Sleepless: Chapter Twenty-Seven

Wide Blue Skies [Under White Cold Suns]

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Margo blinked awake.

But… no, no that wasn’t quite it.

She wasn’t in her room in Felix’s apartment. There was no sound of rain against the window, no howling of wind outside. She couldn’t hear or see Baxter at the foot of her bed. And it was cold —

Well, no. No, no, no…

Her body was hot enough to burst into flames at any minute, with terrible pain radiating from her back as though two fist-sized coals had planted themselves just past her shoulder blades. The room itself was also swelteringly hot, with a fire crackling in a fireplace.

But where she was lying was cold — a bathtub, filled with… snow?

She shook her head, trying to orient herself. Her train of thought was moving with sudden clarity, as though having just emerged from a fever.

The cabin. She was in Val’s cabin.

With great effort, she turned her head to look around, trying to piece together what had happened.

Her ballgown had been reduced to tatters — little more than scraps of fabric hanging loosely from her form. She'd been swaddled tightly in a white blanket though, presumably so as to not lay her directly on the ice.

Her arms remained free, but she barely had the strength to move them. For as sharp as her mind was, her body was wracked with aches and pains, as though someone had stuffed her into a washing machine and turned it on.

The paint on her arms had been smudged and smeared, and she suspected the markings on her face looked much the same.

The white blanket and the snow were both covered in bloodstains, but her actual wounds were freshly healed — or at least, partially healed. Only enough to keep her from bleeding out, she imagined.

She huffed with the effort of trying to feel her back, but couldn’t find a wound where the intense pain burned into her skin and muscles. The skin felt strange there, but there was no evidence of a wound, freshly healed or otherwise. Lifting herself from the snow only made the pain in her back increase tenfold, and she collapsed back into the cold.

But… for everything that had happened, it was her body. Her normal body. Small. Human. Wingless.