Bewitched のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 11 - チャプター 17

The descent back into the cellar felt like stumbling into a coffin. My hands, damp with sweat, clutched at the splintered banister, guiding my trembling legs down one step at a time. My lungs burned from the sprint; each inhale carried more heat than air. Yet the cold of what I had seen upstairs had not left me. It clung to my skin like damp cloth, a reminder that I had been inches away from something inhuman, something grotesque enough to tilt my world off its hinges. The door flew open under my hand, the hinges crying out as if to betray me. Flynn jumped to his feet at once, startled, his eyes sharp in the half-light. For a heartbeat he looked at me as though I’d brought the devil itself back with me. Perhaps I had. I tried to speak but words broke in my throat. The picture of her — that woman in the mirror — refused to loosen its grip. Her hair a mass of filth, her nails hooked and twisted, her eyes like twin caverns of tar. I had not even been face-to-face with her, yet the memor

The night had been cruel to me. I had not truly slept, though I had tried. Perhaps I drifted once or twice into that shallow kind of rest that only mocks the body with its pretense of peace. Each time I closed my eyes, I saw it again—the warped reflection in the mirror, the grotesque thing that answered Tremaine in whispers. Each time I let my mind wander, I felt the beating of wings and the snap of talons from the dragon, as though it hovered still above the roof, waiting to tear us apart. No bed could protect me from that kind of remembering, and certainly not the splintered chair I had chosen to sit upon until dawn. When the first line of sun broke the forest’s edge, the air shifted. A light breeze brushed through the half-rotted shutters of the old house, and I stepped outside to meet it, hoping it might clear my thoughts. For a moment, the world seemed merciful: the leaves whispered against each other as though exchanging confidences, birds scattered notes into the still air, and

There had been a time when hopelessness wrapped itself around me so tightly I thought I might suffocate. It was not here in this prison, not even when the wardens’ hands bruised my arms and their chains carved into my skin, but long before. It was when my father—my father who once told me stories of my mother as if they were sacred relics—stood before the court and placed Tremaine at his side. I remembered that moment as clearly as though it had just passed. The chamber had been filled with whispers, the kind of silken murmurs that rise from curiosity and hunger, and in the middle of it all, I stood still as stone, watching my father vow himself to another woman while my mother’s memory still lingered like incense. I had opposed it. I had spoken, argued, pleaded. But my voice was as dust against stone walls. And when my father’s gaze slid past me, when it favored Tremaine’s jeweled smile instead of his daughter’s trembling hands, I knew something within him had changed forever. His lo