Sound of Madness: A Dark Royal Romance by Maria Luis

Author:Maria Luis [Luis, Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alkmini Books, LLC
Published: 2020-12-02T18:00:00+00:00

28

Rowena

One staggering step takes me away from the loo, and then yet another and another, until I’m running clear across my bedroom. My feet are bare, my naked flesh damp from a late night shower. It doesn’t stop me from throwing open the heavy drapes, heedless to wandering eyes down in the garden, and shoving my nose against the chilled glass.

Light cuts through the darkness.

A car winding through the dense sycamore trees that bracket Swain’s Lane.

I follow the glowing head lamps without blinking, terrified that if I do, it’ll prove to be only a mirage. A bout of wishful thinking after days of quashing every seed of hope within me. The car disappears a moment later, around the bend toward Highgate Cemetery, but it’s enough.

Enough for me to face the cavern-like darkness of my bedroom and make a break for it.

I dive for the desk and put greedy fingers to the lamp string. One tug and warm, yellow light splices across the wood. I stare at the varying shades of oak, my heart racing fast, fast, faster, before I’m rushing to each nightstand, and the switch by the door, and, finally, to the loo, where it all started with a feather-like shadow darting across my vision when I reached for the bath towel.

A shadow when I was already encased in total darkness.

I want to laugh.

Instead, with my arms locked across my middle, and water droplets dripping from my body to the rug, I slowly turn around. Please, please, please be real. My shoulders curl inward and a sob aches to burst free and this time, I don’t do a single thing to stem the tears that burn the backs of my eyes.

Light pervades the room, revealing everything I’ve seen for years but never thought to see again. The rocking chair in the far-left corner, where my grandmother used to hold me as a child. Behind the sleigh bed, a mural of Ben Bhraggie overlooking the tiny coastal town of Golspie, its blue-oiled bluffs sharp and distinct against a cloudy afternoon sky. The yellow-striped blanket that rests over the footboard, its hand-stitched threads looking worn with age and love.

A birthday gift from Mum the year before she died.

Choking back a sob, I reach for something solid to support my unsteady frame—and graze wood.

The wardrobe.

I step toward it, toward the mirror that Hugh covered, only to slam to a halt when an unexpected shadow flies from my periphery to the center of my vision. It hovers there, a black mark layered over the wardrobe’s filigreed wood.

No.

No, no, no!

Shoving down panic, I close my eyes gingerly. Don’t you dare think the worst. Dr. Matthews said that the woman . . . the woman who fell—hadn’t she seen dark streaks when her eyesight returned? Floaters, Matthews called them. An improvement, some might say, over seeing nothing at all.

A floater, if that’s what this is, will not be the end of me.

“Broken, but never defeated,” I whisper to the empty room.

Damien told me to harness the darkness, to own it with all my heart, and I do that now.

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