She opened her mouth to scream but- nothing. Like someone had just... stolen it. Her voice was gone. Completely f*king gone!
The woman laying there barely looked human anymore. Beside her was a huge pillar about 15 meters long. **(It's the pillar she was hit with by Vale during the Awakening)** Her skin was literally hanging off her bones like old wallpaper and her eyes... her eyes had sunk so deep into her skull they were just these black pits. But they were alive and moving around, focusing on her in a way that made every hair on her body to rise.
"He's free," she wheezed and Sasha could to hear her ribs clicking together with each breath like wind chimes made of bone. "The first thing he'll do is hunt you down. You need to find Vushnik. Fast."
Sasha's knees buckled. The whole world tilted sideways and she grabbed onto this rotting fence post just to keep from face-planting into the dirt. On her mind, she kept on screaming, "Oh no! Not again. Please, please not another episode."
"Ever since your dad's funeral, your brain had been pulling this 'things'. Making you see things that weren't there. Conversations with people who didn't exist. The kind of crazy that gets you locked up in those places with the beige walls and the smell of industrial cleaner." She said smiling to her, a cold smile revealing knowing too much.
"Who's coming?" The words barely made it out of Sasha'a throat. "Why me? I don't even know what you're talking about-" She was a bit alarmed. Who was this woman and how did she know that much about her?
The woman coughed and blood splattered between them. Bright red droplets hitting the grass with these tiny wet sounds. Too real. Way too real for something her grief-fried brain cooked up.
"I'm dying," she said in a casual way as discussing tomorrow's weather. "Death Delayer spell's the only thing keeping me vertical right now. Won't hold much longer."
'What? A spell? Are witches even real? What was really unraveling this time?'
The 'witch' raised her hand and a scroll just materialized out of thin air. Blood-red paper tied with silver string that seemed to glow even though the sun was setting. The whole surface was covered in these interlocking circle patterns that made Sasha's eyes water when she tried to look at them directly.
Then something happened that made her stomach drop. There was a tiny thing... like a person shrunk down to the size of a thumb with gossamer wings peeled itself off the witch's body and fluttered over to her. It landed on my shoulder, weightless but radiating this weird warmth against my neck.
"Take this," she said, holding out the parchment. But before she could , her fingers clamped around her wrist like ice-cold manacles. "Never trust anyone. You hearing me? Anyone. I'm sorry, kid. So sorry fate picked you for this."
"Sasha!"
Mom's voice sliced through everything. Distant but getting closer. She could hear her footsteps on the cracked sidewalk; that quick, worried pace mom had perfected since she started "having episodes."Relief flooded through her so fast she got dizzy. Mom was coming and would fix this, make it stop like she always tried to. But what if this time was different? What if...
These thoughts were halted by a hand touching her shoulder. She jumped in fright which made her lose balance and almost fell but landed on her mom's quick arms as if she had expected her to tumble.She calmed after seeing it was just mom standing there with that expression on her face, the careful one. The one that said she'd found her talking to empty air again and was trying not to lose herself about it.
"Sweetheart, what's wrong?"
"Look," she said spinning around to show her the witch, to prove that this time wasn't like the others. "There was this woman and she was dying, and she gave me..."
Nothing.
The place was completely empty. No witch, no blood spatters, no mysterious scroll. Just the wind making overgrown rose bushes sway and the distant hum of a lorry passing by.Sasha stood there pointing at absolutely nothing like a complete moron.
"I saw someone," she said and even could hear how desperate she sounded. How crazy. "She was right here, Mom. She was bleeding everywhere and she said someone was hunting for me and..."
Mom's face did that thing. That soft, careful thing that always made her want to punch something. The expression she'd practiced in the mirror, probably. The one that said my daughter is losing her mind and I don't know how to fix it.
"Oh, honey." She stepped closer and Sasha caught that familiar scent; vanilla perfume mixed with hospital disinfectant and worry. "I know things have been really hard since Dad died. The hallucinations have been getting worse, and I understand, but..."
She didn't even wait for Sasha to argue. She just turned and walked toward the front door which was hanging wide open. Sasha followed her but her feet felt like they were made of concrete.
Hallucination. That's what everyone called them. The doctors with their clipboards and concerned frowns. They said she had just grief-induced hallucinations. Nothing more.But her shoulder still felt warm where that little creature had perched. She kept her mouth shut as they went inside and added this to the growing collection of things she couldn't tell anyone without confirming what they already suspected- that she was completely losing it. But something deep in her gut some instinct she didn't even know she possessed, was screaming at her.
This wasn't like the others. This was real. And if it was real, then something out there knew her name. Something that was coming for her. The thought should have terrified her and sent her running to hide under her blankets like she was seven years old again. Instead, as she watched Mom triple-check the locks and flip on every light switch in the house- her ritual for when she was scared . She was slipping away again, she felt something completely different.For the first time since Dad's funeral, she felt wide awake!
And that's when she realized... the house wasn't empty.