Sneak peak. We are trying to hook you all in.
Please enjoy. May this edited snippet entice you as much as it enticed our editor.
She must’ve been sleeping, but she wasn’t dreaming.
Her eyes were closed, and she could feel Hale’s body next to hers, could feel her arm slung over his midriff. He’d come to her some time in the night when she was already asleep, mumbled sweet things in her ear, apologized. His form rose and sank with every vast, slow breath he took. His heartbeat reverberated throughout his frame and moved into hers, fell in tune with her own, until she could no longer differentiate between his heartbeat and hers.
The storms hadn’t stopped for days and days and days—behind her eyelids she could see flashes of light, through the haze left behind from her slumber she could hear rumbles of the sky in low, unhurried tones.
And suddenly she realized that someone else—it couldn’t have been Hale, she was pressed into Hale, she held him in her arms—was standing over her. Someone else was there, at the side of the bed she shared, casting a shadow over them with every blaze of lightning.
“Wake up, sleepyhead.”
The voice jolted her from her slumber. She jerked violently, bolted upright, and looked all around her—but there was no one there. No one but Hale, stirring slightly away from her haste.
She could’ve sworn she heard DesdeMona’s voice…
Was it a dream?
Izobel slowly disentangled herself from Hale, trying not to wake him. He turned away from her then, too deeply buried in his own delirium to really notice what she was doing. She glided on the tip of her bare toes to the door, the storm lighting her way in a string of fire, and opened the door as quietly as possible to peek down the hallway.
Nothing to the left.
When she turned to the right, however, at the very end of the corridor, looking ever so small beneath the cavern of the ceiling, the length of the windows, was Des—wearing robes, ghostly and white, swaying in wind Iz wasn’t sure was there.
“Des?” She called.
Maybe it was the storm. Maybe it was some strange effect of the lightning. As Iz stared at her, as she watched her friend wave for her to follow, she could see the edges of her fading, hitching as if she were a projection, as if she were only static. When Des opened her mouth and spoke to her, it echoed far too much off the sides of the walls, took far too long to reach Izobel’s ears.
“Come see me,” Des was saying. But the words didn’t match the movement of her lips. “I miss you.” And she continued to drift away, down the hall, disappearing around the corner.
Iz followed her.
Thunder rumbled beneath the floor. Iz quickened her pace to catch up to Des, and when Iz had reached the corner Des was already behind a door, peeking out from it, smiling at her.
It was the hidden door—the one that lead to the library.
She ran to the handle, reaching out to stop it from clicking closed, and flung it open to the curved stairwell. All she could see of DesdeMona was the end of her flowing gown as she moved up, up, up. Distorted sounds of laughter bounced down and surrounded Izobel.
Was any of it real?
At the top of the stairs, when Iz finished her ascent through the trap door of the library and turned in a circle, it was not DesdeMona, after all, standing there waiting for her.
It was Radek.
“Izobel,” He drawled to her, his voice wicked and low, “I am so glad you made it.”
All at once, nearly making her dizzy, fear fisted violently in her gut, but amazingly her anger had more power. Her eyes lit up, hiding her dread, giving her false valor to stand against the monster before her. “Where the hell is DesdeMona?”
The monster only blinked, feigning a certain amount of hurt. “Is it really all about your wild counterpart?” He asked. “Did you not like her phantom?”
Iz could only be silent, swallowing hard at the heartbeat stuck in her throat.
Radek rolled his brown eyes, waving off her concern with his hand. “She’s about, don’t you fret. Chasing fireflies, I would assume.”
Izobel’s gaze flitted to the window, where the wind howled and the rain cascaded hard against the glass. And, as though he could sense her discomfort, her worry, Radek laughed, booming along with a flash of lightning, sound for sound matching the thunder that followed.
“What do you want with me?” Iz finally demanded, turning her glare back to him, unable to find salvation (or her friend) through the rain.
He sat lazily on the edge of a book-filled table nearby, crossing one leg over the other and offhandedly lifting a bound treasure to inspect it. He was silent for a long while, apparently uninterested in answering her inquiry, turning a few pages of the novel, looking at the covers before setting it back where he found it, just so. As if suddenly remembering she were there, he wrinkled his nose and grimaced in her direction.
“I wish you’d bathed before you came up here,” he said. “You reek of wet dog.”
“What are you—?”
“I heard about your little escapade.”
She didn’t respond. She knew he meant her attempt to save those people in the town. She was slow as she crossed the room, as far from him as humanly possible, to reach the window and look down in the hopes of seeing DesdeMona somewhere through the storm.
The rain and wind and lightning were too vicious, and she too high up. She thought maybe she could see those fireflies he’d mentioned, glittering amongst the tree tops, flashing green and yellow—or was that a trick of the cruel world, too?
“Would you like to know what happened to your slaves?” Radek asked her.
“They weren’t mine,” she spat, “they didn’t belong to anyone.”
He chuckled, and she whirled around, a fresh wave of anger pouring over her, making her seethe.
“I think you know, Izobel,” he said slowly, as if he enjoyed every dripping word. “They’re all dead.”
