Page 31 of Once Upon a Dark October

Chapter Thirty-One

I had enough awareness left in me to remember what Morrigan had said about the poisoned dhampir reaching sunlight. But they did not deserve such a fate.

How I made it up the stairs again, I didn’t know. The growling, pitiful noise of the ichor-made monsters rose behind me. Shoving my body into the door to close it, my legs finally gave way and I slid onto the floor’s cool embrace. I was so consumed by pain that I didn’t know where it started or ended, my vision grayed at the edges. Trying to breathe felt like forcing shards of glass into my lungs. I was beginning to burn through with bitter cold from the inside.

Ichor twisted and lashed in my veins.

Something in the dhampir’s poisoned bite had vanquished the cloaking serum. I was me again, fangs and scars and all—for how much longer, I wasn’t sure.

Would I burn if I touched daylight, too? The ashes of me swept on an October wind, carried to the sea?

Perhaps they were more ichor than sorcerer’s blood now. I’d never seen their blood-teeth like that before. Dripping with it as if it was serpent’s venom .

I’m so cold…

I crawled out from under the tapestry, each bite and claw wound screaming in objection.

“You’re a cunning little one, aren’t you?” Anastasia’s growl reached across the hall, souring the air. “The dirty little urchin had us all fooled.”

She was nothing beyond a silhouette to my dimming eyes, but her smug grin was palpable. “Looks like you’re going to get what you deserve, anyway.”

“I see you’ve found my dungeons.” Sonia emerged from the shadows at her side, a wraith in the dark. “Oh, poor dear. Seems they’ve made quite a mess of you.”

The ice of her own sorcery was hard to discern from the ichor’s grip, but I felt the caress along my veins, urging the demon’s blood to take everything.

“Y-You’ve,” I shivered, forcing the words from my tongue, “You’ve…made them…monsters.”

“And soon you’ll join them, sorcerer ,” Sonia declared. “It won’t be much longer now. Your heart will serve me well under the Blood Moon.”

Even if I didn’t make it home, I wasn’t going to let her use my heart to kill my coven—to kill Morrigan, who’d made it beat again.

Sonia’s heeled shoes tapped against the floor, a calculating staccato, a ticking like the hands of a clock.

Summoning every bit of strength within me, I leapt for the curtains to my left and tore them from their hangings. A wide beam of sunlight cleaved the shadows between us. Anastasia recoiled, throwing her hands up to shade her face.

At the edge of the hazy daylight, an ominous smile pulled at the corner of Sonia’s mouth. Her bloody eyes glowed a wine-dark red.

I saw her attack before I felt it. A gentle flourish of her fingers that became a dagger in my chest, my blood thrumming glacier- cold. The breath fled my lungs. I dug my fingertips into my breastbone, a cry rising to the surface, my knees swaying.

“Weak,” Sonia spat. “Just like the sorcerer who made you.”

More sunlight flooded the hallway, bright and sudden, blinding me for those first seconds. It became harder to see between the disappearing shadows, but the curtains were being torn down window by window. Anastasia cursed, smoke and pale ash floating from her exposed skin. The odor of incinerated flesh was revolting. But Sonia’s screaming renewed me—she shrank back to cling to thinning shadows, while I surged forward, still wavering on unsteady legs.

“Run!” Drusilla shouted from somewhere beyond the light. “Elspeth, keep running! Go!”

The daylight didn’t burn me. The ichor was too cold, too fierce in my veins. Every impulsive evil it whispered into my blood, into my thoughts, grew from a buzzing to a drumming roar. I clenched my jaw against it as I staggered down the hall. Smoke clouded the path, ashes stirred as though they were dust in my wake. Sonia’s cries of agony lifted the shadow moving toward my heart, if only for a few moments.

Drusilla had cloaked herself in the drapes. Her burns had yet to heal, new ones peeling away fine layers of flesh, leaving her raw and pink and scorched. Fresh wisps of smoke coiled from her bloodied fingers.

She ran beside me, both of us shambling, weakened by pain. “I know what you tried to do for Rosie.”

When I stumbled, she caught me by the elbow. “You’ll never make it like this. That demon’s blood is eating you alive.”

