The Last Smile in Sunder City (The Fetch Phillips Archives #1) - Luke Arnold Page 0,90

continue to turn and there will still be jobs and seasons and kissing and chocolate; there just won’t be any music in it any more. We can bite the fruit and understand that it is sweet but not taste it. We will look at the sunrise and do our best to will some kind of warmth into our hearts and feel nothing.

That is the Coda.

And this is how it happened to me.

Laughter. Some mad, hacking sound came bouncing down the hall. A chuckle at first. Then an echoing shriek that spoke of insanity.

I sat back in my cell and tried to put it from my mind but another sound soon followed: a cracking from all around like the world was standing on thin ice. Something inside me panicked and a sharp pain hit my chest, dropping me back on to the mattress. I held my hand to my heart, managed to find my breath again, and wondered what the hell was going on.

There was a shattering SNAP and the lights went down. The barriers went down too, opening up the roof so the sunlight filtered in.

On the other side of the walkway, a Werewolf prisoner opened his mouth to scream. It was supposed to be a roar but the sound that came out was stretched in panic. His claws grabbed at his throat and when they came away, I could see where he’d scratched the fur from his skin. He pressed his skull between his hands and tried to crack it open like a coconut to let out whatever fire was burning in his brain.

The magical doors had disappeared. We’d all been set free. I was surrounded by the most dangerous criminals in all the magical world but I was the only prisoner who had the strength to leave.

I stepped out into a long hallway with cells on either side, and in every other room some poor creature writhed in agony. Blood poured from noses. Fingernails fell to the floor. Faces burst into flames and bones broke under their own weight.

The laughter continued. In the final room, there was a man in old robes sitting in the corner with his back against the wall, cackling uncontrollably.

His mouth was wide open and his eyes… he had no eyes. Drilled into the sockets of his manic face were two gray padlocks. The keyholes looked like long, black pupils full of nothing but darkness. I ran past him as fast as I could.

At the end of the hallway, I stepped through another non-existent door and found myself in the operations room where the pretty Elven warden was on his knees. His long blond hair had come off in his fingers and he held the clumps of it out to me as if I could give him some kind of explanation. All I could do was stare into his eyes and watch the years, the centuries held back by magic, flood in. His cheeks formed little wrinkles that spread about his face and quickly carved out channels in his skin. The remaining hair turned white and his skin went yellow and then gray. His mouth dropped like a stone in water. Open. Open. Open in disbelief at the eternity that fled on his breath. His body died before he did. He was still screaming when the flesh dried on his bones and black sewage cascaded from his mouth. When his face hit the floor, it turned to powder and scattered over my feet. A corpse was lying where a man had been standing only a moment before and I don’t know if I screamed or cried but I certainly ran.

I passed terrified men and women, gripping to their last piece of life and begging me to help. But how do you force life back into something when it so desperately wants to leave?

Outside, the world was crumbling. The driveway was lined with hedges and I watched the leaves lose their color and fall from the branches and then the branches creak and die and fall from the trees. The birds were wailing in long, dark moans of despair. On the grass outside the main gate, every warden was bent over gasping, vomiting or collapsing to their death.

I stumbled uselessly past them, through failed magical barriers, unable to comprehend the horror around me.

Then, something scratched my brain and I knew what was happening. The horrible truth about what I’d done and what it meant filled my mind in a terrifying instant and when it did,