The Paper Magician (The Paper Magician Series) by Holmberg Charlie N

Author:Holmberg, Charlie N. [Holmberg, Charlie N.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: 47North
Published: 2014-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

THE WALLS OF THANE’S heart pressed against her on all sides, pulsing with their loud PUM-Pom-poom and drowning out the unnatural light. They squeezed against her, tight and tighter, as if she were being run over by an empty buggy with more and more passengers climbing inside it, making its wheels crush her. It felt like drowning.

Her own muscles tightened as adrenaline surged through her body. She couldn’t breathe. Heat from the walls seeped past her clothes and into her skin, making her too warm, too hot. One would think a heart disconnected from its person as long as this one had been would feel cold, but not Emery Thane’s heart. Emery Thane’s heart defied the physics of everything Ceony had come to know over her nearly two decades of life. Though unless she found a way out, she wouldn’t see her twentieth year!

A tear squeezed through clenched eyelids. She clawed at the walls, trying to shove past them, gasping for air but finding none. She tasted blood on her lips—blood that wasn’t hers. She inched forward, pushing back against the flesh that pushed against her and tugged at her bag. Her head began to pound, her vision blurred—

A surge of blood from the river at her feet pushed against her rump, shoving her through the valve. Her hand touched open air. Digging her heel into flesh, Ceony pulled herself into the second chamber of Thane’s heart, gasping and choking, spitting and wheezing.

She bit down hard on her own teeth, sucking in mouthfuls of hot air, trying to calm her own trembling. Trying to prevent a sob. It’s over, it’s over, she told herself, and it helped somewhat. I chose to do this. I can do this.

I have to do this.

She had barely caught her breath when she heard a suctioning sound from the valve behind her.

Ceony looked over her shoulder. The river that had pushed her out of the valve—and into a chamber almost identical to the first—continued to flow after her, filling the gutters around the edges of the heart and beyond. Flooding them . . .

“No, no,” Ceony said, shooting up with a renewed vigor. Her clothes, sticky from the bloody valve, clung to her clammy skin. “Stop, stop. Please stop.”

But the blood—thin blood, watery blood—continued to gush from the valve and overflow the rivers, inching closer and closer to Ceony’s feet.

Ceony backstepped to the center of the chamber, the highest ground. The first tides of blood touched her shoe.

Her skin turned to ice. Her lips numbed. “Thane!” she shouted, hugging her bag tightly to her. “Let me out of here!”

She took another step, the blood up to her ankles. At this rate it would fill the entire chamber in minutes. Ceony couldn’t swim. She had nowhere to go.

She really was going to drown.

“Thane!” she screamed, trembling from chin to ankle. Even her cry shook.

Anything but this. Anything but drowning.

The blood continued to flow, the heart’s thumping deafening. She squeezed her eyes shut, released her bag, and pressed her palms to her ears.

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