by Ember Hollis
Noah hadn’t brought me here, I recall. Which means this could only be one place.
“The unicorn pasture,” I whisper out loud. Though I can’t see any unicorns, I know it must be true.
Slowly, I wade out of the water, then fall boneless onto the grass. I run my fingers through the stalks. They feel like velvet, and smell divine. I bend down to get a closer look at the starry flowers. There seems to be more now than I noticed earlier, and as I study them, a jolt of realization hits me. The heavenly smell isn’t coming from the grass. It’s coming from the flowers… because they’re Parnassus blossoms.
“Oh my God,” I sigh, reaching out to pluck one. It looks much smaller than the image Chiros conjured for us, but it looks exactly the same.
I bring the blossom to my nose and drink in the smell. Its fragrance is potent and heady, sweeter and more delicate than lilac or jasmine or gardenia, yet somehow resembling all three. The scent of it delights me as if laced with pure bliss and joyous laughter, and I throw myself down to roll in the patch of flowers like a cat with catnip.
No wonder Chiros asked me to find it. Now that I know what to look for, I feel as if I can recognize this smell from miles away.
Maybe I really do have some powers. I smile and close my eyes, luxuriating in the scent. In the same way the animals that Bane raised made me sick to my stomach, these flowers sooth and heal me. It feels as if something deep in me recognizes them and is opening its arms to their energy. Its sacred energy.
Feeling renewed, I sit up and pick a flower to place in my palm. Even if our group broke up and I found these flowers by accident, Chiros can’t be that harsh on us if I bring some back with me.
With that in mind, I pick a few more, just in case Bane stumbles across me on my way back and insists I give him a flower like Chiros instructed.
“Knowing that sick bastard, he’d probably make it wilt with just a look,” I say to myself. Better to have some backups just in case.
Something rustled in the undergrowth in the trees.
I look up, feeling a foreboding unease settle in my stomach again. I expect it to be Bane, or some of his animals that survived their fall in the river, but what steps out is even more surprising.
I stand slowly and cautiously as I take in the nimble legs, the slender neck, and the graceful head with its dainty dark eyes and nose. The silvery horn in the middle of the unicorn’s forehead gleams in the dark as it edges nervously forward, nickering.
“Oh… ” I stop short, the wonder I’d felt at the sight of the unicorn dissipating into horror when I see that the rear of its body is coated in thick, glistening blood, so dark it appears purple. It’s probably come from a gash on its hind quarters that’s half scabbed over with dried blood.
The unicorn limps towards me, its breaths heavy and labored. I’m rooted to the ground, afraid that I’ll spook it into running away. It doesn’t look like it can go very far without help. So I stand as still as a statue until it finally approaches and lowers its head to my hands.
The unicorn devours the Parnassus blossoms in my palm, then lifts its head to lick my face. It seems to have calmed down and I smile, not even minding when its saliva gets onto my lips.
“Hey girl,” I whisper to it. “How about we find you some help?” I reach out to rub its nose and the unicorn nickers again, then lifts its head to glance over its shoulder.
The heaviness in my stomach is worse than ever, and something about the way the unicorn is looking into the darkness beyond the trees unnerves me.
“Is something there?” I whisper almost inaudibly. Part of me wants to raise my voice and shout for Bane, that psychopath, to just leave us alone. But another part of me is telling me that even Bane wouldn’t have gone so far as to attack one of Pandorax’s precious unicorns.
A twig cracks in the darkness beyond and something huge starts to rush towards us. I can hear it buffeting the trees, scattering leaves and flowers as it moves. Panic rises like a snake in my belly, sending cold shivers up my spine. Suddenly, my heart is pounding in my ears. The darkness beyond the trees seem to yawn toward us, growing larger and deeper with each second.
“Run!” I turn to the unicorn, but it’s already got the idea. It dances around me, then lowers its head and scoops me up onto its back as easily as if I were as light as a feather. Without my direction, the unicorn turns and runs like the wind.
