and snaps with primeval energy, where it curls around the woman, rustling her gown and lifting her hair. This is where her eyes, her beauty, her hair are her downfall, where a vengeful and unjust goddess takes out her petty jealousies on an innocent, peaceful woman.
First raped and now blamed.
The woman screams as the very air itself enters her body, an air alive with Athena’s words of power. It invades her skin, her organs, and her bones. It reshapes and brings forth ugliness and poison. The searing pain rips from her throat in a guttural, primal scream that makes me stop breathing. I feel this pain. But I know it is nothing like the real thing. She bends at the waist, and her stomach empties its contents onto the mosaic tiles. Pain has taken her vision. She no longer sees, only feels. Her scalp burns, breaking open in jerks and tears. She reaches up to grab her blistering head, but her hands are bitten by something. Painful bites. Over and over and over again until she is consumed by merciful blackness.
Breathe, I tell myself. My heartbeat pounds like a frenzied ritual drum, echoing inside me. Trapped.
Another flash takes me from the white temple to a dark cave. A shadowed place. A place where candlelight flickers on the walls, and the screams and pants of the same woman echo through the hollow place.
So much agony.
And then the cries of a newborn child as it is carried through the darkness by its mother, a new mother racked with the pain of childbirth. Heart pumping. Limbs so weak, but her will so strong. To save this child. To get this child away. Away. She weeps hot tears and her heart breaks with each step, with each step closer to abandoning her child.
But it’s the only way.
She’s been hiding for many months, and soon they will find her. And when they do, they will have no mercy on this child. This child born of woman and god.
I moan, my own voice reaching beyond the images to my ears as the child is laid at the doorstep of a small stone farmhouse.
And then the woman flees. Heart racing. Body weak and bleeding from childbirth, the warm liquid running down her thighs as fast as the tears roll down her face. She’s done. This act of saving her child has broken her more than anything that Athena or the god ever did.
She returns to the cave, to the small nook where her child, a daughter, first breathed life, and she digs her hands into the earth to cover the afterbirth, to hide any evidence that a child has been born. And then she lies down like the monster she is to wait for the hunter.
This time she won’t hide, won’t run or fight. This time she will let him take her head as the others have tried to do. She is tired, too damaged to go on.
She doesn’t know how many nights and days she lay there on the cold, rocky ground of the cave, but she knows immediately when another invades her space. She lifts her head and shivers as the monster in her wakes. Her hands feel for the small candle and flint, and she lights the wick.
Shadows lick and writhe on the walls, revealing a man in battle gear creeping closer. His hand flexes around the hilt of a short sword. His other hand lifts a round shield as he approaches the candlelight.
The shadows on the wall meet.
She bows to the sound of hissing in her ears, a sound she hates more than anything. A sound that will soon be silenced.
He swings.
The sharp sting on the back of her neck pulls a gasp from her lips, but then relief flows through her. She is finally free. Free of the curse, free of being a monster. She welcomes her death with the comforting memories of her child nestled in her arms.
“Ari!” The back of my head rolled from side to side on the hard floor. Hands gripped both shoulders hard. “Ari! Goddamn it, breathe!”
Sebastian’s voice. Sebastian’s hands. Breathe. Why? I was fine. Everything was fine. Sleepy and fine. I settled back into the numbing, warm blackness that I found so comforting.
Until a fist slammed into my chest.
Fuck!
My eyes flew open. I sat up, mouth open, eyes wide but unseeing. My lungs burned. The pain over my heart, brutal. My mouth gaped like a fish out of water. Suffocating. My vision sharpened and with it came the realization that I needed to inhale, to breathe.
Jesus Christ, I needed to breathe!
My body lurched as my brain finally fired the correct signal, and I was able to suck in a long, desperate draught of air. My heart pistoned so hard, one breath was not enough, not nearly enough.
Sebastian sat back and wiped a hand over his forehead, his eyes filling with relief as he grabbed my hand.
After a long while, he said, “You stopped breathing. You were so still and quiet. The whole time. You didn’t even blink.”
A series of shudders went through me. I bit back tears and swallowed. “I didn’t?” I gasped. Because I sure as hell remembered screaming and crying and moaning.
And I sure as hell remembered my past. No, not my past. My ancestor’s cruel, heartbreaking past. My chest ballooned with the lingering despair I’d experienced as my ancestor. My head fell into my hands.
“You saw.”
I glanced up at Sebastian, hands falling limp into my lap. “Yeah,” I answered, voice ragged and small. “I saw.” He waited. And I couldn’t make the words come. “Do you mind if we get out of here?”
He eyed me for a long moment, and I saw worry and fear in his look, but that was all, just a brief glimpse before his head dipped and he began packing the contents of our ritual into his bag.
After shoving the heavy lid over the unnatural corpse of Alice Cromley, we left the tomb.
Long streaks of purple and orange leaked across the dark sky from the east, revealing the cemetery in all its creepy, broken glory. The high iron fence rose like battlefield spikes, keeping in the undefeated tombs, the ruins, and the mossy, exposed bones.
Still weak and numb, I made my way carefully down the two broken steps, my eyes coming to rest on the backs of the others. Odd. I thought they’d be facing me, waiting, curious to know what had happened.
Four in a line. Shoulder to shoulder. No one moved.
“Guys?” I said slowly, the hairs on my arms rising.
“Shh!” Henri’s head moved slightly, the only indication that the sound had come from him.
I exchanged a quick, confused glance with Sebastian before stepping closer to see what had grabbed their attention.
A gasp lodged in my throat.
No.
Snakes. At least thirty of them. All on the edge of the swamp, where water met ground. Bobbing in the water. Gathered. Drawn there. Eyes on the tomb. On me. Looking at me.
I stumbled back, falling against the steps. Pain lanced though my back and elbow as they cracked against marble. One look was all it took, one brief look that would be burned into my brain forever. And fear, the likes of which I’d never known before, swept me up and propelled me back. Scrambling, falling hard to my knees, my hands scraping across the jagged edges of a broken stone as I continued, turning and running.
Run.
My heart and lungs grew strained with the force of terror pushing the blood through my system, making me tingly and unsteady even as I darted around tombs and leaped over ruins, slowing only when the gate that led to freedom rose up before me.
I paused in front of the overgrown gate, my chest heaving, my arms going limp at my sides, the backpack slipping out of my hand and falling to the ground. Tears flowed down my cheeks and neck as I struggled to breathe and process what I’d just witnessed.
