Pure Blood_ A Nocturne City Novel - Caitlin Kittredge [100]
I didn’t answer, absorbed in the intricate, tiny carvings, carvings that must have taken years with a steady hand to immortalize on the Skull.
Sunny was so sure that I was doing the right thing. All I heard were the whispers—overconfident. Thrill seeker. Suicidal.
They were both right, my inner doubts and Sunny, but I really hoped that when it came to me dying horribly, they were both wrong. I stared back at the Skull. “Just you and me now,” I told the blank face. Mathias didn’t reply.
The symbols were definitely an alphabet, squiggly and menacing, a psychedelic cross between runic and Sanskrit. My hand cramped before the first line on the pad ended.
Then it started to shake. Then the rest of my body did, entirely against my will. The pen scratched crazily across the pad, leaving a long line like a river on a map.
Flashbulbs exploded in my eyes and I felt the world abruptly shift under my feet. My entire universe was pain, the strongest I had ever known. Worse than being shot. Worse than the phase. Every nerve ending and subatomic particle in my body screamed in concordance. Through it all I felt my forehead impact on the low table as I collapsed on the floor and my tongue swelled to a thousand times its normal size, blocking my throat.
I was way beyond screaming for help. All I could do was curl up and let my consciousness be seared away by the pain. This was dying, I knew more certainly than I’d realized anything before. The end, roll credits, houselights come up, and the audience goes home.
Someone was shaking me, hard, by the shoulders. Their touch was like a branding iron and I wanted them to stop more than anything. I couldn’t speak or raise a hand, so I just prayed to die quickly.
And as abruptly as the fit had come over me, the pain stopped.
“Luna!” Sunny screamed, shaking me hard enough to rattle teeth loose. Her round pale face was verging on hysteria. I saw it, translucent and glowing, filling my entire field of vision. I blinked. When had Sunny’s eyes been a thousand shades of blue, like tiny ice chips floating in an arctic sea? And veins the same blue appeared just under the porcelain skin we’d both inherited.
I breathed in, trying to tell her everything was fine, and choked instead. Scents of pine cleaner and dust and also garlic, tomatoes, and ground tofu assaulted me.
“Who’s making Aunt Delia’s lasagna?” I croaked.
Sunny sputtered. “I… we had it for dinner last night. What happened? I heard a horrible racket and ran in here and you were convulsing!”
I didn’t think Sunny was yelling but my ears were ringing. I could hear the rustle of something chewing on the insulation under the floor. I could hear as well as see the blood beating in Sunny’s veins. I smelled everything, from the musty old plaster of the cottage’s walls to a faint hint of incense from a working, food and soap and sea air borne from the outside. I felt that if I closed my eyes I could navigate through the cottage just as easily—perhaps more so. The last stray pain from my beating eased and disappeared as my were DNA kicked into overdrive.
“I don’t say this a lot, but you’re really freaking me out,” said Sunny. “I’m getting Grandma.”
I wanted to object, but it was kind of hard to talk, and I was thinking—gods help me—that maybe getting Rhoda wasn’t such a bad idea.
The scent most overwhelming me as Sunny rushed out became smoke. Burned-paper smoke to be exact. The legal pad I’d been copying on lay next to my head, edges curled and blackened, the ink from the rune transcription seared right off the page.
Crap. That couldn’t be normal.
“I don’t see what the fuss is all—” Rhoda stopped when she saw me and the pile of ashes that used to be the pad. “Oh.”
“What’s going on?” Sunny demanded. “What’s wrong with Luna?”
“More than I can enumerate on,” Rhoda said. The old bat. I practically die and she still keeps up with the barbs. She’d probably crack jokes at my funeral.
“Here,” said Sunny, crouching