Heartless

❆ Twenty-Five ❆

Twenty-Five

I once read a story about a young princess who had fought in a war. She'd been tricked, abused, deceived, and betrayed. She lost the ones she loved in battle, and in a moment of distraction, in that moment of mourning, she was killed. Her life had been pierced clean through by the sword of a warrior she had once called her lover. The book had detailed her death just as she'd described it: cold at first, then sumberging into warmth, as if being eased over the edge of a bath and carefully lowered into the water. She was scared at first, like being afraid of the hot water's first sting, but then she welcomed it, welcomed the peace the heat brought to her. Her death was glorious.

Mine was nothing like that.

I felt every vibration of my feet stumbling through the arctic snow like it was an iron club beating against my skull. My head beat with a pulse of its own, my brain still spinning in circles and turning my vision this way and that, upside down and in all different shades of blinding colors. I faded in and out, and when I opened my eyes it was darker out and much colder than it had been when we'd set out from the palace. I hadn't really noticed how long of a trip it was coming down the hill, but my body definitely did this time now that we were climbing up.

My arm looped around Lumea's neck, she bore most of my weight in determined silence, her face contorted into so many conflicting emotions it was hard to understand what exactly was going through her thoughts. When she spoke, her words were nothing but knives raking into the flesh of my brain. Each one made me hiss and cry, my feet falter from their pattern. My knees gave out several times, and each fall was worse than the one before. The cold seeped into my bones, the wind blowing straight through my cloak and clawing into the exposed skin of my torso. My shivers turned into violent convulsions.

Lumea's screamed pleas rang throughout the mountain. I didn't know what she was begging for: for me to stay awake— because she was insistent that I needed to stay awake— or for the palace to come into sight. With my head pounding and my body in excruciating pain, I couldn't keep my eye open anymore. My head raged with its own heartbeat.

This is it, I thought, and felt my body fall into a bottomless sea of ice.

❆

I awoke to the feeling of fire eating me alive.

A scream tore from my raw throat. I tasted blood on my tongue. Needles drove through my frozen skin like skewers. I reached out and clawed at the air to get out of the steaming bath of scalding hot water. I couldn't tell if tears were burning down my cheeks or if it was the splashed water.

   Screeching voices wormed through the painful blocks in my ears. My teeth chattered louder than their words. Somewhere I could hear Lumea crying and another voice hushing her, that same one soothing me and running a hand through my hair to keep my head above the water. I winced at the pain in my skull, but I welcomed the familiar feeling of sparks shooting from his hand into me. I peeled my frozen eyes open.

   Beast's silver eyes broke through the fog in my mind. His handsome face twisted in pain, a dark shadow clouding his eyes as he reached into the water and grabbed my hand. My arm emerged blood-red from the bath, and for a moment I wanted to scream as I stared at it. Then he peeled back the shirt's sleeve from around my wrist and I relaxed back into the water, closing my eyes again even as his voice shouted for me not to.

❆

I lay in darkness, buried under a mountain of blankets and furs and pillows. A fire's crackles and pops sounded off to my right, the heat pulsing from the hearth in divine waves of much needed warmth. I slowly attempted to open my eyes.