Page 12 of Blood Vows
The sound echoed back, hollow and distorted. The small window behind me glowed faintly with moonlight, though it offered no comfort. Because the shadows beneath it were moving, stretching, shifting, coming alive.
Hands.
Dozens of them, dark and inhuman, slid across the floor like liquid ink. They clawed toward me, reaching for my ankles, my wrists, my throat. I stumbled back until the cold metal of thedoor pressed into my spine, breath tearing from my lungs. The shadows coiled and rose, serpentine, alive with purpose.
They were his.
His darkness.
The same power I had seen twist around him, that had slaughtered the mob like they were paper.
Only now, that same darkness wanted me. They reached for me, those shadowed serpents, eager to touch, to claim, to consume.
“No!” I cried, slamming my fists against the metal door again and again until my hands ached and burned. My voice cracked with desperation.
“Help me!”
A low, sinister laugh filled the space, one that did not belong to him this time.
It was her.
The witch.
Her voice slithered through the air like poison.
“You thought he’d save you, little rabbit? He only keeps what he wants to break.” The walls groaned. Then they moved. The cell began to close in, stone grinding against stone as the space shrank around me. The air turned heavy, hot, impossible to breathe. I clawed at the door, screaming again, my voice raw.
Panic seized me, and somewhere in the madness, I remembered that old superstition, the one whispered by children and dreamers alike. When you fall in a dream, you always wake before you hit the ground. That if you didn’t…you’d never wake at all.
Would the same be true here?
If the walls reached me, if they crushed me, would that mean death in the waking world? The thought froze my blood. My heart pounded hard enough that I could hear it, feel it, a steady drumbeat counting down my seconds. I thought of the dreamshe had made me endure. The one where I fell through the floor, the drop endless, the fear absolute. He hadn’t let me die then.
He had saved me.
Because even in his nightmares, he had refused to let me fall.
But he had also terrified me, broken me, made me beg.
In this dream, I could still hear my own voice pleading with him, the desperate girl I had been, begging the monster who haunted her to save her from the monsters he had created.
It wasn’t forgiveness I had ever given him. It was surrender. But now, as the walls crept closer, the witch’s laughter rising to a fever pitch, I found myself whispering again, not in fear, but in defiance.
“Vasileios.”I breathed.
And somewhere in the dark, even through the dream, I swore I felt him answer. A pulse of shadow. A flicker of heat. The whisper of my name, carried through the black.
“Vanessa”
But it wasn’t enough to break through.
I screamed, again and again, my throat raw, my fists pounding until pain exploded through my bones as though they might splinter beneath my skin. The door stayed unmoving, cold, unfeeling. My sobs turned to shouts, my shouts to wordless noise.
The room was alive around me.
Furniture scraped across the floor, the sound of metal legs shrieking against stone.
The narrow cot and the dented bucket, my only companions in this nightmare, were moving, drawn toward the centre of the room as each was pushed by the walls closing in around me.
