Читать книгу Red Sister онлайн | страница 79

‘Don’t hurt me!’ Saida pointed at Nona, cowering.

Nona tried to reassure her but found instead that she towered over Saida, holding her friend’s arm in a massive fist. The grey hall around her became the walls of Raymel’s apartment, Saida dangling above the thick luxury of a bearskin rug.

Nona tried to let Saida go. ‘It’s not me. I’m not like him. I’m not!’

‘No, please! I didn’t mean to.’

Anger flared somewhere deep in Nona’s chest. She was trying to help the silly girl. Why was she scared? Did she think Nona had anything in common with a creature like Raymel Tacsis? ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ She found to her horror though that she was shaking Saida, the fist on her friend’s arm emphasizing her points as she spoke.

‘Let go!’

‘I am letting go …’ But the fist gripped tighter, twisted, and Saida’s screaming began.

Nona drew a sharp breath and opened her eyes. The colours of her nightmare vanished leaving only black. It took a moment to realize where she was. The soft sounds of sleeping surrounded her on each side. At the back of her mind the dream carried on as if it neither wanted her attention nor required her permission to proceed. She had been following something, a line that ran its narrow path with danger to either side, on one flank a dark and consuming hunger, on the other a blindness, fierce as staring at the sun. And somehow she had been following someone else at the same time, black-clad, swift, certain, moving through a starless night, plotting a sure path between high buildings. The figure had found what it sought, looked up, reached out to find cold stone walls, and had started to climb.

Nona strained her ears, hunting beneath the novices’ gentle snores and sighs, the soft turning of a body in sleep, the whisper of the wind … a scrape, a sudden movement … hard to judge at what distance in the unbroken night. Without warning, surprising herself, Nona jolted upright, as swift a motion as she had ever made, the blanket pulled from her. Perhaps some new sound had sat her up, perhaps nothing, just one of those twitches that comes out of nowhere and jerks your body as if by a string. Somewhere else in the dark a muffled impact, the sound of air leaving lungs fast and without orders …