She woke up with darkness around, the air almost too thick to breathe, or at least it felt like that when she took a tentative inhale and it was like drawing jelly into her lungs. She tried again and no avail. She was on the verge of panicking when she suddenly realized that the air might well be good enough, it was she who didn't need to breathe. Not any longer. That sent her, well and truly, into a tailspin and she started running – along the poorly defined corridors, barely outlined passages, she was running without getting winded until she saw a flicker of light ahead, until she crashed into it, strove through it and felt the floor give way from beneath her. As if someone flipped the switch, the light went out and she was in the dark again, so she shut her helpless eyes tightly, paralyzed with fear, as she knew herself falling.
When she next opened her eyes, it was light again, as light as it could get under the dismally overcast sky she had been so used to seeing every day of her 23-year long life. She found herself sitting on a bench, her legs tucked into her chest, her arms hugging her knees, as if for warmth or comfort but she was feeling neither. In fact, she wasn't feeling cold or desperate either, she was just numb and purposeless. She looked around and immediately recognized the place – the cemetery she used to come to a lot when she was a kid. A weird place for a child to be at but not if you're a street-raised neglected girl-urchin, not if your own home is a much more dangerous and gruesome place.
The last time she had come there she thought she was gonna die. But he said she wasn't and she believed him. He said it was a morbid choice of a resting place but he hugged her and stayed with her and she was safe and calm in his arms.
Her arms fell to her sides and she pushed herself up from the cool wood of the bench. She was looking round, his name on her lips, and that was when she remembered who much had happened between now and then. She saw the smiling siren in her mind's eye, and then she saw the dying siren, a blooded sword sticking out of his chest. She saw the blinding light, not the mild harmless light she had just fallen through, but the intense searing electricity that pierced her small body like thousands of razors.
She looked down and saw she was wearing the fancy pin-patterned off-white top with a broad belt and tight black pants – the ensemble that was one of her favorite outfits. At the very least it used to be one of her faves before the body-switching incident when the less than graceful wolf, who her tiny body was hosting, ruined it with his manly straddle. The memory brought a smile to her face and a sense of longing to her heart. And then she reminded herself that she had ditched the pants long ago, that she wasn't breathing, that she wasn't even hungry. And then she knew she was dead.