella tried to pull away but Amiel grabbed the back on her head. “It won’t hurt-t for very long,” she said, fingers nearing Ella’s face.
A drop slid onto her cheek and then closer to the cut. Ella tried to focus on Lambspeak, but Amiel’s nails deepened into her skin. “No time lik-k-ke the present,” she whispered, her eyes locked with Ella’s, arresting her mind into the present where Lambspeak could not exist, and without comprehending, Ella knew that Amiel had always stopped her prey from veering off, from thinking of anything but the pain.
It awakened something inside her, a floodgate of emotion and memory.
This is how they’d all suffered, all of the slaves, all of the victims. They’d seen these same eyes, and those purple rings were gates to more than just physical suffering.
Ella remembered watching Jolie in front of the statues of the Strike.
You know what they really are don’t you? They’re our sins, she’d said.They live offof all those things we don’t want to feel, and we worship them for it.
Now those words rang true, because looking at Amiel’s monstrous face, Ella could only see her own monster. Fear, perhaps, had been Ella’s own form of worship.
In Amiel’s eyes she saw Valentine, Khalid, Marnie, Jolie, and every other person who’d given her their best even in their brokenness. She’d eventually disregarded them, rushing to forget them as she’d clawed to the safeties and freedoms she’d enjoyed at their expense.
They became rats to her and even the Strike had loved them more than she had.
Therein lied her unforgivable sins, and she’d come all this way to seek them out.
She’d come all this way for judgment at the feet of her monster.
Amiel would devour her body as the shame Amiel awoke devoured her spirit.
Ella wondered, her mind drifting off, if every one of Amiel’s victims died this way.
CHAPTER 20
