But she had survived that night.
She had been surviving for a long time. Eternity.
And she would survive this too—or die trying.
Without opening her eyes, Chyna hurtled backward as fast as her leg irons would allow, and in spite of her fear, she figured that she must be at least a somewhat comic sight, because she had to shuffle frantically to build speed, had to throw herself toward spinal injury in quick little baby steps. But then she slammed into the rocks, and there was nothing whatsoever funny about that.
She’d been bent forward slightly to lift the legs of the chair behind her and to ensure that they, rather than another part of it, would strike first and take the hard initial blow. With her entire weight behind the assault, there was a satisfyingly splintery thwack on impact—and the pine legs were jammed painfully into the backs of her legs. Chyna stumbled forward, and the upper part of the chair whiplashed into her neck, as she had expected, and she was knocked off balance. She dropped to her knees on the flagstone hearth and fell forward with the chair still on her back, hurting in too many places to bother taking an inventory.
Hobbled, she couldn’t get to her feet unless she was gripping something. She crawled to the nearest armchair and pulled herself up, grunting with effort and pain.
She didn’t like pain the way Vess claimed to like it, but she wasn’t going to bitch about it either. At least she could still crawl and stand. No spinal injury yet. Better to feel pain than nothing at all.
The legs of the chair and the stretcher bars between the legs seemed to be intact. But judging by the sound of the impact, she had weakened them.
Starting eight feet from the wall this time, Chyna shuffled backward as fast as she could, trying to ram the chair legs into the rock at the same angle as before. She was rewarded with a distinctive crack—the sound of splintering wood, though it felt like shattering bone.
A dam of pain burst inside her. Cold currents dragged her down, but she resisted the undertow with the desperate determination of a swimmer struggling against a drowning darkness.
She hadn’t been knocked off her feet this time. She shuffled forward. Not pausing to catch her breath, still hunched to ensure that the chair legs would take the brunt of the impact, she charged backward into the rock wall.
*
Chyna woke facedown on the floor in front of the hearth, aware that she must have been unconscious for a minute or two.
The carpet was as cold and undulant as moving water. She wasn’t floating in it but glimmering along the rippled surface, as though she were coppery spangles of sunlight or the dark reflection of a cloud.
The worst pain was in the back of her head. She must have struck it against something.
She felt so much better when she didn’t think about her pain or her problems, when she simply accepted that she was nothing more than a cloud shadow riding on the mirrored surface of a rolling river, as insubstantial as the purling patterns on moving water, gliding away, liquid and cool, away, away.
Ariel. In the cellar. Among the watchful dolls.
I am my sister’s keeper.
Somehow she got to her hands and knees.
She heard the hollow thump of paws on the front porch floor. When she pulled herself to her feet against an armchair, she looked at the window that wasn’t covered by drapes. Two Dobermans were standing with their forepaws on the windowsill, staring at her, their eyes radiant yellow with reflections of the soft amber light from the lamp on the end table.
At the base of the stone wall was one of the rear legs of the chair. That length of turned pine was all jagged splinters at the thicker end, where it had been fixed to the underside of the seat. Bristling from the side of it at a ninety-degree angle was the one-inch stretcher bar that had connected it to the other rear leg.
The lower chain was more than half free.