Page 23 of Death of a Mortal

Even my first breath had been unwelcome. Even my existence had been a problem to solve.

I was numb but cold over my mother’s cruel words, consumed by pain but empty. I needed to cry, but my eyes were dry. Any moment now, the all-consuming feeling and lack of feeling would sever the remaining cords of my heart and finally take me into oblivion. There was no chance of survival for me at this point; I was too broken. There was no way to live in a world where my family and boyfriendbetrayed me, where my mother didn’t want me, and where my sister no longer lived.

“Kill me! Kill me now!” I screamed over and over, just wanting to die, to no longer be. “Bleed me out and take my life, I beg of you! Take me beyond the veil. I can’t survive this life anymore!”

It could have been years since I came to this place of pain. Maybe a lifetime. My eyes stared, unfocused, at Nella. Nothing had hurt more than watching her die while I couldn’t save her. So I just stayed here, staring at her beautiful, blank face and imagining I was holding her hand, even though I couldn’t. I was powerless. And so I would stay for eternity, here, by her side. It was the least I deserved for letting her down. Dying would have been too kind, too swift, after my failures.

Despite my despair, the hollowness in my chest began to warm. As it spread out from my chest, logic snaked its way through my sorrow, feeling like a mental fog was clearing. This couldn’t have been a memory since Iwasborn. I was never killed in the womb. And how would I have a memory of something that happened before I existed? None of this could have been real. Not my mother, not Fadric, Aemilia. Not Nella…

A light illuminated above me and drew my attention. It looked like a star, just a pinprick of light high above, but bright and persistent. The longer I looked at it, the warmer I felt, like my heart was reforming in my chest and beating for a purpose. Like I wasn’t powerless, but full of fire. Not angry fire that destroyed, but warm fire that comforted and melded, forged.

In a single blink, I left the expansive, painful darkness and found myself back in the banshee’s cabin.

“Welcome back, my child,” the banshee said with a wide grin on its face.

I looked around me and found Nella, alive and well, albeit shaken and crying, sitting next to me at that gnarled round table.

And then I sobbed. Uncontrollably sobbed. I reached for her face to feel her warm skin and damp cheeks, and when she looked at me, I knew thatthiswas reality, not that empty, painful purgatory.

“Whatever you saw, I’m here. I’m real.”

I smiled and tried to pull myself together.

“I thank you for your truth and your memory,” the banshee said. “You were most divulging. The blood is so much more potent when the agony is all-consuming.”

As if the abrupt change in setting wasn’t jarring enough, the look of pure glee on the banshee’s face certainly was.

“The blood?” I rememberedemotionalpain, but not physical…or bleeding.

The banshee nodded toward my hands in my lap. I looked down and found a sharp short knife in one hand and the palm of the other bleeding. I had no memory of how it happened. I flung the knife onto the table and squeezed my cut hand.

“You see, pain leaves imprints on the heart. The heart pumps blood. The blood carries echoes of the pain. Even the echoes have power, to those who know how to use them.”

Creepy.

“What did you do?” I asked, jumping up from the chair and knocking it over, backing away from the banshee.

“You begged for death. You begged me to bleed you out and end your life. Do you not remember? I only handed you the knife. You did the cutting yourself. As I said you would.”

It knew what I’d seen in that shadow abyss, but the way it smiled told me I had given up more than I realized. The pure happiness emanating from it made me wonder how powerful my truth and memory were, and what this mysterious elixir was for.

It retrieved the knife from the table, several drops of my blood glistening on the blade, and threw the whole thing into the cauldron, which hissed and sputtered.

“But it wasn’t real. And it wasn’t a memory. It couldn’t have been.”

“What you saw may not have been a true memory, but it revealed very real things from your memory that I found…interesting. The memory may not be what happened nearly twenty years ago, but at its core, it’s what shaped you.”

“I don’t understand. What’s interesting about a false memory?”

“Careful, child. I agreed to two questions. Even though you have already asked several, I will allow two more. Do not try my patience. Ask your desired questions and be gone.”

I inhaled, taking my time to think back over the questions I wanted to ask.

“First question…” I took a deep breath. “Where can I find my mother?” It was the root of this entire journey, and I knew that, if I could find her, see her, talk to her, it would begin to heal the broken pieces of me. And now more than ever, I needed to know the idea that she loved me wasn’t a false hope, that what I saw in my vision wasn’t how she had felt about me.

The banshee stared at me for a long moment with its empty eye sockets. They were so unsettling.

“Ashenholt’s capital, Dolvenar,” it said, short and calculated.