Page 126 of Claim the Light
That’s what my mother whispered to me when I was a little girl shivering in her lap because I was afraid of the scraping sounds that would echo through the damp stone wall beside our cage.
“You were loved.”
She’d remind me over and over like a ward against the perpetual night that surrounded us. While she shared her food with me, stretching out the scraps our jailer fed us. While she wrapped her arms around me to keep me warm from the freezing cold in winter.
Even when she struggled to breathe at the end.
“You were loved.”
I soon came to understand that she chose her message carefully.
What mattered was not that there was love in my life before I’d been born, but that it was in the past.
I was loved.
She was loved.
Until we weren’t.
Now I crouch in the center of my cell, my threadbare, black dress barely covering my backside, listening to the unusual sounds through the solid, stone wall to my right.
I’m accustomed to hearing soft snarls from animals I can’t identify, along with the occasional low moan—of pain, not pleasure.
But these are two voices I’ve never heard before.
Neither of them belongs to my jailer. He calls himself Zadkiel. He’s an angel with the blackest hair, the whitest wings, and a smile that makes my stomach turn.
The higher pitch of one voice tells me it’s female. The other is male. Both are muffled through the thick, stone walls that make up my cage.
Four stone walls. Impenetrable ones.
There are small air vents in the ceiling, each located near a corner. I have an old mattress on a wooden frame for a bed, a wooden bucket in the corner for a toilet, and a single, wooden chair, which I rarely sit on. Because, well, that would be civilized. Or so my mother told me every time she rested on it, her head held higher, as if it made her feel like her old self.
I am not civilized.
The cage is magically sealed so that the walls defy any sort of deep scraping or attempted burrowing.
Not that I haven’t tried.
Like the animal that I am, I have broken my claws on those stones over and over, looking for any weak patch. After my mother died, I turned my quest into a game, managing to scratch out tiny squares as I tested every inch of stone for a weakness.
The scratches remained on the surface, but my claws sunk no deeper.
Zadkiel found it humorous. So humorous that he would slap me once for each square I made since his last visit. The slap itself didn’t hurt so much as the light that filled his palm.
His light magic. The power he uses to keep me under control that blazes from his hands whenever he wishes.
A purity of magic that’s a contradiction to his rancid soul.
Painful to my dark heart.
He taught me that if I try to escape, he will flood the air with light. Once, I made it three steps past him toward the door he’d left inches open to taunt me. His light burned my back so badly that I couldn’t sleep for days.
Screaming never did any good, either. As Zadkiel likes to remind me, sound only passes one way through the wall—inward—and he’s the only one who knows I’m here.
But now…
Something’s happening beyond my cage.