We didn’t stop moving. Drusilla caught me under the knees and lifted me into her arms while the labyrinth of corridors sped past. My fingers tightened around the coarse brocade fabric veiled over her, fighting the thrashing poison within me. The craving for blood drove me feral—a raucous and cruel bloodlust. A desperate desire for violence, for destruction and rage and gore.

A sob muffled into Drusilla’s shoulder. “Morrigan…”

Everything afterward felt like I’d fallen into a nightmare.

We made it across the harbor to the cliffside in broad daylight, though I imagined the struggle was horrific from the stench of blistering flesh that engulfed my fading senses. I drifted in between shadow and light, my mind steadily pushed into a corner to make way for whatever wretched cravings the demon blood wanted from me. I tried to restrain it from the inside. There wasn’t enough of Morrigan’s blood within me to fight.

I was dying, being devoured, conquered.

A hollow, shivering husk of a creature. The whispers were louder now, the wild, venomous cravings impossible to tame. Trapped somewhere in my own body, tied down by fetid poison thick as ropes in my veins, I felt my limbs go rigid with all the hateful impulses that had seeped in. A flurry of voices, all confusion and chaos. The familiar warmth trying to draw out the cold that had burrowed soul-deep.

Their exchanged words were muffled and strange to my ears.

I was so far away from them, so freezing cold . My bones would shatter if the demon’s will overtook them like ice frosted over the wharf.

“…get you something for those burns,” someone was saying. Josephine?

“She needs blood,” Drusilla said, hoarse and feeble. “Don’t worry about me.”

I felt myself lash out. Arms striking, fingers twisted into claws, seeking to hurt, to maim, to draw the blood the ichor hungered for. A guttural hissing forced itself out from the shadow descending upon my heart.

“—stay with us, if you’d like,” Gwen—I thought—droned in the background somewhere. “Sonia’ll be coming after you.”

“Bring her over here.”

“—wounds aren’t healing. Mor.”

“…not enough blood.” A familiar voice, resonant, stifling the noise. I knew her voice, I was sure. I’d dreamed of hearing it again. I know you, don’t I? “…ichor…look what they’ve done…my darling…”

Morrigan? Where are you?

I was a creature possessed. The ichor weighed down my veins like rancid gutter sludge, my heart drumming so fiercely, so angrily that I feared it might burst from my ribcage.

I’m here, darling. Her words drove through the malice, the noise filling up my head. I won’t let you go. Never again—can you hear me?

She chased out the shadows for a fleeting moment.

“Fight it,” Morrigan said aloud, though her voice seemed to drift. “Elspeth, listen to me.” Her fingers smoothed the hair away from my forehead. “If nothing else, hold onto the sound of my voice. I know you’re not lost to us yet. But,” her words quaked close to a sob, “you have a lot of ichor in your veins.”

Some part of me noticed how the light glittered in Morrigan’s eyes, how it sparkled down to her chin.

“It’s already traveled to your heart,” she continued. “There’s still time to extract it, but I need your help, Ella darling. I need you to keep fighting. Not only for us, but for yourself.”

“Let go of me!” That snarling creature had taken hold again. My head jolted forward and hard skull-bone met Morrigan’s nose, a sickening collision, a split second of hateful force. She straightened, vibrant red pouring from her nostrils and a shallow cut across the sharp, slanting bridge of her nose.

“Mor?” Gwen yelped .

“It’s nothing.” Sniffling, she wiped at the blood absently with her tunic sleeve, but it only made the stain look more gruesome. “I’m all right.”

“Hurry,” Josephine said through gritted teeth. “Have to get through to her, or it’ll take her too quick. Keep talking, Morrigan. Keep her here.”

“This monster isn’t you,” she told me. “Don’t let it consume you.” The scent of Morrigan’s blood made me suddenly feral. A demon’s victory, however small. “Gwen, hold her head still. I need her to drink as much as she can. Being starved is making this worse for us all. My blood should help force it out.”

“Are you sure that’s—”

“Hold her down!” Morrigan yelled. “Don’t let her get her fangs into you.”

