The True One

Chapter 37

Verity

I was alive. That's about all I could be certain of.

Waking up from whatever the Aurum Venari hunters had done to me was like emerging from a cave to find an alien landscape rather than the one I was accustomed to. I didn't know where I was, only that I was no longer on the road where we'd left Alek's car, but instead inside a room with off-white walls, fine cracks in its plaster surface webbing out from an impact crater the size of a fist. I lay on a cot, not cushy enough to be a proper mattress but raised off the ground and held together with a metal frame. A trapezoid shaped light hit the wall next to my bed, indicating the presence of a window, but when I tried to shift to my left to confirm this, A fiery pain struck me like I'd been clubbed with an iron-spiked mace.

Groaning, I tried to remain motionless, hoping the agony would ease.

"It will get better." A woman spoke to me from the opposite corner of the room. The cadence of her voice seemed familiar, but I was too drugged up to place it.

"Who's there?" It must be Flora's mother. The thought came to me slowly but I almost immediately disregarded it as memory caught up with reality. Val's voice was deeper, an alto to this woman's soprano.

I paused these thoughts and listened. A groan of wood against wood, followed by light footsteps.

The woman's face appeared over mine. Long, dark hair framed her oval face. I estimated her to be in her late forties, but when I peered into her hazel eyes, she seemed almost timeless, as though age was only a construct that didn't apply to someone like her.

"That's the drugs talking," she said to me. "I age just like anyone else."

Panic. My breathing shallowed and my limbs felt like someone had stuck a thousand tiny pins into them, which was somehow worse than the mace to the head sensation I was also coping with. "You read my mind."

"Sorry," she said, frowning. "It gets lonely down here. I don't see people often, and rarely are they ones whose minds I can access. That doesn't excuse it—I shouldn't have intruded. You think loudly, though. Frankly, it would be hard not to hear you."

Still looking into her eyes, I wondered if maybe I'd been wrong to assume I was on this side of the dirt, after all. Perhaps this crappy room was the afterlife. That would make sense, seeing as though the woman talking to me had been dead for over fifteen years.

"That's funny," she said, though her expression betrayed no hint of amusement. "I thought the same about you."

I tried to take deep breaths, but my chest constricted instead. "This isn't possible."

She brushed the hair from my forehead, and I remembered long fingers with nailbeds bitten down to stubs. Lullabies and bedtime stories.

"The last time I saw you, you were just a little girl. But I recognized you right away." A tear streaked down her face. "You're all grown up."

Closing my eyes, I leaned into the touch of her hand. That same hand had made this same gesture many times in the distant past.

If I'm dead, then so be it.

"You aren't dead, Verity. And neither am I."

Tears formed like water behind a dam. I opened my eyes and let them cascade down my cheeks. "Mom?"

Cora Hargrave's face crumpled like a balled-up piece of paper. "I hardly deserve that title, but yes. It's me."

Determined to sit up, I struggled to make my arms support me. I let her assist, and once I was leaning against the wall, she sat next to me, an arm draped across my shoulder. "You must have questions, just as I do."