Page 91 of The Diamond in the Rough

Water burbled out from under the door, dark and cold. Bitingly cold. So cold it felt like acid.

Breath rasping in my lungs, I forced myself to push open the heavy doors, what felt like the weight of a hundred ghosts pushing back from the other side. Although I didn’t particularlywantto, some unknown compulsion forced me onward, and I put my shoulder to the door, leaning my weight into it.

With a long-suffering groan, the door gave way.

All of the tubs were overflowing their stainless steel sides, the water weirdly dark as it cascaded over the rounded lips of a half-dozen baths. The water should have flowed into the grating in the center of the floor, but it seemed those were flooded, as well, as the water rippled across the room, reacting to the movement of the doors and my sloshing feet.

I shuddered as my scan of the room revealed that at least one of the tubs held more than just icy water.

A sodden lump of fabric—that I knew instinctively wasn’t just fabric—floated at the surface of the one farthest from me, all the way down the weirdly long row and to the left.

Moving forward was like wading through cold molasses, although the lapping water around my ankles was clearly more liquid and less opaque, the pink shape of my feet distorted and strange through the swirling water, like the pale bellies of bloated dead fish attached to my ankles.

I glanced in each of the other tubs as I passed, but only the one had more than dark water.

I stopped beside it, staring down at the mass of off-white, stained fabric billowed around the form floating inside. Stringy brown hair floated out from the face-down skull—the only feature that was recognizably human.

I knew the face I was going to see, but the same horrifying compulsion that had dragged me down the hall and forced me to walk across the room made me reach into the chill water that felt almost oily against my skin and scrabble through sodden fabric for a bony shoulder to turn him over.

My own face—but younger, much younger—stared sightlessly up at me, the dark irises that looked nearly black filmed over and made a milky grey. The skin was paler than mine had ever been in life, and my skin hadn’t seen sunlight for most of the fourteen years I’d spent here.

What I hadn’t expected was that my own corpse would come back to life with a gasp in front of me.

It wasenough to startle me awake, choking on a cry.

Apparently, even the fact that Hart had mentioned going back to Tranquil Brook had been enough to send my subconscious back there. At least I hadn’t dragged anyone else into that nightmare with me.

A glance at the clock told me it was four-seventeen in the morning.

My skin—like the knit boxers and t-shirt I wore as pajamas—was damp with sweat, my heart pounding and my breath fast and shallow. I closed my eyes, trying to ease the panic attack pushing against the back of my throat.

Every sense felt hypersensitive, the sound of my own pulse and respiration loud and rasping, the rev of an engine and rush of tires down Broad Street outside startlingly loud as a solitary car sped past, making me jump.

Breath shuddered in my chest.

I wanted desperately not to be alone. To find Raj…

But I couldn’t do that, and I knew it.

With a sigh, I pushed back the sweat-soaked covers withshaking hands, then bundled them all up and stuffed them into my laundry basket, along with my shorts and t-shirt. I debated the merits of showering immediately versus once I’d put my laundry in, and decided I needed to be clean more.

I leaned against the molded plastic wall, both hands spread, holding me upright as I stood under the thankfully hot water, letting it run over my skull, down my neck, back, and the sides of my face, and down into the drain, the water swirling away the sweat and the tears that I let escape under the spray, although not the anxiety that had produced them.

I was honestly surprised that I was tolerating the water, but the thought ofnotscrubbing myself clean had been too strong. And the fact that this water was both flowing and hot went a long way into keeping me from breaking down in the shower.

I spent probably a half hour—maybe longer, I don’t know, I didn’t actually check the clock when I finally dried myself off and pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a clean t-shirt—in the shower, then shoved my laundry into the tiny in-unit washer to clean out the cold sweat.

I wasn’t going to be particularly useful at work in another four hours, but it wasn’t like this was the first—or would be the last—time that nightmares had stolen my sleep.

I just?—

I’d had worse nightmares, worse panic attacks. Nights that I’d been wakeful all night or starting at midnight, one, or two in the morning instead of a quarter after four.

But there was something about this one that had left me particularly drained.

Maybe it was the fact that I was already exhausted andworn out from trying to gain control over either my psychic abilities or my death magic.

Maybe it was the guilt.