Queen of the Dead by Stacey Kade

Author:Stacey Kade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction - Young Adult
Publisher: Disney Hyperion

When I woke, a suffocating blackness—the kind of dark your brain rebels against by creating fireworks and faces out of nothing just for something to see—pressed in on me from every side. I couldn’t move, couldn’t see…couldn’t breathe.

Stay calm. A good suggestion, but it didn’t help with the impossibly tight feeling in my chest and the screaming desire to inhale.

Was this it, the end? The nothingness, nonexistence Will had talked about? I’d had visions of burning pits of flame or watching myself disintegrate like bonfire ash in the wind. Never this darkness and unbearable closeness to something I couldn’t even see. I hadn’t felt this claustrophobic since I was six, and my dad had accidentally shut me in the closet designated for my mother’s dozen or so fur coats, stoles, and wraps. (I’d been playing runway model again, even though I’d gotten in trouble for it the week before. Hence the hiding in the closet with the furs instead of dragging them out and down to the front hall, which any reasonable person could see cried out for runway use. It had been like being trapped in an animal…one that was inside out.)

But the weird part about this, aside from unending darkness, was I was still me. Didn’t oblivion—as Will had described it—mean I wasn’t supposed to exist? Like maybe your name and the memory of your life was always right there on the edge of your awareness, but you couldn’t quiterecall it…forever.

Unless remembering was the point. I would know there was an existence other than this, and that was my punishment. To be stuck here, knowing what I could never have again, trapped in this unrelenting darkness forever…

No. Something about this didn’t seem right, and not just in the gigantically, cosmically unfair kind of way. Whenever I’d vanished before, lost control and let the negative energy wash me away, I had no memory of it. I didn’t exist during those times. They were just blanks. Like a night at a really bad party.

This, though, was different. I was here. Wherever here was.

I struggled to concentrate, trying to ignore the feeling that my lungs were about to burst. The last thing I remembered was…

It took a second for the memory to surface and then fall into place.

I’d been in Lily’s hospital room, borrowing her hand to deliver my message, but something had gone wrong. The force connecting my hand to hers had grown more powerful and started to pull me down. And I, unpleasant as it was to admit, had freaked out, caught between the unknown power tugging at me and my own fear and anger, which had slowly begun to consume me.

So, if this wasn’t the final nothingness, which seemed unlikely as I was still here and aware, unlike my other temporary bouts of nonexistence, then that left really only one other option…

Oh, no. No, no, no. If I could have shaken my head violently in refusal, I would have. This could not be. It would just be wrong, on so many levels.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.