Its hooves echo the pounding of my heart as we race along the lake, towards Pandorax. I look over my shoulder, trying to see what’s chasing us. But whatever it is is cloaked in swirling darkness that’s coming ever closer.
The Parnassus blossoms turn black in its wake as it cuts a path across the meadow to chase after us. When I see that, the feeling in the depths of my stomach worsens, and I fight not to gag. There’s nothing in my stomach but bile, yet I still feel as if I’m going to hurl.
“Quick, quick!” I yell at the unicorn. Its hooves pound the ground, and I feel myself slipping off. Terror grips me and I throw myself forward, clinging to the animal’s neck.
When I look down, the unicorn’s eyes roll to meet mine. The poor animal’s eyes are ringed with white and its breathing is labored. Sweat makes its back slick and I feel myself sliding again. I’ve never ridden bareback before. In fact, I’ve only ridden a horse once, let alone a unicorn. Yet, through sheer tenacity and probably dumb luck, I hold on.
Until the swirling blackness lunges forward and claws along the unicorn’s other side. The poor creature shrieks in pain, then takes an almighty jump, away from the lake and off the path, right over a thick bush and beyond the cliff’s edge.
Chapter 17: Heaven
One second, the unicorn and I are galloping along the lake and the next, I find myself falling through thin air with wind whistling all around me and the darkness roiling just out of reach at the top of the cliff.
“HEAVEN!” someone yells. “SHIT!”
Shit indeed.
We’re falling so fast, I can’t tell which way is up or down. I have no idea what to do with the last few seconds I have left to live. All I know is that the ground is approaching at a speed that will surely flatten me like a pancake.
With death imminent, time seems to slow and even stop. Flashing impressions brand themselves into my mind like a cinema reel thats on fast-forward, and my focus zeroes in on random images and sensations in painfully stark detail.
Like how weightless I feel.
How the wind snaps my arms back and pulls at my cheeks.
The delicate little dandelion that quivers as I hurtle past its perch on the vertical slope.
The raw shock in Noah’s voice as he screamed, because that’s who that voice belongs to.
The fluffy cloud overhead that looks exactly like Snoopy.
And the way the unicorn looks beside me, with its froth of silver mane, glossy black hooves and white-ringed eyes.
There’s something in its deep brown gaze that pulls me out of my reverie and brings me back into the present moment. And it’s not desperation or fear. It’s something worse that I can hardly recognize.
It’s trust.
Why the hell is a falling unicorn looking at me like I can save it, I think furiously, just before a terrible pain arches my back and wrenches a scream from my mouth.
“HEAVEN!” Noah shouts again.
Now there’s blood everywhere.
Blood, euphoria, and a burning pain like I’ve never felt before courses through me.
For a moment, I think I’ve already crashed and am lying, dying on the ground.
But then I register the wind and the blurry cliff side that’s still rushing around me. Blood droplets splatter the air like dark dense lava lamp bubbles until they get brushed away by huge, powerful… wings.
I gape in shock at the feathers that line them, recognizing the fine, downy fluff.
Dad? I glance around, but he’s nowhere to be seen. And once the blood slides off, the feathers beneath them are white, not dark blue.
Don’t
tell me…
I flex the muscles where my shoulder blades are, and a terrible pain shoots through my back. But I don’t care.
Because the wings moved, curling around me before coming apart like massive swan’s wings.
They’re mine, I realize with a mad sort of joy that chokes up my throat and squeezes my heart. They’re my wings. Because I’m not just pathetic old me, I’m me with a bid whopping helping of angel!
Wind sweeps the tears from my eyes and snatches the shriek of joy that bursts from my throat. Despite the pain, I instinctively flex my back muscles hard, forcing my sticky wings to spread open and catch the wind.
Immediately, I’m jerked up and around in a swoop that brings me gliding out into the open air. I look down and see that far below is the unicorn, still plunging to its death, while tiny people look up at us from the bottom of the cliffs.
