Rebirth (Lost Souls #1)

Chapter 10

A shock of electricity wakes me up with a panicked gasp. A headache immediately fills my head when I jolt upright in the bed. My thoughts are a jumbled mess, and the left side of my vision is dark. With trembling fingers, I carefully touch my face. The feel of bandages on the left side and over my eye brings back the memory of what happened—the image of Sophia’s dead body, the look in her lifeless eyes. I slump and stare down at my hands. There is a heaviness in my chest and my body trembles, but the tears refuse to come.

Much like that first time, I look around the room and take in everything around me: the burnt-umber walls with mahogany wooden skirting boards, the matching hardwood floor, furniture in the same wood as the skirting boards. No windows, a door in the far-left corner leading to a hallway, another leading to the bathroom on the left of the bed. The wall between them is filled with shelves that hold an uncountable number of candles. The first time that I awoke here seems ages ago. It might be, for all that I know.

There is a knock on the door and when it opens, I almost expect Isra to walk in. Except I don’t remember her ever knocking. My mind darts back to the moment that I repeatedly stabbed her, to when I killed her. I cringe. It’s just me now. And him , I conclude as he walks in with a bowl of fruit in his hands. He places it on the desk and turns his gaze to me, his yellow eyes calculating as they look me over.

“How are you feeling?” His eyes remain on me while he leans back against the desk, crossing his arms in front of his chest. Muscles strain against the fabric of his shirt, and it takes more effort than I care to admit to drag my eyes up to his face.

My look of utter confusion doesn’t go unnoticed, and he gives me a faint smile. Without saying another word, he comes to sit on the side of the bed and reaches for me. I flinch as he touches my face and starts to undo the bandages. His touch is gentle, careful, and every brush of his fingertips against my face makes me want to lean into the featherlight contact. I don’t understand why he makes me feel this way when all I know is to fear him. And I do fear him, but the longer I’m here, the more I long for him as well. I crave him and the faint touches that he gives me. The looks and the smiles that are certainly enough to have me combust on the spot, despite it being unclear if he wants to have me or devour me. Perhaps both.

Sophia warned me away from him, but so far, he hasn’t given me a reason to heed that warning. There’s only the inexplicable way in which I'm drawn to him and my own common sense that tells me to heed her words. Two conflicting urges that wage a war inside of me: to go to him or to run fast and far. Both equally inexplicable and frustrating. I just want to understand what this is, why I’m feeling what I’m feeling, and how I can make it stop. At the same time, part of me is just curious to know if I’m the only one affected by whatever this is.

He meticulously inspects the uncovered part of my face and nods in approval. Carefully, I open my left eye and find that I’m able to see out of it. It seems very alien, though, as if there is a layer on top of my eye that slightly distorts a part of my vision. I close my right eye and look around with only the left one. Things seem to be moving in the shadows, but I’m unsure if I’m actually seeing it or just exhausted from everything that happened.

“The scars should fade soon,” he says as I open my right eye.

Turning to face him, I almost flinch away a second time. The combination of both eyes shows a dark-red aura that hangs around him like a mist of blood. Part of me wants to look at him with only my new eye, but another part is hesitant enough to stop me from doing so. Hesitation caused not only by this mist, but also by the sheer sense of danger, of evil, that he almost radiates.

Is this how Isra saw the world around her, how she saw him? I had been under the impression that it was her returned memories that made her so violent and borderline insane and downright volatile. But this, this sight, I don’t think that it helped with her sanity at all. If I hadn’t seen this place with my own eyes, I’m certain that it would have driven me mad as well.

“It seems that you’re already starting to realize,” he says, cutting through my thoughts. He already heads to the door, not looking back at me. My left eye shows me the most vile, hidden expression on his face as he walks out the door. I wonder—fear—what might happen to me from this point forward. Even with the contradicting emptiness that fills me at the lack of his presence.

As soon as he closes the door behind him, I will all of those thoughts away. I slip out of bed and go to the bathroom. There are no traces of what happened, as if it were nothing but a dream. A nightmare. The mirror has been replaced with an identical new one, both bodies have been removed, and the rubble and blood cleaned up. The only thing remaining is the knife, cleaned and carefully placed on the chair next to the door. Despite this, I still see Sophia’s body lying on the cold tile floor.

