Change of Darkness (The Change Series Book 3) by Jacinta Jade (best new books to read txt) 📕

started to open once again at the sound of the chalice smashing, and this time it was Melora’s voice that called inside.

‘Lady?’ The door opened a little wider. ‘Lady, is everything—’

She heard a gasp, and then, from the corner of her eye, Siraay glimpsed Melora’s form enter the room at a run, Genlie close behind her.

‘My lady!’ Melora dropped to her knees beside Siraay, carefully avoiding the glass splinters, and lifted Siraay’s head and shoulders from the floor while Genlie moved to a defensive position.

Siraay felt her hands hit the cool ground below her, glass digging into the back of one hand, but her mouth and face were steadily going numb.

From her new position, Siraay watched a bit of her spilled drink drip from the sharp edge of a glass shard.

That was when she realised. The grape had indeed been rotten. Perhaps most of the food was. And purposefully placed on the tray to ensure Siraay drank her fill of the nectar. The poisoned nectar.

‘Poison,’ she managed to gasp out hoarsely.

‘What did you say, lady?’ Melora bent over her, but now it was as if Siraay were just a passenger in her own body.

Her already bruised stomach was raging against her, her body was going cold, and her mind was not her own. She could feel it spinning her around and then shutting down, as if walls were slamming down around vital parts of herself so that she couldn’t touch them.

She tried to reach for that core of power within herself, knowing that if she could just touch it, she might withstand the effects of what had been done to her long enough to survive.

But another wall slammed down, cutting her off and cornering her in a small section of her own mind. She couldn’t see anything now, could barely hear what was going on around her or feel the touch of whomever was holding her.

She was left with only one word, which she repeated numbly a final time, just before a final wave of darkness slammed into her.

‘Poison …’

The word echoed in Siraay’s mind, a final torment in the blackness before even that word disappeared.

Then there was nothing.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

NOISES CAME TO her sometimes. The sound of an angry and commanding voice. Then the mixed murmur of voices that she was unable to distinguish between. Sometimes she could tell if they were male or female, and sometimes she barely registered anything.

But each time the dark walls that kept her prisoner opened just enough to let something in—a sound, the feeling of her roiling stomach, a brief sense that someone was touching her—Siraay would try to shout through those walls that kept her cut off.

But what came out was never what she was trying to say.

Someone’s poisoned me, she tried to yell at the person whose hand she felt, just for an instant, on her shoulder. Please, help me!

‘P-poi-oison,’ she heard herself gasp out, her body doubling up in pain at the effort. ‘He-help.’

Sometimes, when she managed to break through the dark just enough, she could hear a response, just a few words, before those walls once again shut her off from the world around her.

‘We know, lady. Keep fighting, we’ll—’

But those walls were ruthless as they slammed down again, and so Siraay never learned what it was that her servants or the healer’s were trying to do.

It seemed to go on forever, that nothingness, only rarely broken by snatches of the real world, which would then ceaselessly loop through her mind, until, exhausted, she collapsed almost gratefully back into the dark nothing.

Only sections of Siraay’s mind seemed available to her, so that she couldn’t even piece together what was happening.

So she hung on to the precious words that did manage to pierce the walls.

Fight. System. Chance. Strong.

At first the words would come through to her every so often. And then they started to slow. And the less frequent the words got, the worse they became.

Unknown. Nothing. Investigate. How.

The small part of her mind that still worked puzzled over these words, but she could make no sense of them.

Fading. Unlikely. Looking.

It was like being told just a couple of lines of a story, but from random places throughout, so that she couldn’t understand the plot in its entirety.

Then she heard the last words.

Nothing. Mother.

And even though she didn’t know what their usage meant, Siraay could feel the dark walls around her inching in closer and closer, and even as she backed away from the never-ending darkness of those walls, she knew what would happen at the end.

Her mind, this last, small part of her, would be crushed.

She would cease to exist.

She was huddled in that blackness, the walls only a body length away on each side, when it happened.

They stopped.

Siraay didn’t know how, but she could feel that they had halted their advance. If she had been able to take a breath in that place, she would have held it.

And held it.

In that darkness, she turned, watching the black walls as they began to tremble.

Were they about to explode towards her, driving her forever into unknown and unrecoverable depths?

And then she felt them move.

Away from her.

Then they halted again.

All of her that she had access to was alert and trying to piece together what was happening.

Because something was happening.

And then she realised.

Out there, something—no, someone—was trying to save her.

Once that thought appeared before her, Siraay grabbed on to it, not even fully sure why, but knowing she had to.

The walls trembled again, then shifted farther away. And kept moving.

Slowly but surely, Siraay could feel their retreat, almost as if she were in a room that had been opened up to let the air rush in.

As the space around her widened ever so gradually, Siraay felt like raking her fingernails down those walls, beating her fists upon them, and screaming at the person helping her to hurry.

But by maintaining a tight grip on herself, she refrained from doing so, knowing that such antics might distract the person who was trying to