Page 1 of Of Sockets Of Stitches (Unworldly City #4)

Chapter One

The luxury of time.

T he creature circled at night, as far as I could tell. In this place of haze and numbness of body and sense, time had become a quaint memory. Perhaps the creature circled in the day. Perhaps twice a night.

I could not properly tell.

I had assumed thoughts and power would be my only company here, but I could sense this creature—whatever he was—in fullness.

No other sound reached my ears but his growl and snarl and snap.

No other smell nor taste nor sight had otherwise touched me during my time here, though I imagined that if the creature attacked tonight, then I might feel the drip of his saliva and smell the rot of his breath in my final moments.

Robbed of senses. Starved of bodily reassurance. That was the haze for a queen.

And the reason?

I simply did not care for the reason at this time.

Time.

Since stitch and patch and immortality first came upon me, I had not known the luxury of time. Turn princes to pawns. Lure princesses to become champions of my queendom. Conquer kings. Stitch fifty mothers together. Enter the haze or the world will face The Real End.

Rush here. Rush there. Such completeness in the frenzy.

Immortals had no luxury in time. And how ironic, how unexpected that discovery had been. Yet here… Here .

Here, a queen could not be sure of night and day and the circling routine of a creature. She could only sit—though in numbness, she could not be sure of her sitting position, either—and be circled as she wondered whether saliva and rotting breath would meet her senses now or later.

A queen could not await that fate.

Yet a queen could not resist that fate.

“Monsters need me?” I asked the thick haze. Though if my lips moved, I could not feel them. If my voice sounded, then I could not hear it. Total bodily numbness would not allow for that.

Filled with determination to remain queen and to guard the wellness of all monsters, I had marched into the fog.

The savage betrayal of King See had ignited my courage to do so.

I had marched and marched, and then slowed somewhat, then somewhat more.

The numbness of my body had not been as all-consuming then as it was now, and I had vaguely felt the impact of crashing to the rocky ground.

My hands had registered the scratch of stone and compacted, cracked dirt as I had crawled up a shallow mound.

The backs of my legs had felt the tiniest pressure that had informed me of sitting there.

But did I still sit? A queen could not say, because shortly after sitting, she had lost all knowledge of body.

Only awareness of mind and power had remained.

I had since tried to convince myself that the only reason I entered the fog was to cling to queendom and guard the wellness of monsters. I might have convinced myself of this, too, and yet my mother’s gaunt face lingered in memory—the fear in her eyes.

In all of these quiet moments— too many quiet moments— my mind would stretch back to the past and retrace my steps to where fifty mothers were stitched around my tower. I would look across their circle and straight into my mother’s eyes where she sat beside her grave of hellebores.

In her eyes I saw her fear again, and her fear would not let me deny. She had feared I would not return because she had guessed that I did not want to return.

King See had broken my heart as he had always said he would. He had offered the role of princess to me, which he had wished for from the start.

King See had betrayed me as I stood battling the poison of a deadly curse, in chase of another king who had escaped me—King Change, who now wandered in the haze, like me. Was he maddened too? Did we unknowingly sit five feet from each other?

I took a breath. In my mind, at least.

No, my mother’s fear-filled eyes would not allow me to deny.

In this haze I had sought an escape from heart’s agony, or a distraction from its iron grip.

I had sought to equal and override my pain in this terrible and frightening place.

I had sought to… punish myself. No, perhaps not that, but I had desperately yearned to erase the hurt of my soul immediately and in whatever way possible, whether in love or hate of myself. Perhaps that was punishment.

Loving him was what I had sought to outrun in this fog. I had achieved the opposite, for I could think of nothing but the thoughts that I had thought to outrun.

I could think only of the mistake of loving King See; of my shame in letting him drive me toward self-punishment and such torment in heart; of the naivety of granting him that power over my wellness and fate and queendom.

Broken dreams.

I had imagined many happinesses and loyalties in a shared immortal existence with King See.

Those dreams were gone and robbed away, and a shadowed gap now lingered in my soul where they had happily fluttered.

The gap begged to be filled, yet what could?

What other monster could be strong enough for a queen?

Who else could I love? But what queen could be strong enough or weak enough to return to a king who had betrayed her so harshly and with such calculation?

A queen should never have loved.

“I should have listened to him,” I might have said. Or might not have.

You will always have monsters. Monsters need you.

My thoughts circled painfully between love and pain and self-preservation. They circled like the creature. He was still here, stalking this way and that, snarling and snapping.

I listened to the ring of his fangs sliding over each other. How fearsome they must be. Would I appreciate the sight of them before they latched around my neck?

“Will you end me, then, great creature?” I asked wearily. Of course, there was every chance I had not spoken aloud.

The creature growled louder than ever, and I sat straighter. I must have spoken aloud. I had not asked the creature a question before. Silence had seemed better for my survival. “Why do you circle and never strike, fearsome beast?”

A vicious snarl. The creature pressed closer than ever to prowl a tighter circle about me. He did not like when I acknowledged him.

Was this My End?

Time swam by so luxuriously, but the creature did not strike.

I inspected the angles of that—yet more information and questions to add to the already deafening clamor in my head and heart. I might have pressed my hands against my ears in a desperate bid to stop the clamor. My breath might have quickened to shallow gasps.

The ringing bells of my thoughts, the clashing waves of my power… too many and too much.

“Why do ancients punish me?” I screamed in my mind.

The creature retreated, so perhaps he had heard my tortured question.

He was done for the night. Or the day. Or hour.

Did my body relax with his departure? My mind did not. His routine circling was a torture of its own. Why did he not attack? Why did he wait?

Ringing, clashing, clamor.

Such clawing and scratching in mind.

Fate or ancients had propelled me to this robbing place, whether for purpose or punishment, yet that thought came and went, too, as the boom and snap of heartbreak smashed over my shoulders.

He had said that he loved me.

Three simple words, and they had reinforced so many hopeful dreams—for only a short time when everything had made sense at last. Those dreams were gone now, voided, and I was more senseless than ever.

A queen just had to exist in the luxury of time for now.

Even though monsters needed her.