Silver Lining (Diamond #3) - Skye Warren Page 0,3

pager that it’s time for rounds.

And I go to Holly’s bedside. It’s the only conceivable place for me to be in the world. My hand curls over hers before I know what I’m doing, before I can think about it.

A moment weighs itself down with silence broken only by her breathing. The rhythm is steadier now, but that doesn’t mean she’s healed. It doesn’t mean she’ll walk out of here okay. Nightmare scenarios line up and hurl themselves into my skull one by one, crowding in close, filling the room.

I must stay like that for hours. Maybe days. Time is meaningless without her.

She squeezes my hand. It startles me from my dark stupor.

I hold my breath, frozen, waiting. Her eyelids flutter, almost like she’s dreaming, and then she opens them, blinking into the light.

Holly swallows once, twice, and licks her lips. The sight of the pink tip of her tongue on her bottom lip is more of a miracle than anything this church has ever seen. And when her eyes meet mine, I could almost believe there was something holy here once.

“Where am I?” Her thumb traces a lazy circle on the back of my hand.

“You’re in hell, sweetheart. Welcome back.”

2

Holly

Some people wish they were mermaids. Some wish they weren’t. But it’s not the being that’s the problem. It’s the becoming that kills you. The transition, when flesh tears apart and reforms, when electricity runs through the invisible seams in your body. White-hot pain scorches me, and I twist my body in the fire. It might only last seconds or it might be an eternity in the roiling, beating, panting ache. The ache is relentless.

The pain becomes a constellation. Small pinpricks of hurt in the black sky of my body. Hanging there with sharp metal pins that dig in and hold tight.

They’re too far out of my reach to touch.

The stars turn to embers, sizzling at the dark fabric behind them. It’s too late to put them out, and then all of them light up at once in a roar of fire and flame. A dragon—it must be a dragon. It’s as reasonable as becoming a mermaid, and I can feel him there, his hulking presence taking up all the space in my mind.

I can’t get away. Can’t move my legs, can’t move my arms. You need muscles to sit up and mine won’t engage. Even my own body won’t save me from the danger. The threat is here. The threat is me. Somehow, I set this into motion, I thought this dragon into being, and now—

The dragon breathes again.

Fire consumes the stars and bleeds out into everything that’s left of me.

It’s a hot, obliterating pain, and sweat beads on my skin, on what remains of my skin. If I could open my mouth I would scream but the scream is burned away in a rush of wet heat. My body tries to get away, it tries so hard, but I’m too close to the dragon. I’d give anything for water. Cool water on my scales, on my legs, water to put it out, put it out.

I pray for the cool spray of the ocean. For rain.

Rain doesn’t come.

Instead, I sink down into fire. A strangled animal noise comes from somewhere above me, beyond me, and it sounds familiar. Like my voice. But it can’t be, because I don’t have a voice anymore. I don’t have anything but the pain.

The pain is everything. I’m nothing, nothing, nothing.

Nothing for a long time. Long enough that I hear a jagged drumbeat. The dragon’s heart?

My heart.

It takes an eternity to think of my heart. My heart, which beats. My lungs, which draw air into my body. A new source of pain locates itself in my jaw. Well, that’s what you get for gritting your teeth. In the still-dark of my mind I peek out the corner of my eye for signs of the dragon. No new flames light the space, only the hazy-red glow of the burned places.

The red gets brighter, and brighter, and brighter until finally I recognize the shade as light through my own eyelids. It adjusts itself off to the side of me.

Curiosity seeps in at the margins. A lamp to light someone’s way? Maybe. Maybe not.

I’m sure I’m not moving. I’m sure now that I’m not a mermaid, not in the water, not even upright. Lying down. Lying back. How I got here is a mystery. Is this how a mermaid feels after she’s made the change, the sand