“Fuck, fuckitty, FUCK!” I swear as I instinctively drop into a dive. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but my body doesn’t seem to need my mind to steer it.
Just before the unicorn crashes into the rocks below, I drop down onto its back. Desperately, I press my cheek to its sweat soaked hide and loop my arms under its belly, then snap my wings apart. I need to cushioning its momentum and steer it out away from the cliff to a nearby clearing. The resistance from gravity and the rush of air makes it feel like someone just took a red hot poker and stabbed it into the joints of my wings. The pain is so bad, I wonder if I’ll pass out before we make it.
But a second later, we’re tumbling onto grass. I release the unicorn and tumble head over heels, feeling my huge wings bend in all sorts of ways they weren’t meant to. A dull snap pierces the air just before I come to a crumpled stop.
I hadn’t thought the pain could get any worse, but now it feels as if my spine has been snapped in two. I roll into a ball and scream into the torn up earth beneath me until a hand lands onto the back of my head and blackness rushes up to consume me.
* * *
When I wake, I’m lying in the grass on my stomach. The ground is muddy beneath me, soaked from the blood that I feel running down my back. Voices murmur above me, gradually becoming more distinct as my consciousness returns. Every single bone in my body feels shattered, and the pain is so strong I nearly pass out again.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” a girl sobs. Her voice is muffled, but it’s filled with so much emotion, I immediately feel like reassuring her.
“How did she even get there,” another voice says. “And why did the unicorn jump?” This one’s familiar, with a deep undertone of concern and anxiety. It’s Noah, I think. I focus on his voice, using their conversation to anchor my consciousness.
“I don’t know,” the girl continues tearfully. “They’ve been restless all morning, because…” she trails off, and I get the impression she’s shaking her head wildly. “I’m so sorry, Chiros, I should have come to you sooner… I just thought I could control them—”
“We’ll discuss this later,” The centaur’s deep voice comes from somewhere over my head. “There are more urgent things to deal with now. Where is Knox? Why isn’t he here yet?”
“I’m right here, sir,” a voice as smooth as velvet and dark as night says. Immediately, I’m brought back to a room filled with food, sex, and shameless debauchery.
“No…” I begin to protest as hands turns me over, but the moment our eyes meet, I’m tumbling into an intense green labyrinth.
You again.
My eyes widen at the sound of his voice in my head. “Wha—how?”
Don’t talk. Just. Pay.
Knox clasps his cold hands on either side of my head, and immediately I’m lost. My back arches and I don’t even notice when my eyes roll back into my head.
Footsteps echo throughout my mind. I can feel him inside me, closing in. His consciousness is a hard and calculating presence and it chases me through the halls of my mind relentlessly. No, get out!
Not till I get what I came for, poppet.
Dread gives me wings and I flee deeper inward, twisting and turning through my memories until I burst into a room filled with sunlight.
Pink wall paper crawls up the walls and a canopied bed filled with porcelain dolls stare back at me. It’s the Princess room, back from when I was ten. My Mom had lured a real estate mogul into marrying her, and we’d lived in a fairytale-like mansion for long enough that I’d dared to believe we’d stay forever. It had been my dream room, and I’d been completely in love with it. Unfortunately, my mother had turned out to be much less enamored with her husband, and we’d left a few months after moving in, shortly after I’d finished naming all my dolls.
Still, everything seems to be exactly the same. I turn round and round on the plush carpet in the middle of the room, but I’m too big to hide in all my usual hiding places.
Ominous footsteps echo in the hall outside, coming closer with every second. Desperate, I throw myself onto the bed, then pull the covers and dolls over my body. The door swings open with a creak and the footsteps come in. They pause at the foot of the bed.
He can’t find me here. He can’t find me here. I screw my eyes shut and bite my lip. There are hundreds of dolls on top of me. He won’t find me here.
A hand wraps around my ankle and all of a sudden, I’m yanked out from under the covers. Knox slams his arms down, caging me in. His luminous eyes are rimmed in dark liner and his hair is styled in soft spikes, but there’s nothing gentle about his hands pinning my wrists to the bed.
