Death. What happens after it? What lies beneath the surface?
Poor Arielle Daniels stumbled through dangerous hoops to figure this out. She wakes in a new place--the Void--and discovers that what waits after death are layers, dimensions, and sadly...
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Heat rushed to Benny's cheeks; not the mild, blushing kind of heat when one was embarrassed or flattered. Not the brief heat after working out or running a few miles. No, this was actual heat, as if someone were blaring a blowtorch right at his face, melting through his skin like butter, burning through his bones.
He tried to open his eyes, to move his arms and legs, but every motion made his lungs ache. Every jitter made his heart stammer about in his chest like a woodpecker jamming into a thick tree trunk. Every breath seemed to suck the life from him instead of fill him with air; and any air that somehow slid up his nostrils seared his insides.
He opened his mouth to speak, but only a minor croak came out. After clearing his throat—wincing at the pain that caused—he attempted once more to talk, without success. He then sought to pry his eyelids apart, but when he managed to, not much changed from the darkness he'd been trapped in.
A dark sky loomed overhead, black as a raven, empty and paralyzing. There wasn't a single star or cloud—like a giant ebony blanket had been stretched above him, blocking the rest of the world. But it wasn't a blanket; it was, to Benny's horror, the actual sky. So far, yet so close, falling in, about to devour him.
He was able to sit up, at last, and rubbed his cheeks, his forehead, his eyes. The air turned stale and sticky, and though his rib-cage still tinged with pain with his every breath, he seemed to adjust to it. Vision blurry, he struggled to decipher the various shapes surrounding him. His ears were clogged, too, as if he were underwater.
Touching his torso, his stomach, he felt something wet. His T-shirt was ripped and a dense moisture coated his fingers, which he brought to his eyes to attempt to figure out what it was—and gasped.
"B-blood?" His chapped lips parted as his heavy tongue and his dry mouth finally allowed him to speak. "What in the—"
A flash of memories jarred through him like lightning tearing through a lone tree in a field. Red eyes, giant claws, a snide smile, a cruel cackle. A billowing white gown and hair like the night blowing out as her claws dug into him.
Those claws. Nightmarish and unreal and dangerously sharp.
Panting, he once more touched his front, sensing the deep gashes stretching from his navel to below his nipples.
Had he died? Or had he somehow survived and was now outside, saved by some passing hero, by some FBI agent that Kylie might have contacted before she died? Had he been rescued, and was the house on fire? It would have explained why he felt like his flesh was aflame, why the air reeked of ash and smoke, and why he heard that rippling sound of something blazing nearby.
And yet as his eyesight focused, as he started to gain his bearings, he realized this spot wasn't where he'd fallen. He'd been inside the house when that horrid specter broke through his skin and tore him to shreds. He'd collapsed on that dusty hardwood floor and detected a subtle moan as he'd closed his eyes. And he vaguely recalled seeing someone—a young woman in jeans and a T-shirt, her colors faded but her features eerily similar to Arielle's, from the pictures he'd seen. Was that Arielle, waiting for him? Had she harmed him?