She shook her head, wanting him to shut up, to leave, to die and never come back. But he continued; his voice playful, surprised that she didn’t know, happy to enlighten her.
“You killed them all.”
“You’re lying.”
She remembered her exact words to them, in the forest, all that time ago. She remembered each face, everyone battling terror, panic, the inevitability of being human as the screams in the distance became moment after moment a part of their souls, built into each of them from that point on.
But she had given them a chance. She’d given them hope.
Somehow, in the process of four words, Radek dashed all of that.
He got up slowly to face her, his face soft and serene despite what he was saying. “You can’t tell me you didn’t already know… you must have felt them. Slipping. One by one from the planes of this tiny world,” he paused, to watch her. “And, I mean, if anything you must have seen them. Strung up like party favors all over town. Quite festive, in its own way.”
He never stopped smiling.
And Izobel thought, for an instant, that she would hit him. She could do it all within the quickest moment—starting with a swift kick at his knee, breaking it back, collapsing him to the floor so she could reach his skull with both hands and press her thumbs deep into the sockets of his eyes. She relished the idea of him screaming and pleading for her to stop, relished making him writhe while she paid no heed at all.
Screaming and screaming for her to stop—but she wouldn’t.
His smile shifted to something more sinister, as though he could sense her intent. He stroked idly at the scruff of his jaw, waiting for her to respond, to act—if only to enjoy her discomfort.
“What are you doing to my friend?” Izobel choked instead, cursing her wavering voice.
“Isn’t that a question you should be asking yourself, Izzy?”
She cringed to have him speak to her with such familiarity. “Don’t call me that,” She snapped.
He ignored her, eyes glittering in soft flashes of lightning. “Our sweet girl is slipping from you, and you’re just letting it happen?” He looked her up and down, slowly. “Too busy playing bed warmer?”
Izobel was closing in on him without paying attention. Her anger was powerful enough to overcome her fear and her better judgment. “She’s not your sweet girl,” she hissed at him, surprised at her own voice. “She’s my best friend. Don’t you dare—’’
He was quick to overcome her words, voice raising just enough to drown her out. “It really shows,” He said, “considering she’s spending so much time apart from you.”
Izobel’s mouth clamped shut.
Radek sneered back, approaching her in a speed that was too quick—in every way inhuman. “Don’t worry,” he drawled, bending over her, looking down on her. “You can continue your promiscuity in peace, and I’ll take care of darling DesdeMona.”
“Stay away from her!”
He laughed, close enough that she could smell him. She could see contradicting beautiful flecks of gold in his eyes, even in the shadows.
Contradicting serenity in his voice, even as he spoke so wickedly.
“I could kill you,” he whispered. His words bounced off of every book in the library and echoed in her ears, over the storm, despite their volume. “You’d be dead before you realized it. Before you hit the floor. Or, if I wanted, I could make you feel every second of it…” He sighed, as though soaking in the possibility. “I could draw it out for so long.”
Izobel was frozen, inches from his face, unable to move. Her anger could not save her after all.
“But I think you have your own death wish, girl. And that might be more amusing for me to watch. So patience it is.”
But so unsound. Her anger could save her. There was her perfect opening: as he mocked her, as he played with her for his own sick sport. She lunged at him, nothing but rage and ultimate precision cultivated by fear and years of practice, a dip of her body and a jut of her toes towards his kneecap, and there was no way she could miss. The velocity of her motion was sure to connect and destroy its contact, then he’d fall, and then all she had to do was reach out.
But her toes connected with nothing.
She pulled her leg back and Radek was gone.
Vanished—at the last possible second—impossibly, and definitely.
She stood in the library and was completely alone.
And all he’d said to her came crashing down.
Tears fell like the rain. Breath tore from her, for she hadn’t realized she’d been holding it. Couldn’t get enough air, couldn’t see, couldn’t stand straight, the truth of his words crushing her to pieces, the misery of the truth ripping into her from all sides.
Who was she to think she could save anyone? Who was she to think she had the right to step in and change the fate of strangers? The world gave her the answer, in the lives of those she’d tried to free, in the lives of those whose end she’d sealed.
How could she go after Prometheus? Not only did her friends prove that they would not be as gracious as Izobel when it came to others, but Radek also assured her that no matter her good intentions, ultimately she would fail. What right did she have to save him?
Lighting struck ground, rumbled the earth, and shook the plantation. With it, Izobel’s resolve rose from beneath her despair, took hold of her anger, fear, helplessness, hopelessness, and twisted it. Shocked it back into life.
She had every right to try and save anyone she could.
If she was the only human left in this world, the only human still human enough to try and preserve all that was left, so be it.
Radek would not stop her.
DesdeMona would not stop her.
Not even Hale. Not even her own doubt.
And to prove to all of them that very truth, the only thing she was absolutely sure of, she’d do what she’d always known she’d do, what she was going to do from the very beginning.
By the dark red of the sky, by the way it bled through and cast new light out below it over the rain, she knew the sun was on the rise.
She was going after Prometheus.
The Space Between Worlds 