Chapter 216 Chapter 216

Chapter 216 Chapter 216
Violet

Multiple pursuers were behind me, their footsteps echoing off the stone, their voices calling out to each other in coordination.

They were hunting me.

I stumbled, nearly going down, but caught myself against the wall and kept running. My heart hammered in my chest, fear making my hands shake and my vision blur at the edges.

Turn left, my mind screamed at me instinctively stating that my room was that way.

But that made no sense. I didn't have a room here. I'd never been here before. 

Yet my feet obeyed the impulse anyway, carrying me left down a narrower corridor. The voices behind me grew louder, closer, and I could hear the scrape of metal on stone. 

They were armed.

A door appeared ahead, heavy wood banded with iron and I threw myself at it, grabbed the handle and wrenched it open, stumbling inside and trying to slam it shut behind me.

But a hand caught the door before I could close it. Strong fingers wrapped around the edge, forcing it open despite my desperate attempts to keep it shut.

I was pulled backward into the room, away from my only escape route. I spun around to face my captor, ready to fight, to beg, to do whatever it took to survive.

And found myself staring at Elijah.

Except it wasn't Elijah. 

His features were the same including the line of his jaw and the shape of his mouth. But his eyes were completely black. Not just the iris and pupil, but the whites were filled with solid darkness that reflected nothing, and seemed to swallow light rather than let it escape.

"No," I gasped, my voice high and terrified. "Please, no. Elijah, please let me go."

But he didn't respond or show any sign of recognition or mercy. 

He just dragged me toward the center of the room with inhuman strength, his grip on my arm bruising, and unshakeable.

I fought hard as his fingers dug painfully into my skull, yanking my head up. I kicked and scratched and tried to wrench myself free of his deadly grip but it was useless. 

He was too strong, and my struggles only seemed to amuse him.

He raised his other hand, and I saw a knife in his hand, the cool metal blade glinting when it caught light.

The blade was ornate, and runes were etched along its length, symbols I didn't recognize but felt I should. 

But I gasped when I noticed the hilt.

It had a motif of the snarling wolf and the thorns wrapped around it, the claw-like shapes framing the whole design.

The same image I'd been drawing compulsively for days.

"Please," I whispered, my voice breaking. "Please don't do this!"

Tears were streaming down my eyes but it didn’t affect Elijah in the slightest.

The thing wearing Elijah's face smiled. It was a cold and cruel smile, utterly devoid of humanity.

He yanked my head up, exposing the column of my throat and a second later the knife came down, slashing toward my neck.

I screamed and woke up gasping, my hands flying to my throat to check for the wound I was certain would be there. 

My fingers found only smooth, intact skin, slick with sweat but unbroken and unhurt.

I raised my hands at eye level and looked at them, they were devoid of blood. I looked down at my clothes and sagged in relief to notice that I was wearing my regular pajamas.

I was in my room and in my bed. 

It was just a dream. A horrible, vivid nightmare, but not real.

But it had felt very real. I was panting, my heart racing so fast I thought it might burst. Sweat soaked through my shirt, plastering it to my skin. My entire body was shaking, trembling with the fear of getting my neck slashed even now that I was awake.

I forced my legs out of bed, needing to move, to ground myself in reality. My feet hit the floor and I stood on shaking legs, making my way to my desk where my sketchbook lay among scattered papers and pencils.

I flipped it open with trembling hands, turning pages hastily.

I had to ensure if what I had seen was true or just some crazy imagination.

I flipped through five sketchbooks, old and new and tossed the dustbin over, sitting in the pile of crumpled papers.

I opened a few until I found what I was looking for.

The motif of the snarling wolf surrounded by thorns stared back at me.

As if the paper burned my skin, I let it go, trembling a little.

I simply sat there for a while, gathering courage to pick it up again.

And then with a frenzy, I reached for more of the crumpled pages. The motif was rendered in careful detail across multiple pages, variations and iterations of the one I’d seen in the dream, each one slightly different but all unmistakably the same core design.

I'd drawn all of these. I knew I had, even if I couldn't remember making the conscious decision to create this specific image.

And in my dream, that same image had been on the knife. The knife that dream-Elijah had used to kill me.

I recalled the way his pitch black eyes had looked at me as he raised the knife to kill me.

Then suddenly a hazy and incomplete memory surfaced in my mind. 

It was of the night at Ironcrest Manor when we'd all gathered in the sitting room for family night arranged by Nicole. 

The sisters had been talking about the witch and then Alaric showing us artifacts from the witch war, precisely the weapon that had been used to kill the witch.

I held my head in my hands, tugging at my hair. I couldn’t recall if I had seen the motif then? 

Had I noticed it subconsciously and my stressed mind was now bringing it to the surface through compulsive sketching and nightmares?

I tried to remember more clearly, tried to picture that knife in detail. But the memory was frustratingly vague, just impressions and fragments rather than anything concrete.

I closed the sketchbook and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until spots danced in my vision. This was insane. 

I needed water. With still shaking hands, I reached for the bottle and forced myself to drink. 

The glass bottle was cool against my skin. Wiping sweat with one hand, I drank slowly and focussed on my breathing until my heart rate finally started to slow.

It was just stress, just my exhausted brain playing tricks on me, creating connections that weren't there, manifesting fears through nightmares.

That's all this was. It had to be.