Dire Straits by C.P. Rider

Author:C.P. Rider
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: made into an audio-read
Publisher: VC Group, LLC
Published: 2023-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE PAIN WAS A BIG THING. A grotesque thing. Immense. All. Everything. The combined mass of Earth, our universe, and everything in it sitting atop my body, pulverizing me until I was nothing more than a soul.

Silence. An absence of sound so profound my ears ached from the loss.

Then it all stopped.

The pain. The crushing feeling. Sound rushed in, along with sight, and the ability to move.

"Wake up, siren."

Air entered my lungs as if pumped into them by a machine, and I immediately rolled to one side, fetching up against a concrete wall. I peered around the room, my gaze brushing over rough concrete walls, floor, and ceiling. There was a door seven or eight feet to my left, but it might have been miles away for all the good it did me.

A cell. There were no bars, but it was a cell.

Sweat broke through my skin in cold pinpoints of pain. My breath caught in my chest and stuck there—my throat squeezed shut. I slowed my inhalations and held in my panic so my enemy wouldn't see how rocked I was.

Claustrophobia had the worst timing.

"There's nowhere to run and it's pointless to try." The voice was a combination of lilting angel and gravelly demon. It was the voice of an abuser and a flatterer, and though androgynous in tone, it felt feminine in some gauzy, undefined way.

"Who are you?" My voice was sandpaper on coarse wood. Whispery, rough.

"Don't you recognize me?"

I rolled over. A buzzing, electric pain drove through my shoulder muscles. The metallic scent of blood assaulted my nose.

"Eve?"

She smiled, and like her strange voice, the expression conveyed an almost grandmotherly kindness edged with the rusty, nicked blade of a well-used machete.

Her presence was similar. Her features were vaguely otherworldly—ghostly white skin and hair, icy blue eyes, long slender limbs. The lines around her mouth and eyes were deep, giving her the look of a person between sixty and eighty. She was beautiful, and also the ugliest thing I'd ever seen.

"I am Vox Primo, as you are Vox Diaboli. There are few people like us. We would be considered the most endangered species in our world if paranormals cared about such things." Her voice was like the inside of a freezer. "And they should."

"Vox Primo?" I rasped.

She lifted a pale brow. "Primo, as in first. I am the first voice. I am Eve."

"Shouldn't it be Prima or Prim—feminine or neuter?" I asked, demonstrating, in one question, the entirety of my knowledge of Latin.

"My title is exactly what it is supposed to be," she replied icily.

Fair enough. I rubbed at my throat. "Did you do something to my voice?"

"Yes. I took it away."

She said it without a trace of evasion, and her confidence infused me with fear. "How? What are you?"

"I am the nothing that frightens." Eve's gaze spidered into mine. "I am the silence that haunts."

The room grew chilly enough for me to see my breath.

"I am the null that terrifies."

My teeth chattered and my body twitched from the cold.

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