Page 11 of The Dawn Chorus

Agony filled my skull. It clanged in my jaw and my eye sockets and the hollows of my cheeks. An iron band was locked around my brow and, with every breath, it constricted. I wept into the pillow, trying not to make a sound. Warden had already seen too much.

A memory. The wallpaper in my childhood bedroom. Mamó spoon-feeding me medicine while I burned and itched with chickenpox.

Something was tightening my insides. Not just the wounds, not just grief. Deeper than the hunger in my stomach, it whispered in my blood and sinews. It wrung my muscles and scraped my bones. My skeleton was ravenous, every joint a panting mouth. I wasstarving. For the drug. For the oblivion promised by a needle. In oblivion, I was not an orphan. I was not hunted or trapped or broken from torture. I was fog, impossible to chain.

Grey light sifted through the cracks between the shutters, enough for me to glimpse the pouch of saline above my head. A tube snaked down to meet the cannula in my hand.

In the Archon, I had been sedated to keep me from using my gift. Now my body craved the stupor that had kept me weak and powerless for weeks. I was a razor blade, all edge and gleam, and I needed to be dulled. I needed tofade. Not to die, not to disappear altogether – just to soften, so the world stopped catching on my sharp corners. So I didn’t feel it when it scraped me. I ached for the comfort of absence. I longed to exist less severely.

My eyes closed. I didn’t want him to see me in this state again.

I had no one else.

‘Warden.’

Only a breath came out. My eyelashes were sticky, my hair dishevelled from being crushed into a pillow for days. I kicked with boneless legs at the duvet. The chains. The duvet.

‘Warden,’ I slurred again, but I had no more strength to speak, or to tug the golden cord.

For a while, I drifted between the room and my dreamscape, where a spectre had appeared. A smoking, Rephaite-shaped reminder of my ordeal, staring out from the darkest circle of my mind.

I must have fallen back to sleep. Next I woke, I was desperate for breath and soaked to the skin, and it was dark. Dread viced my limbs. Was I on the board again? No. Iwasthe board.

Water. My skin wascreatingit, pints of it. It prickled on my scalp and nape. Even the backs of my knees were slippery. Whimpering, I rolled on to my side and scrubbed at my arms, desperate to dry off. Liquid trickled down my back and dripped from the ends of my hair. I was slimy with it. Each movement stretched the skin of my hand.

Perhaps the Underqueen would care for a drink…

The tube.

Water was shooting into my bloodstream. Flowing out of the bag, into my arm. I was so full of it that it burst out from my eyes, my pores, my nose. I was drowning from within. Wet sponge. Soaked cloth. Like the rag that had masked my face in that basement, congealed the air before it reached me, kept me blind and screaming. I was blind now, too, with terror. Desperate, I groped for the tube and ripped it out.

Heat knifed through my hand and drew a sharp cry from me. Blood dribbled from my vein, saline from the tube. I sat there, staring at the break in my skin, too shocked to do anything but stare.

That was how Warden found me, bloody and petrified, hair wild around my face.

‘Paige.’

Dizzy, I looked up at him.

‘I had to get it out.’ Tears seeped to my neck. ‘I was drowning.’

Warden seemed to assess the situation. He looked at the wormlike tube on the bed, and at my hand, gloved in blood.

When he left, I watched the door, shivering. Moments later, he was back with a gauze and a roll of bandages.

‘Don’t touch me.’ I cringed against the headboard. ‘Please d-don’t try to touch me.’

This time, I saw a flicker in his expression. Disquiet, perhaps. He must be wondering what he had done to unnerve me to this extreme. I wished I could explain that if he touched me, he would know what a filthy, broken creature I was. He would slice himself on my razor edges.

I doubt even his standards are this low.

‘I will not touch you,’ Warden said quietly. ‘You have my word.’

I swallowed. Making no sudden movements, he placed the supplies within my reach.

‘You must staunch the bleeding yourself,’ he told me. All I could do was shake. ‘Paige—’

‘I can’t do this yet, Warden. I n-need the drug.’ Blood laced my arm. ‘Please just find it for me. They must sell it somewhere, the sedative. I’ll just have a little bit.’