@intolerablexsacrifice continued from [x]
Demons had haunted her steps for so long, she had learned to find friends in the shadows. She held her hands out to them, welcomed them at her side and gave them voices through her pages – but there were some that wanted more from her. Some that wanted her voice, and left scouring wounds wherever they touched. There were some she simply could not control, and last night she had been visited by the worst kind – a demon who had stepped off the pages and back into the world itself. It had only been a moment, but she could have sworn that she saw Ned Low at the back of the pub. The man had looked right at her, and the whole world had come to a screeching halt.
When the cacophony finally quieted, Abigail had found herself blinking toward the ceiling in the cellar – she had jumped to her feet so fast, she didn’t even see Georgina as she ran for the door, yanking on it with the expectation of entrapment. The door swung open even as her friend grabbed her shoulder and hauled her back, closing the door against her cry of terror. She had spent the remainder of the hour in her friend’s arms, soothed without question as the world righted itself and at last, Abigail had been able to step back into the pub, if only to cross it so that she could leave early for the night.
Against her will, her eyes had turned back to that corner – the man sitting there looked vaguely like Low – but was by no means an exact likeness. Shame had gripped her as she was escorted home, and her sleep had been restless the whole night through. The shadows under her eyes could have passed for the effects of a broken nose by the time she got into work, and it was three hours before Georgina started her shift and immediately hauled her aside to conceal them better.
Everything seemed out of order, and her world still hadn’t felt right by the time Flint arrived, nearer to the end of a shift that had gone by on sheer muscle memory alone it seemed. It had felt, for one wild and incomprehensible moment, as though her muted terror had summoned him from the ashes of Hell itself to banish the last lingering traces of Low’s visage in her mind.
Propriety had been little more than a distant memory for long enough now that she did not hesitate to turn to him, and rely on his solid strength against unwelcome phantoms. He had played a role in freeing her from Low, even if it had just been in liberating her from the man who had stopped Low and his crew entirely. It stood to reason then, that he might be what she needed to liberate herself of the memories.
He seemed to understand, to some extent, and for a time she simply afforded herself the comfort of knowing he was there. Eventually though, she did step back and force herself to breathe, to focus beyond the hollow inside of herself that echoed with her despair and to instead frame the words necessary to describe her plight. He alone would know, with the least amount of words, what had caused her so much distress. She wondered if perhaps he had been summoned by Georgina, rather than by some otherworldy sense of wrongness – strange as it might be to think, Abigail could find truth in either possibility.
“I thought I saw Captain Low yesterday.” She took a slow breath, then, “But while I know that to be impossible – I wonder if what Captain Vane assured me was true.” Her gaze hesitantly sought out the strange mixture of his own – another call toward the fae and fell stories that surrounded him. Needing to know, to hear from someone she had no reason to doubt, that all of her demons existed only in her mind. “Captain Low – and his crew – they are dead, aren’t they?”
Ocean Archive 