The Demon Race by Alexandria Warwick

Author:Alexandria Warwick [Warwick, Alexandria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wolf Publishing
Published: 2018-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

She was sinking. Sinking into warm, deep waters. They tugged her down to a murky, gray existence, where shadows twined around her leaden limbs, absorbing into her skin until they disappeared below the surface. A faint light pierced through the haze but could not penetrate the water’s deep.

Memories drifted, hollowed-out, senseless. A bird fluttering its wings behind the bars of a gilded cage. A girl peering into a body of water, her reflection depicting black, soulless eyes and a mouthful of broken teeth. And yet another of a smiling young man, telling her to hold on, hold on.

Wanting to wake coaxed her nearer to the surface, but darkness held her under. Not yet, it whispered. The agony grew steadily worse. Flames licked through her fingers, a shredding heat that ripped open her skin and ate away flesh. It consumed her. Burrowed into her bones until she knew nothing but fire and blindness and the deep ache of loss. If she’d had the ability to scream, she would have, but she could barely move, could barely breathe, and after struggling for so long against the pain, Namali let it carry her away. If this was death, she didn’t care anymore.

•••

An uneven rocking motion coaxed Namali awake, her drowsiness lifting as if it were dew burned away with the dawn. Peeling her crusted eyelids apart, she met a night so thick and dark it was like velvet drapes tumbling down from the heavens. It was true what people said: the world appeared most beautiful on the eve of death. She had always wondered how someone knew their time was at its end, but it must feel similar to how she felt now, as if some core spark or energy had depleted itself. Cool air brushed her feverish skin, and a musky odor wafted from the springy fur tickling her cheek, her neck bent at an awkward angle. She was tied to the back of a camel.

They had left the sand behind in exchange for hard-baked earth and pillars of rock. Weeds and stunted trees pushed between the cracks, clinging to the rock faces with their spindly roots. A few desert blooms unfurled their petals in the splash of moonlight, but otherwise it was a bland, colorless landscape: flat, gray, ruthlessly battered by the wind. The Great Southern Constellation—a line of ancient Malahadi kings—guided them south.

As Namali shifted to relieve the pressure of the rope cutting into her stomach, she accidentally bumped her right hand against the camel’s back.

The world flared red.

Her breath exploded in the quiet. Her muscles spasmed from trying to remain as still as possible, the hot flush of blood pulsing in her ears, beneath her clammy skin. She remembered, years and years ago, a sudden fall, the snap of broken bone, but this pain incinerated that memory into ash. A howl unrolled along her tongue and struck the back of her clenched teeth, over and over. White fire seared the edges of her consciousness, making it impossible to forget what the merchant had done.

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