Chapter 4: Valentine
I was ashamed to leave Jack's beautiful ice castle with the poor doomed couple bawling their eyes out. I wasn't feeling to great either. I was super tired, my eyes hurt, I had a splitting headache. I just felt so weak overall. I would just have to go home and try to sleep. Hopefully the Cherubs would carry out the pre-Valentine's Day work. There was no way I could do anything correctly right now.
Once I got home, I just flopped onto my bed and fell asleep once I hit the pillow.
A good night's sleep was what I needed, but nightmares was all I got.
I was trapped. I was stuck in some kind of prison. I felt around to find anything, a door windows, an air source. The walls were all padded with a material that felt like sandpaper. There were no windows, no door, no air vent, no light, nothing. The entire room was….. pitch black. I just sat curled in a corner. I seemed to have lost my shoes, and changed into some weird, scratchy cloth, that was at some points, digging into my skin. It hurt. At those same few points where it hurt, I felt a liquid trickling down me. I prayed that it wasn't blood. Then someone came in through an opening in the wall. The light poured in, temporarily blinding me. When I could refocus, I saw Pitch standing there with some kind of tray. I shifted, but that only hurt me more. I looked down and now saw that my clothes were made of a white wool with tiny strips if barbed wire sewn into it. Most of the cloth was stained red now. Blood.
"We meet again Valentine." Pitch said. I tried to speak, but I couldn't. It was as if someone had ripped my voice out. Tears started to trickle down my face, I was scared.
"Oh look, she's scared." He laughed evilly. I felt so helpless. All I could do was sit there and watch.
"Well have I got news for you. You are going to become my child of fear. It will be you who kills Jack with your bare hands, and you won't even know it. But don't worry, I will allow you to awake from your trance just enough to admire your work, and then you will come with me and be my slave for the rest of our eternal life."
I was screaming inside. I tried to move, but I couldn't. I was crying hard now. It was hard to catch my breath. Pitch just stood there and laughed. He approached me with the tray. There I saw it had one huge syringe filled with a horrible dark liquid. He took the guard off of the syringe, exposing the he pulled up my sleeve, scratching my arm up more. Pitch jabbed the needle in my arm and then injected the dark fluid into my veins. Once he was done he said with a smile, "Don't worry darling, that wasn't even the worst part. I'll see you soon." He walked out the door and shut it, engulfing me in darkness once more.
I awoke with a scream. I couldn't move. My body felt detached and not there. I craned my head to look at my arm. Though I was back in my old clothes and there were no scratches to be seen, I now had a bandage around where Pitch had injected me. I lay there for awhile until I could regain feeling in my body. Then, when I thought I was ready to walk, I went to my kitchen to make some tea. After I had finished a bit more than half of my tea, I heard a knock on my great wooden door. That was unusual because it was a drawbridge to the path outside. And nobody could really knock on it unless they fired a cannon with a knocking knuckle on it, which was highly unlikely. I went to the door with my bow and arrow at ready, in case it was Pitch, and hit the lever with my foot so I could still keep my arrow knocked.
As the door slowly lowered, I found Jack floating just above the bridge. I relaxed and put my bow and arrow away.
"Jack! What are you doing here?! I thought I made it clear that I was dangerous!"
"I know, but I figure we can manage at least one trip to the rink before I meet my doom." He held up a pair of ice skates.
I smiled, despite everything that happened. I ran and got my ice skates from my room, told the Cherubs that I was heading out and that Jacen was in charge, and closed my heavy door behind me.
Rockefeller Center was beautiful, as it always was. The rink looked perfect, and it wasn't too crowded either. Jack and I put our skates on and started off just doing normal rounds. Then we got really into it and started to use Jack's powers to propel us and I would shoot showers of sparkling love into the air. We went on like this for awhile until we ran into somebody. Well, Jack ran into somebody, the man just passed right through me. He was actually somewhat stuck inside of me when he quickly apologized to Jack. I was totally out of energy by then. For the rest of the night, we walked around Central Park. I told Jack about my nightmare as we walked. He was really startled and worried when he heard the news. And just as the sun was setting, the unimaginable happened.
From behind, an arrow pierced me through the heart. It was excruciatingly painful. Jack caught me as I crumpled to the ground with tears in his eyes. He looked back at where the arrow had come from. I don't know what he saw, but all I could hear was a bit of laughter before Jack screamed "You! You did this!". The arrow was unusual. It had disintegrated after a few seconds of impaling me, but still left the horrid stinging pain as if it were still in there. Tears fell down my face in painful silence. Some of them mine, some of them Jack's. I coughed as I choked on some of my blood. Somehow, I wasn't dying, or at least not as fast as anyone should normally be. It was torture. I lost all feeling in my body. I felt so detached from life, yet I could still feel the white-hot pain all over. I started to slowly fade out of the world. I couldn't hear anything anymore, and Jack was trying to say something to me that I couldn't quite make out. My vision blurred. The last thing I saw was Jack, hovering over me crying, stroking my hair as I fell into darkness.
