Page 81 of Noctis

I closed my eyes and danced, smiling as my limbs grew pleasantly heavy. Someone bumped into me, hard enough that I should have stumbled, but the impact seemed to happen far away. Everything did. The grief, the betrayal, the disappointment—they were still there, but sealed behind glass where they couldn’t reach me.

The warmth kept building. Pleasant became smothering. Sweat prickled across my scalp, yet a chill ran over my skin. I opened my eyes to find the lights smearing together, trailing ribbons of color whenever I moved my head. I grabbed the nearest shoulder to steady myself. Its owner twisted around and said something, irritation pulling at his mouth. I tried to apologize, but my tongue felt swollen, and the word emerged thick and shapeless. He peeled my hand away and disappeared into the crowd.

Nausea surged through me without warning. I swallowed hard and stopped dancing. That only made everything worse. Without the movement to anchor me, the room tilted sharply, bodies and lights sliding sideways before jerking back into place.

If I was going to be sick, I wasn’t going to do it on the dance floor. I needed the toilet. The crowd seemed determined to keep me there, closing every gap almost the instant it appeared. I shoved between bodies, earning muttered curses and at least one hard elbow to the ribs. By the time I reached the toilets, sweat soaked the back of my shirt, and every breath felt like it had to be dragged into my lungs.

I staggered into the first empty cubicle and barely managed to lock the door before dropping to my knees.

Nothing came up.

My stomach cramped anyway, leaving me hunched over the bowl, shivering despite the heat of the club. I rested my forehead against the cool porcelain and closed my eyes. Just for a second. Just until the dizziness went away.

The bass pulsed through the floor beneath my knees, growing fainter with every beat. My limbs had become impossibly heavy. When I tried to sit back, my arm gave way and my shoulder struck the partition. The pain should have been sharp. Instead, it barely registered. It might as well have belonged to someone in the next cubicle.

I slid sideways until my cheek met the filthy floor. Some distant part of me knew I needed help. I should unlock the door. Call out. Bang against the wall. Do anything except lie there while each breath grew shallower than the last. I lifted my hand, but it fell back to the floor without ever reaching the lock.

The darkness gathering around me felt soft and warm, and painless. Maybe I’d get to see my mother again. I could tell her how sorry I was about our last argument and how much I missed her.

I stopped fighting and allowed myself to slide into oblivion.

Chapter Twenty-six

Rowan

There was a hand on my brow. It felt soft and pleasantly cool. My mother? I hoped so, the thought of her enough to make me smile. I couldn’t be dead, though, because I was still breathing—shallowly, with a rasping sound that didn’t sound remotely healthy, but breathing nonetheless. So what was this? Was I in the hospital? Had someone found me? Was it a nurse touching me?

The hand slid down my arm, and something dug into the crook of my elbow. A needle? No, it was too big to be a needle. It felt more like a thumbnail. It pressed deeper, the sharp burst of pain piercing the drug-induced haze. I tried to pull my arm away, but they wouldn’t let me.

“Hold still,” a smoky voice said. “I have to get this stuff out of you, and this is the quickest way.”

Whatever it was kept pressing while something wet, which I assumed was blood, dripped down my arm. The pressure intensified. A strange pulling sensation followed—not just in my arm, but everywhere at once. It began in my chest, deep behind my ribs, as though invisible threads had wound themselves around the heaviness in my lungs and were drawing it toward the crook of my elbow. A shudder tore through me, violent enough to rattle my teeth. Nausea rolled through my stomach, and for one awful second, I thought I was going to choke.

The hand on my brow remained steady. “That’s it,” he murmured. “Just breathe.”

I tried.

Air scraped into my lungs, thin and ragged. The next breath came a fraction more easily, followed by another that was easier still. The rasp remained, but had grown quieter, no longer drowning out everything else. Whatever was digging into my arm shifted deeper.

Pain flared, dragging me closer to consciousness. The surrounding darkness began to thin. Sensation returned in unpleasant fragments: my cheek pressed against cold tile, the sour taste at the back of my throat, music pounding through the floor, and the hard edge of something cutting into my hip. My heart gave a heavy thud, then another almost immediately.

Relief loosened something inside me. Until then, I hadn’t realized how long the gaps between beats had become.

Fingers stroked through my hair as the tightness in my chest eased by degrees. I could still feel that impossible tug running through me, gathering the heroin and alcohol from every corner of my body and funneling them toward the point where he held my arm. With each pulse, my thoughts sharpened, and the warmth that had seemed so comforting curdled into clammy sweat. Pins and needles prickled through my hands. My stomach cramped, but the nausea was receding rather than building.

I dragged in a deep breath. It hurt, but I’d never been so grateful for pain in my life. My eyelids fluttered open to find Caligo crouched over me, his face a picture of concern. “Silly, silly Rowan,” he said, one hand still stroking my hair with astonishing gentleness, while the other encircled my arm.

A talon had pierced the skin at the crook of my elbow. Thick, dark liquid welled around it and ran in sluggish trails toward the floor. Too black to be blood. Too much like smoke to be anything that belonged inside a human body. He withdrew the claw, its shape softening into that of a humanoid finger as shadows rippled over it.

The pulling sensation stopped so abruptly that I gasped. Air—or what passed for air in a nightclub toilet—rushed into my lungs, making me cough, weakly at first, then hard enough to send pain tearing through my chest. Caligo rolled me onto my side and held me there while my body convulsed with each cough.

Each one made the world clearer. The music. The sound of people outside the cubicle. The reek of disinfectant. The packet still digging into my thigh through the fabric of my pocket.

What I’d done.

My breathing finally settled into something approaching normal. It was still uneven, still too shallow, but no longer slipping away from me—and it grew stronger with every passing second.

Now that I’d regained the use of both hands, I struggled to sit upright. “I would have died,” I said, “if you hadn’t found me.”