Page 48 of Finding Her Heart
One moment she was in his lap, the next, darkness had a hold of her and she was falling down the hungries hole into darkness.
The cold, wet weight of a grave-like night pushed at her from all directions. At the same time, annoying needles of pain pricked her fingers. The first poke started on her left forefinger, increasing quickly to her palm then up her arm, then her spine. The feeling spread, appearing simultaneously on the tip of her tongue and at the back of her head, a slow-moving wave of unnatural discomfort.
Frostbite. Below zero winters were rare in the mild temperature of the Peace River Valley. There had only been two, one when she was very young and another in the first year of her marriage. A cold wind came down from the mountains and covered everything in snow and ice. There was not much snow, each time, barely above an adult's ankles, but there had been endless amounts of ice. The ice lasted weeks, and with it, the threat of frostbite in people and animals. That needle-prick sensation, akin to falling asleep and cutting off circulation, one of the first signs. Annabell remembered it well. She'd almost lost a toe to it.
When the wave of pins finished, it left her body pricked and pinged with sticking needles. She couldn't move to shake it off, to get warm, to get away. Instead, she struggled to breathe, encased in earth and mud. Trapped in the darkness with the hungries.
Children and lovers they called to her, "Queen. Queen. Queen."
One desperate voice of demand. "Queen, queen, queen."
The children wanted in. Clawed fingers pulled at her mouth, trying to force their way in and feed her the mud and slime of their memories from the dark.
"We know. We know. We know," they whispered.
What do you know?
"We everywhere. We everything. We starve." Humming, clacking voices vibrated in the prickles. Layers of voices and minds trying to take her over and possess her.
The prickling needles sank deeper, a million sharp bites. It was pain, but not pain. Everyone suffered the sensation on a small scale, but this was all over her body, fierce and relentless afflicting every nerve ending.
She could not move. Suspended in cold, swampy mud, the pressure of it pushing inward. She didn't know how she was still breathing.
A cold mouth bit into her chest, over her heart, clamping to flesh and spirit. Had she not been so fully buried, she would have jerked from the pull of it. She could tip her head just a little, earth and dirt squishing in her ears, and see the mouth at the end of a proboscis. Her heart connected to her memories which the thing attached to her began to suck out.
The clearest ones went first.
Those were also the dearest ones. Like lumps of soft tissue, fresh but healthy, the memories were sucked out of her into a starving body. There was no pain. Instead, underneath the prickling and pressure, the suction of her heart felt good. She liked it. It felt like she imagined it would feel to nurse a child.
Children, they are all her children and she needed to feed them, bond with them.
No. That couldn't be right.
"Are you sure you aren't a little poisoned by the creeping dark? Are you stained? Who that is human would refuse clean, when a little water does redeem?"The words echoed.Annabell didn’t know who they belonged to anymore. Did they come from memory? Where they real?
Mama, help me!Annabell couldn't speak. If she opened her mouth, it would fill up with mud, earth and that slime that covered the hungries’ skin. They would stuff it into her until nothing of her real self existed.
She didn't want to lose Doku-ni. She didn't want to lose her memories, or the future, the adventure that hours ago shone with promise. If they got inside her, their chittering, grinning smiles and insect minds taking over, she’d lose everything.
She didn’t want to lose herself again.
This was a nightmare. A vision. Only it was a real thing happening to her body. The overtaking transformation that would kill her, or worse, transmute her into a hive queen. She knew it.
Something had happened and she couldn’t let them win. She did not know where she was, couldn't remember the last thing that happened. But she had visited this lost, disoriented place of violent catastrophe before and let it suck her down.
Not again.
Clicking, desperate voices pushed, squeezed, and pricked, penetrating the first layer of her skin. The sucking, leech mouth drained more of her heart, taking chunks of her apart with each slurping pull of the wormy tube. The hungries siphoned her identity out through the hole, while pushing their will and need in through her skin.
Stuffed and devoured.
No. No. No.
But the white Orki was more than a memory. She drank from the red pouch. She had lived, breathed, and eaten in the valley.
The Orki was destiny. He locked himself inside of her, pumped her full of his seed. And child. There could be a precious child inside of her.
"Feed us. We are hungry. Feed us. We will tell you what you do not know." Sibilant, humming voices spoke in her head and under her skin.