I undress and take a careful look at myself. My body is marked by the faint traces of cuts and bruises, but the scars on the left side of my face are the worst of all. The skin around the eye is one big scar, red and stingy, yet looking older than I know it to be. It’s a relief to know that it will indeed quickly fade away.

It’s strange, unsettling, to see my reflection look back at me with both a blue and a green eye. On the other hand, it’s far better than only one eye, so I really can’t complain. What I find to be at least equally unsettling and weird is my hair. Not a single trace of my natural dirty-blonde remains; every single strand has turned white.

In the flicker of the candles in the bathroom, the white has a silver-gray shine to it. Running my fingers through it, it feels as natural as can be, which somehow is even more strange. My chest tightens at the idea that perhaps my eye wasn’t enough of a sacrifice after all.

My own reflection sends a shiver through me, and I throw a large towel over the mirror to obscure it. I turn around and do the same for the smaller one above the sink. With a last look, I close the door behind me and return to bed. Both my body and my mind feel so very, very tired.

N ightmares made me toss and turn, so despite my tiredness, I get washed up. I put on a navy-blue sleeveless dress and a black overbust corset with lacing in the front. The hem of the corset has silver stitching in it that shimmers in the light. It oddly matches my new hair color. I admire it for a moment, then leave my room and go out to the garden. Even there everything seems to be alive with something. Shadows move around, yet they are gone once I focus on them.

“If I had known, I would have accepted having only one eye,” I mumble to myself.

I stop in front of the bench in the center of the garden—the one that Sophia would always sit on. I almost expected to find her here, and not seeing her sets an ache in my heart.

What happened to her body?

Something swells inside of my chest even before his voice reaches me. “I returned her to her original time. It will be as if she never left. Isra as well.”

He still manages to startle me. Not so much his presence, but the knowledge that he answered a question I didn’t speak out loud.

“Is that what would have happened to me if Isra had killed me?” I ask while I turn around to face him.

It’s unsettling to look at him with a mix of two visions, with that red aura fixed over his warm, honey skin. While I’m curious to find out what I will be able to see with only the emerald-green eye, I don’t dare to try it. Instead, I hope to learn to control this newfound sight of mine.

He smiles his usual wicked smile, and I notice that it’s less cold compared to before. Is it the eye showing it to me differently, or is his smile itself different? No matter the reason, it still looks like a violent, deadly promise.

“Yes, you would return to your room in that filthy whorehouse, bleeding out from cutting your own wrists.” He doesn’t even blink when he says those words, baring my own truth in front of me.

I only barely manage to hold back a shudder, taken aback that he knows about this. About this most shameful part of me—of my life. “Why?”

“Because I have no use for you when you’re dead.”

“You kidnap women and put them back where you found them when they’ve lost their usefulness?”

“It’s not quite that simple, but in a way, yes.” He laughs.

Gritting my teeth, I stop myself from speaking, because my newfound boldness is going to get me in trouble. Or worse, dead. Because he clearly has no reservations when it comes to that .

“You’ll understand, at some point,” he says. “But for now, you should have this.”

In the blink of an eye, he stands right behind me, so close that it makes my breath hitch. His chest almost touches my back, and his breath is hot on my neck. I can feel the heat of his body against my own. He smells like fire and brimstone and something else… something that I can’t name. Something warm and woody that manages to take the edge off the brimstone. It makes the whole thing weirdly calming, like being cuddled up in a soft blanket in front of a fire. The notion is so at odds with what little I know of this man that I find it hard, nearly impossible, to reconcile the two with each other.

He reaches out to me and brushes my hair out of the way, his hand stroking the back of my neck. My body heats under his touch, and I feel myself blush. I’m grateful that he can’t see it. His movements are careful while he puts something around my neck. A cool stone falls against my skin, and it’s enough to tell me what he’s giving me. Sophia’s necklace . My chest tightens, and a sob lodges itself in my throat. I touch the jewel, and it turns from colorless to ice blue, the color of my magic.

His fingers trail along my jaw, and from the corner of my left eye I see that they are red. Red as dried blood. I end up flinching after all, and he grabs the back of my neck, the pressure hard enough to bruise and making it difficult to breathe. Panic rushes through me but I can’t move, can’t struggle against him.

“Don’t forget that you’re mine,” he whispers in my ear.

The next moment he’s gone, and I fall to the ground, gasping for air.