Storm

Chapter Sixty-Seven

My eyes opened.

At least, I thought they did. As I stared upwards, the ceiling came in a bit blurry. As though everything were underwater.

I blinked. Blinked again.

Slowly, everything came more into focus.

Gray tiled floor beneath me. Dangling light fixtures. The stinging scent of antiseptic mixed with a tinge of body odor.

Where was I?

My arms were sore for some reason. So were my legs.

Who was I?

My mind was a jumbled mess. Everything seemed to take forever to compute. The thinly cushioned bed...no gurney...I was on. The freckles sprayed across my arms. The delicate pads of my fingertips, untouched by guns or daggers of any kind. The slimness of my wrists and arms. 

This wasn't me.

Was it?

I sat up. Nothing restrained me. The room I was in seemed to be more of a closet. Nobody else was with me. I was utterly alone. Nothing but a sole full length mirror on the opposite side of the room, pointed away from me.

It wasn't there by accident.

With careful movements, I pushed myself off the unstable metal gurney, nearly tipping it over. I flinched at the freezing contact of my bare feet on the cement ground.

Slowly, I made my way across the room and stood in front of the mirror.

Short red hair. Freckles. Blue eyes. Thin. No...gaunt.

Empty.

I screamed.

And then I ran.

I ran out the door. It hadn't been locked. I ran through a familiar basement, past a familiar desk, the memories flooding back and standing out in stark contrast with the present.

Because in those memories I wasn't...this.

Nobody tried to stop me. Nobody even flinched. Nobody even stared as I ran by.

It was as though they were used to this.

They left the door open intentionally.

I found the stairs up to the dark alleyway from which I'd come. I could barely see much of anything, but as I shoved through the door, I caught a quick glimpse of the older woman who'd done this. Her eyes gleamed as though she'd gotten what she wanted.

She had gotten what she wanted.

I took the stairs two at a time, tripping and skinning my knee at the top. I fell out of the door, hands splashing into a murky puddle, sick to the stomach. For a second, nausea overcame me. I tried to suck in air, but all my lungs could do was gasp.

My reflection stared back at me, those bright blue eyes eerily gazing from the watery depths. I smashed my palm into it, breaking the mirror vision. Drunkenly, I stood up and began to stumble down the alleyway towards the darker recesses.

I picked up the pace, moving alongside the damp and dirty wall, one hand pressed against the brick. I felt like I was falling over. Dizziness swamped me. Was this a side effect of what had been done to me? Was this some sort of malfunction, some sign that this was the end of the road?

I couldn't die now. Not with everything that had happened. Not with Noah not knowing the truth of this hell. Not with Asten and Ava possibly at the execution block. Not with January and Kyan and Max and Elijah God knows where. Not with every single person who I'd run into still struggling to survive, still waiting in line for their turn at the gallows.

What had happened to me?

It felt like my life had been on a downward spiral for the past months. Every little thing that could ever go wrong went wrong. Everything I thought I knew was destroyed, then destroyed again. I was ripped to pieces again and again and again and just when I thought I'd found a stable place to land, to recuperate, to re-gain what was taken, it all fell to pieces once more.

I wasn't even me anymore.

And Asten.

Asten.

Where was he? Why did he leave me?

Why would he ever do something so ridiculously stupid and selfish?

Why did he think I could make it on my own?

What if he was already dead? Had been dead for weeks? Weeks that I should have been mourning, but instead had been going on shopping trips and hanging out on Noah's couch.

I fell to my knees lost in the darkness of between buildings. I had no idea where I was.

My fingers went to the tips of my red hair. It was thin, thinner than I was used to. And a bright red that would stick out in a crowd from miles away. I wanted to rip it off. I wanted to tear everything, this entire body to shreds.

I hadn't consented to this.

I felt violated. Ruined. Taken apart. And I didn't even know where I was. I didn't know where my body was.

I forced myself to suck in slow breaths. I needed a clear mind. If I couldn't get over this dizziness, I would be stuck out here in the dark with absolutely nothing.

Or I could give up. I could lie in this dark alleyway forever. Allow this body that wasn't mine to rot into nothing. Everything was in shambles already.

When the snow had started, I'd imagined myself dangling off the edge of an infinite cliff. My mom died and I'd fallen, spiraling downwards into the deep. But I'd lived. And in living, somehow, I'd grasped onto an outcropping mid-fall, stopping myself from falling eternally. At least I'd thought.

With each new struggle, I'd fall again. And each time I found stability, I managed to break the fall. But eventually, you get to the point where you look up and no longer can see the sky. Where you've fallen so far you forget what the sunset looks like.

Now, I was falling. I was falling down into the darkest pits of hell, smooth walls on every side. Despair and dread waged a tug of war on my soul.

But each time I'd fallen before, there had always been some sort of outcropping. Something to latch onto. As I sat in the dark alleyway, puddle wetting my jeans, I saw that outcropping. Even the walls of hell aren't perfectly smooth.

Noah.

I had to get back to Noah.