“We need Bella.”

“Not yet. Elspeth might be too fragile,” Morrigan insisted. “And we need the ichor intact.”

Morrigan’s fingertips gripped my chin, near-bruising. The demon reared up, but my head was locked into place. “Drink, my love,” she pleaded with me. “You have to try.”

Don’t let it take you. She was crying into my thoughts. Please don’t leave me like this.

Warm rain pelted my tongue, tangy and metallic. I swallowed it down, mouthful after mouthful, hunger and vicious craving becoming gluttony. She tasted like a spring shower in a sunlit afternoon, fragrant against the demon’s rot. It began to thaw the ice imprisoning my heart.

Morrigan rested her ear on my chest, listening to the frenzied beating, the war rushing in my blood. Despite my body’s restlessness, she let herself linger before she buried her face in my apron. Her hands ghosted along my waist as she left a kiss on my stomach.

“Help me fight this, Ella,” she whispered. “I know you can—you’re strong. Reclaim your body from this monster. Listen to my blood flowing inside you. Listen to it and nothing else. Just as I taught you. Feel it flowing right to your heart, cleansing that poison. It’ll give you strength to force it out.”

Her hand had remained still on my breast until she started tapping with two fingers. She mimicked the rhythm of a pulse—not mine, which ran a breathless demon’s pace, but hers . The pulse I could hear, just faintly. Her calm amid a storm of brutal shadow and festering poison.

“Morrigan, if the ichor takes any more of your blood…” Josephine began.

“We won’t let it have enough time,” Morrigan promised. “Carefully now, Elspeth. Tether yourself to my blood—let it be your anchor, and we’ll force the poison out together. We’re stronger than it. Remember that.” Her fingers slipped into my hair as her other palm settled over my racing heart. “If you push, I’ll pull.”

An icy, jagged blade harpooned my chest.

I tried to find Morrigan’s blood between the ichor weaving through my veins, but it slipped out from my sorcerer’s grasp. Again, I reached for it, feeling the subtle tug on my veins from her power grappling with the demon’s will. I shivered, ichorous blood dousing the air. The bone-deep trembling, the frost that coated me from the inside, the buzzing in my head. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t see Morrigan anymore, though I felt her in my veins. She was with me. I wanted to see her again—needed to, like the hunger still ravaging inside.

Morrigan wrested with the thick sludge. I found her. I still couldn’t see her, but I felt her caress inside my blood— her blood , flowing into my heart—and her warmth filling me, strengthening me. My anchor. A primordial rock in the ocean’s surf. Weathered but unbroken. I clung to her tightly as I could.

The shadow began to weaken. The raucous noise, the anger, turned into the swift tide of Morrigan’s blood, the ebb and flow, the beating of her heart. She was all I could hear now, her sorcery blazing between us. And my heart answered, trying to match its pace. My own thoughts returned to me, muddied and slow. I started to shake the feeling back into my body, the ice and frost and poisonous shadow melting away.

“That’s it, Ella,” she said. “Keep going.”

The ichor was stubborn, thick and tangled. It had a taste of power now, and it wouldn’t go quietly. As it threaded through Morrigan’s blood, winding toward my heart again, I drew up a tendril of molten sorcery. A clash, a writhing pain—of burning and freezing cold, nerve-endings firing haphazard—that spiked through me. We’d built a wall, Morrigan and I. She’d flooded my veins and the demon’s poison retreated. It couldn’t take us both at once.

But the violence of it being dragged from my veins ripped a scream from the center of me. A last piercing stab of unbearable cold, an aftershock rippling through my body. I was still shivering so hard it hurt , limbs contorted in a corpse-like stillness. My eyes shut tight as I waited for the gnawing shock to subside. I lay there listening to Morrigan’s blood lapping against the inside of my veins, the slowing of my pulse.

I lay there trying to remember what it felt like to possess my own body.

Elspeth? Morrigan whispered to my thoughts. You’re all right now. It’s gone. Stay with me, Ella darling.

But the beating of my heart had started to lag behind hers. Lethargic, still frail from hunger. Slowly, ever so slowly, I surrendered to the comfort of the dark.