Awakening by Natalie King

Author:Natalie King [King, Natalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742539737
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

She didn’t hear the thud but she saw the metal hit the polished wooden floor and skitter across it.

‘No!’ Zelie barged between the couple dancing near her, searching in the darkness, frustrated by the mirror balls that revolved above her, offering only small patches of light that disappeared as soon as they landed.

‘Tamás? Tamás!’ In her head she called over and over.

Finally she saw it and crashed down on her knees between the legs of gyrating students.

‘No,’ she whispered, her throat as hoarse and sore as if she’d been screaming for hours.

Shaking, she snatched it up. It was neither hot nor cold. She rubbed it between her hands, trying to get it back to the almost-comfortable temperature it had been when it last hung around her neck.

‘Oh man, sorry.’ Otis crouched down beside her. The chain hung from his fingers – or part of it did.

‘It just came apart in my hand.’

The music was a noise in her ears, and so was whatever Otis was saying. All the noise blanked out the thing she wanted to hear most. Holding the amulet in a clenched fist, her other hand wrapped around that, she strained to listen, to clear the fog that rolled in from every direction.

The burn mark on her chest had stopped hurting. There was nothing to hurt. Nothing to hear. Nothing to feel any more.

And that’s when she knew – when she admitted the truth she’d been too scared and too embarrassed to face.

Tamás hadn’t just been inside her head, but her heart too.

‘Tamás?’ Her lips moved but his name sounded only inside her – and echoed around those now-empty chambers.

He was gone.

Otis held the chain out to her but she ignored it. She stood, trying to break through the waves of panic so she could think. She had to think. He couldn’t have gone. It had only been seconds.

But the chain had snapped. The pendant had lost touch with her skin and Tamás had been torn from her.

She uncurled her fingers. It hurt, but she had to see it. She stared at the amulet in the palm of her hand. A grey, lifeless lump of metal. Battered and tarnished. Damaged beyond repair. It might as well have been dust – like how life eventually crumbled to nothing.

‘No!’ she shrieked silently. ‘No!’

‘Zelie?’

She heard a voice at a distance. But it wasn’t the voice she wanted.

‘Zelie, I’m sorry.’

She gazed around the room, vaguely seeing the other students, the concern on Otis’s face, Mr Webb suddenly walking towards her, looking even more worried.

None of that mattered.

She ran faster than she’d ever run in her life. Through the people, not seeing faces, only enough detail to dodge bodies on her way to the door. Outside was bitterly cold but she didn’t care. She just needed to get beneath the black night sky. And once out there she had to get far enough away from the pain. So she ran and ran. Turning down the nearest street, heading into the darkness.

‘Tamás?’ She couldn’t say his name any more for panting so hard.

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