Chapter 212: The Golden Knife
Moana
One moment, I was in the interrogation room with the police officer sitting across from me.
“Ms. Fowler?” he asked, standing from his seat with a worried look on his face. “Are you alright?”
My eyes were wide and my hands were shaking. I was standing with my back against the wall, feeling as though I couldn’t get a full breath into my lungs. The room felt as though it was closing in on me, and I felt trapped inside like an animal caught in a net.
And then, suddenly, I felt my knees buckle under me. I fell to the ground, and then everything went dark with only Edrick being the very last thing on my mind.
…
When I woke up, I was in a dark room. In fact, it was pitch black… But when I held my hands up in front of my face, I found that I could see my own hands perfectly. The room itself was black, like a void.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice felt thick and heavy. There was no echo, and no response.
I called out again. This time, after a few minutes of waiting, there was finally an answer.
“Hello,” a familiar female voice said. I immediately recognized it as my wolf, Mina.
“Mina?” I called out. “What’s happening?” But she didn’t answer. In fact, a long time went by during which I didn’t hear or see anything. It felt like an eternity, but also a split second at the same time. Was I sleeping? Was this just a strange dream? It felt too long and vivid to just be a regular dream… I felt perfectly conscious, not at all like I was in a dreamlike state.
I had to rack my brain to remember what had happened at first, but finally it started to come back to me. I remembered being in the interrogation room. I was answering the police officer’s questions, but it started to get to be too much, and I started having flashbacks when he started asking about the specifics of what happened in the warehouse. No matter how hard I tried to stay focused and keep myself level-headed, I couldn’t stop seeing Ethan’s gun in front of my face. At one point, I started to hyperventilate. Yes; that had to be it. I hyperventilated and lost consciousness. Surely any minute now I would wake up and would be safely in Edrick’s arms once again. I never should have agreed to go down to the police station on a whim like that… I should have waited until I was mentally prepared. But it was okay now. I would be okay once I woke up.
But I didn’t wake up. A long time passed, and I stayed in the black void. I moved around, or at least I felt like I was moving around, but nothing changed. There was nowhere to go, and nothing to do except wait.
Eventually, I started to wonder if I was dead. If this was what it was like to be dead, I thought to myself, then it was awful and lonely. The thought of being conscious with nothing but a void around me for all eternity made me shudder.
At one point, though, I suddenly felt someone else’s presence. A sort of presence, at least. I couldn’t tell if I just made it up in my mind or if it was real, and if someone else was here with me. But when I started to see Michael’s face materializing in front of me, I wished that it was neither of those things. I would have rather been alone.
“Go away,” I told Michael, taking a few steps back. But he didn’t speak. He just sneered at me, and eventually the rest of his body came into view as though he was loading into this new instance, like a virtual reality. His neck, then his shoulders, his arms and his chest… Then, eventually, his hands. He was holding something in one of them; a knife.
It wasn’t just any knife, though. It was golden — even the blade itself was golden — with an ornate handle that had the head of a wolf on the end. He was holding it tightly in his hand, unmoving.
Then, suddenly, the void shifted. It changed from a black void to a rainy cliff with trees on either side. I felt a gasp catch in my throat and I whirled around to see a sheer drop below me with nothing but blackness below.
“I should have killed you sooner,” Michael’s condescending voice said. I whipped back around to see that he was closer now. The knife was raised, ready to stab me. When I turned around, the tip of the knife was nothing more than a mere centimeter from my face and I shrieked, stumbling backwards.
I thought for sure that I would fall into the void now. But I didn’t. I fell to the ground, and Michael stood over me, laughing. He walked closer, straddling me, and lowered himself. Then, holding the knife with both hands now, he raised it high. I screamed again, but it was no use. No one could hear me. No sound even came out of my mouth. Just air.
A bolt of lightning flashed overhead, illuminating Michael’s evil, twisted face and his glowing eyes. He brought the knife down hard just as thunder rolled in the sky. He brought the knife back up… Then down. Up… and down… Until there was nothing left of my chest except for a bloody crater. He laughed the entire time, and when he was finished, he stood and tossed the knife to the ground. He wiped his bloody face with the back of his hand. I was stiff now; I was dead, but I was conscious, and I couldn’t move or scream or even blink against the rain that was beating down on my pale face. With another chuckle, Michael kicked me over the edge of the cliff and I fell limply into the void like a ragdoll.
All around me, all I could hear was the sound of a baby crying.
Suddenly, I awoke with a start, coated in a cold sweat. I woke up for real this time… Not in a void, but in a hospital bed, in a dark room lit only by the dim blue glow of the hospital machines. My body felt sore and weak, but it wasn’t stiff; and when I looked down at my chest, all of it was still there. It was no longer a crater created by the knife that Michael wielded.
Thankfully, it really was just a dream. I was asleep the whole time… But why was I in the hospital? Was my panic attack so bad that they had to take me to the hospital?
But part of me didn’t think that it was just a dream. I didn’t know if I believed it or not, but the dream felt too vivid and too bizarre to just be a machination of my own anxiety. There was something prophetic about it… That knife. I had seen it a thousand times before, throughout a thousand lives. Each time, it had killed me — the Golden Wolf. And now, in this lifetime, someone had it. And that person was Michael. If he didn’t have it already, then he would have it soon.
And he would kill me with it.
