CHAPTER 82: INNER VOICE, PART 9

The lights were too bright. His head throbbed. The party hadn't even really started, and Sam felt like he'd been drinking for hours. Of course, he hadn't intended to drink a drop of alcohol. Such poisons were for weak-willed beings. He needed a clear head. What was in his crystal glass was simply water.

Christina and Violet were with him, of course, one on each side. A flower in each hand, as they used to say. Isabella wasn't far behind, she had been following him like a shadow since he arrived. Submissive, always a few steps behind him. More than a housekeeper, she now seemed like his personal servant.

Anyone would want to have such a beauty as a personal assistant. He hadn't had time to start training her, to turn her into one of his pets, but everything in due time. Now was the time for a small celebration. In the living room, seated at the ostentatiously long table, were the other servants. Those he hadn't bothered to fire before returning to the mansion, of course. He had mostly fired men to replace them with young women.

Anyway, priorities.

"It was close, but we survived." Sam decided to get straight to the point with his little speech. "That's what matters. And let's face it, at least now the family is in better hands."

He spoke as if the alcohol had gone to his head, even though he hadn't taken a single sip. Indiscreet chatter. He highly doubted it would raise suspicions about the true nature of the tragedy. It was well known that the Wrights didn't get along, and that for everyone Blake Wright was the enemy to be overthrown, not a father or a brother.

Well, he had been, of course. Now he was nothing. Less than nothing.

"So, here's to a better future, ours to write."

They clinked their glasses, laughter and voices rose. But things soon took a turn for the worse. His headache immediately got worse, even though it was just water, but that wasn't what alerted him. Sam realized that something was very wrong when circumstances forced him to.

To be more exact, one of the servants doubled over and vomited. That wasn't exactly out of the ordinary at all. Not even when he immediately fainted. But then a second and a third fell, and Sam's own symptoms only got worse. He felt like the floor was made of jelly and his legs were slowly sinking into the substance, his whole body being gradually swallowed up.

The servants continued to fall one after the other and that, of course, didn't matter a damn to him. They were nothing more than furniture. What worried him was that he was starting to show symptoms too, and he wasn't even a human being, so his sisters...

At that precise moment, Christina crashed into him. He caught her in his arms and cushioned the impact of her fall. They fell onto the table, rolling towards the floor. It hurt. But not as much as seeing Christina's face. She couldn't breathe. She wasn't just sick, she couldn't breathe.

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Someone fell beside him. Victoria, Isabella. People started to run as if they could get away from the invisible threat. Precisely because it was invisible, they couldn't know if they were just making things worse. From what was happening, anyone would think that at least the drinks had been poisoned.

But so many people?

Had they had so much time to see after he finished his bullshit speech? And what kind of poison acted so quickly, on everyone? Well, it was a magical world, anything was possible. An accelerator, or maybe it wasn't poison at all, but something else.

Something much worse.

Christina wasn't vomiting, she couldn't, she was just trying to breathe desperately. But the air was full of the sound of people retching.

A disease. A pestilence.

He realized that, like a bolt of lightning, a few moments before losing consciousness.

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When he opened his eyes, he found exactly what he expected. Nothing but hell wherever he looked.

The flames burned intensely and rose higher and higher towards a completely black sky, with no stars. Was it a night sky or simply a void? The place changed all the time because it was partly just a product of his mind, or was it?

In any case, that didn't change his situation. No matter how much he ran, he would only get out of here when he regained consciousness. Considering the circumstances that had caused him to lose it, he could die before that happened. But, although it was a serious possibility, he wasn't really worried for some reason.

He felt strangely calm and at peace. This was starting to become a routine.

The appearance of Satan a few minutes later, this time with yellow eyes again (what had happened the time he saw him with black eyes? although he didn't give a damn), imposing, terrifying with his mere presence. As if his pure evil infected the air wherever he went, impregnating the atmosphere. At least in theory.

He was starting to see him as the normal person he seemed to be, except for the eyes.

"This again, huh? You're starting to bore me. What do you think you can do to me now that I know no wound is permanent? You can make that stuff in your mind as real as it is in all the... stories, but you won't be able to kill me before I wake up. Not with so many people around me."

Satan just smiled. "Who says I want to kill you? I'll just keep you asleep while one of my slaves takes care of destroying everything you have. Of breaking your spirit."

"Pestilence." Sam bit his lip.

"Exactly. Still bored, Sammy? Daddy will do whatever he can to entertain you while they die screaming."

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The door opened loudly. The air, which had already been full of disease and death, became more repugnant in an instant. The sound of high heels rose even above the constant vomiting and people struggling to breathe. But those heels and those slender legs were not attached to a beautiful woman. If Sam had been here, that is, conscious, he would have compared her to a cancerous tumor with legs.

Obviously, neither Christina nor Violet had that frame of reference, so the image that came to their mind was that of a pit of diseased corpses, oozing all sorts of disgusting fluids. There were too many arms, too many legs, too many eyes.

But the eyes, at least, it was clear which ones were the central ones.

All the others were cold, lifeless, fogged-up crystals, empty, nothing more.

But in the center there were green eyes like gangrene, focused on them.

"There you are, little flies." The monster spoke in a chorus of voices.

Inner Voice, Part 9: END