I see you.
A deep voracious hunger teases me as he bends close and licks a fiery path down my cheek. Then, with a vicious smile, he shoves me back hard.
The dolls and bedclothes fall away from me, and the bed splinters and comes apart as if it’s made of cotton candy and toothpicks. I burst through onto the other side in a flurry of silken sheets, then plummet through the air with a scream tearing out of my throat.
Hang on… isn’t this… the sense of déjà vu builds until a familiar dandelion trembles when I pass it by. I continue falling head over heels and glimpse a fluffy Snoopy cloud.
“No!” I gasp, my anger almost strong enough to overwhelm my fear. This isn’t real!
I turn and see a familiar unicorn gazing fearfully at me. But it’s not the only one looking at me now.
Knox is there, riding its back. He’s clad in black, his shoulders capped by spiky metal epaulets. A midnight cloak streams from his back, casting ripples of ink over the unicorn’s snowy white coat and blending in with its bloody hindquarters. He smirks when he sees me staring, then runs his tongue slowly across his lips. “Time to pay, poppet.”
A second later my wings burst out of my back. Now that I know what’s coming, I feel every excruciating detail of it.
The way my bones shift to make way. The first, terrible tearing of my skin as my wings rip through in a shower of blood and feathers. The wet weight on my back that drags me down until inevitably, the wind catches my wings, pulling them free and scattering the blood into ruby droplets in the air around me.
Knox just stares at me while I scream. His face is tense with a deep, dark hunger, and his eyes are trained on my face as if all the secrets in the world are written on it.
Staring at him, I can sense what he wants. He wants to see me suffer, needs to feel my fear and my pain. I can almost feel him drinking it all in like a vampire sucking at his victim’s lifeblood.
“You bastard!” I scream at him. Somehow I know that this dream is all his doing. He’s making me relive my nightmare just so he can enjoy it. As if it wasn’t bad enough the first time! How dare he make me go through this again!
“Don’t worry,” Knox pulls the unicorn around. Its eyes roll in fear but he ignores it, forcing the unicorn close until he can reach a hand out to grab my hair. “This is the last time you’ll use your wings.”
With a swift movement, he snaps a silver collar around my throat, then reels me in close with a fist on the chain. Satisfaction rolls off of him i
n waves. It’s so strong, I can almost taste it, and for a moment, the gnawing hunger I always feel around him abates, leaving nothing but shock and dismay behind.
“From now on, you’re nothing,” Knox grins. “Not even part-angel.”
He stops in mid-air, seated on the unicorn which is now black as night and completely subdued at his hand, while I keep falling, down, down, down into an endless abyss, lit only by the glint of a silver chain stretching from my throat to his long, slim fingers.
Chapter 18: Heaven
I come awake with a jerk and a cry that startles the nurse at my side.
“Miss Ramsey,” she exclaims, rushing over to my side. I blink at her blue skin and many arms before I realize I really am awake. “I’m Madam Kahili. How are you feeling, my dear?”
“Like I fell off a cliff.” My throat is so raw I can barely speak, and my limbs ache as if I’ve been put through a wringer.
She smiles and helps me to sit up, while one of her four hands gives me a glass of water. “Well, at least your memory is intact. That was a nasty fall.”
I take a sip but when I swallow, my throat feels blocked and I immediately remember the collar.
“You shouldn’t get up just yet, Miss Ramsey,” Madam Kahili frowns.
I brush her off and stagger to a nearby mirror on the wall. My reflection gazes back at me, almost unrecognizable. My face is tense and drawn and dark hollows sit below my eyes. I pause for a moment, taking it in, then remember the collar.
I tear my shirt away from my neck and lean forward to peer under it. But there’s nothing. Not even a hint of metal, just pale, sallow skin.
“Miss Ramsey, I really must insist you get back into bed,” Madam Kahili comes up behind me when I sway on my feet. The reflection of her many arms hovering behind me alerts me to something else that’s missing.
