"I think I'm dying."
I wasn't even aware I spoke aloud until Shade replied in his coldly amused way, "A bit dramatic, don't you think?"
"No." I swallowed thickly. "No, I really can't move anymore. I'm... I'm done."
He knelt before me. "Here. Have an ice cube."
Despite myself, I let out a pained laugh. He was treating me like a horse he could goad into doing tricks with the promise of bits of sugar.
"I don't think ice will solve this problem," I said, accepting the sphere into my mouth regardless. Truthfully, it did make me feel marginally better, temporarily subduing the repressive heat that had been growing since dawn. "I've pushed my body harder these last couple days than I've ever done in my life, without any food to fuel it. I can't keep this up forever. I just — I can't."
"You're going to give up when you're so close?" I heard the judgement in his voice, as though to say, 'I thought better of you'.
His provocations failed to fill my limbs with outraged strength the way they used to. I simply couldn't move, not for myself, not for anyone else, not even to spite him.
Honestly, I'd wasted enough energy on him — my enemy — and all his taunts, his cryptic non-answers, so I didn't feel bad about not responding, when even moving my tongue around words proved too daunting a task, the effort indescribable. Too tired to speak, to move, to think and to breathe.
Maybe I'd die in that spot, or maybe I would wake up tomorrow miraculously rejuvenated, ready to carry on. Maybe, maybe, maybe... So many maybes.
Without warning, I felt pressure under my ribs, and then on my thigh as he whisked me off the ground. A gasp involuntarily fled my lips at the impact of my stomach colliding with his shoulder, and although I never particularly fantasized about being carried by a man, if I had, I liked to have imagined that my expectations of the experience would have differed from my reality. Perhaps a bride lovingly carried through the threshold of her new marriage home. Being carted around like a sack of potatoes, my top half flung over the back of a man I despised probably wouldn't have made the final cut.
My protests at this breech of dignity got lost somewhere between my brain and my mouth, fizzing out like a spark on too thin a trail of gunpowder.
I wanted to ask why, for the thousandth time, why?
Tell me what you want from me, and why you haven't just taken it?
I stood no chance of stopping him, we both knew that much. He had every opportunity available to him to take and take and take and never stop taking until I was dead, yet he didn't. At the very least, instead of tiring himself out by trekking through the woods with me over his shoulder, he could have teleported us wherever he pleased. Realistically, he could have done that long before now. At any point during our time there.
None of those thoughts made way to sound. They stayed, swirling torrentially around my head as though in a stoppered bottle I couldn't open.
"Open up," he'd occasionally murmur, forcing ice cubes past my chapped lips.
Open up, open up...
The fatigue keeping my words contained held strong, so inside they stayed.
During my intermittent forays into the waking world, my senses dulled, narrowing around the constant, rhythmic sound of his heartbeat pressed against my ear, the slight whooshing of his cloak flapping around his knees, the predictability of his breathing that lulled me in and out of sleep like a loud, ticking clock.
Inhale.
Exhale.
In.
Out.
I wasn't certain how long we went on like that, hours flashing by disguised as minutes. A blink and the moon crossed across the sky, stars and clouds rearranged. Occasionally, my dead-limbed swaying subsided, leading me to believe Shade stopped to rest briefly, before dutifully continuing on, hopefully to the edge of his promised road, though he could have been taking me anywhere.
He spoke to me through the hours. I woke to his voice softly filling the silence on more than one occasion, only catching snippets, before sinking under for the millionth time. I never responded, even to the strongest stimuli. The road to civilization became a mirage in the distance, an oasis in the desert I dreamed of, but stood no chance of actually reaching. Did it exist? Did it not? It mattered little either way. The result was the same.
"We tried it your way," I caught Shade saying, or maybe I imagined that, too. Awareness that we'd once again paused for a rest trickled through the membrane between unconscious and conscious thought. "But your way no longer aligns with my best interests."
That would have been a frightening statement, had I still possessed the strength to fear.
I forced opened my eyes, blinking the fogginess away with slow fluttering sweeps of my eyelashes. On instinct, I searched out my villain, because, in a twisted way, I felt a degree of personal possession over him. Was I not intertwined in his evil doing more than just about anyone else?
The ground, although still uncomfortable, was softer than it had any right to be, and my semi-permanent frown carved deeper lines down my hollowed cheeks as I took in the fabric beneath me. That blasted cloak! I whipped my head around so fast my vision briefly went dark and I had to fight back the instinct to lie down awhile longer for my blood to rush back up to my brain.
He wasn't there. Shade was gone.
I scanned my surroundings more carefully for any signs I possibly missed the first time, coming to two startling conclusions: one, he'd left me; and two, he'd left me lying somewhere impossible. The noise was almost deafening after so long with only the breeze brushing on leaves greeting my ears. A distant roar of a highway, slamming doors, the rising wail of sirens. Lights buzzed overhead, white letters over a red backdrop: Emergency.
A tightness constricted the back of my throat, a swell of emotion I found hard to put into words. Some part of me truly hadn't believed I'd ever get that far, and the rest refused to reconcile where I was with how I came to be there, fleeing, stalked, followed, and then carried by Shade.
Carried. In his arms. For hours. Days?
Teleported by him, too, despite my protestations that I didn't trust him to take us anywhere. Yet, there I was, teleported not to a dungeon, but to a hospital.
"Your way no longer aligns with my best interests," he said. My way? Carving my own path to a rescue? Or allowing me to kill myself for my stubborn refusal to allow him to teleport me again?
He went against my wishes to save my life.
No. I shook my head, regretting the motion the instant I felt my brain sloshing against the inner walls of my skull. Definitely not saved. He made it perfectly clear everything he did served himself in the end. That this also served me, too, could only be a lucky coincidence, of which I would need to wait and see how it benefitted him.
I tried to rise, tried to inspire a surge of adrenaline to flood my legs and shoot me up to my feet, but adrenaline had been the only thing sustaining me for too long. I was depleted and shaking from things other than fear and cold. Nonetheless, I managed to crawl, inch after painful inch, to the clear hospital doors, dragging the cloak after me. The cloak grounded me, reminding me that everything I went through had been real. I needed it with the same urgency that I needed to think of my dads and Alexia to maintain my will to live. I needed a confirmation of my own sanity during the most insane time of my life.
The doors parted for a stout woman, hair pulled into a tidy bun at the back of her head. Her mauve scrubs and name tag pinned over her breast denoted her to be staff of some kind.
"Please!" I called, knowing they possibly couldn't hear me. My voice was hoarse and raspy, strange to my own ears. She glanced up from typing away on her phone as she walked, doing a double take. "Help! I'm—"
"What's your name?" she cut me off, looking wary in her approach, sticking her phone in her pocket.
"My name is Lily, Lily Burdett, I was—"
"Kidnapped. I know." Her chin jut up in a questioning nod. "You're the one on the news, right?
"The — the news?" I repeated, blinking hard to make sense of what she was saying through my fogged out brain, delirious from a cocktail of dehydration, exhaustion, and starvation.
"You're famous," she said matter-of-factly. "The whole country's looking for you. Everyone thinks you're dead."