Siren Awakened - C.R. Jane Page 0,41

was there out of me. I trembled lying there. It was hard to describe how it felt, this knowledge that something was wrong with me. That you weren’t alone. An eerie feeling slid across my collarbone like someone was watching me.

I flew off the bed and started pacing the cell. I was so freaking tired. It felt like I could sleep forever.

But I couldn’t let that happen.

“A trinket in the warden’s office,” I whispered to myself, probably sounding crazy if anyone was listening. “Of course it would be in his office. It might as well be on the moon.”

A little squeak distracted me from my spiraling thoughts. I looked down to see my little mouse friend standing on his hind legs, holding what looked like a chocolate M&M. I took it politely and then set it on my bed.

“I’m saving it for later,” I told the mouse, not wanting to look ungrateful. But while I was crazy enough to talk to a mouse, I wasn’t crazy enough to eat food that the mouse was holding. Even if it was the only chocolate that I’d seen in the place, besides the bar Alaric offered me the other day or Keon sneaking me some from outside the prison.

The mouse squeaked something that sounded like it was trying to reassure me. I leaned down and stroked the top of his head softly.

“You’re all I have left in here, buddy,” I whispered to it.

He squeaked something else and nuzzled my finger. Suddenly, he froze and sniffed the air. Whatever he smelled seemed to terrify him, because his entire body shook and he ran away like a pack of cats were after him.

I went back to pacing.

After a while, I started to drag. I could literally feel the energy being rapidly sucked out of me. I stumbled to my cot.

“Can’t fall asleep,” I murmured, slapping myself in the face.

I put my head right under the dirty water, hoping that the cold water splashing my skin would help me stay awake.

But it was a losing battle. I went from sitting down to falling over on my cot. It was like an iron weight was suddenly covering my entire body, weighing me down.

It wasn’t long before I drifted into a dreamless sleep.

My eyes shot open as I woke up to the sensation of falling. I put out my hands in front of me just as I fell into what felt like a puddle of sludge. It was pitch black wherever I was, and the smell was completely overwhelming, like someone had gathered up the perfect concoction of feces, vomit, and rotten food and then mixed it all together.

I retched at the smell, nothing coming up since I hadn’t eaten in who knows when.

Tears filled my eyes as I tried to feel around for where I’d found myself. “Not the dark, not the dark,” I said hysterically as I began to inch forward. I hated pitch blackness, it came from when I was younger and my mother would wake me up in the middle of the night because of some kind of infraction she’d come up with that I’d done earlier in the day. I took to plugging in a night light because it was much less frightening to see what was attacking you than to have swings coming at you in complete darkness.

That fear of darkness stayed with me as I grew up. And it was certainly not doing me any favors right now.

Feeling around, it seemed like I was in some kind of tube, a tunnel of sorts. With the smell, I was pretty sure that I found myself in a sewer tunnel.

How in the world did the ghost get me in this?

I inched along, not understanding how it was possible that there couldn’t even be an inkling of light ahead of me.

I began to rap “Lose Yourself” by Eminem out loud to try and distract myself from the smell and the lack of light. The tunnel wasn’t tall enough for me to stand up, so I had to crawl my way through it. The way that I’d woken up had made it seem as though I’d dropped from the ceiling, but when I tried to feel around, I didn’t find any type of opening. Since I had no clue where I’d come from, I picked the direction that the sludge seemed to be moving and kept going.

“Knees weak, arms are heavy,” I rapped as something brushed against my leg.

It’s just a piece of trash, it’s