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Manon walks backward, each step silent on the stone floor of the tunnels despite the point of her stiletto heels. Her steel gaze is fixed on me in a relentless stare.
It’s been two hours of enduring the silent eyeballing, and at this point I almost wish she would say something.
The ghostly silence is somehow worse.
What do you want?! I want to scream at her. Leave me alone.
If I thought it would do any good, I would.
But I don’t. Nothing good ever comes from interacting with my hallucinations, so I vowed to shut her out completely.
She isn’t there.
Manon must sense my resolve, because she finally breaks our tense silence with a long sigh. “Don’t tell me you intend to ignore me forever, my love.”
I’ll do my damndest.
And Manon is doing her damndest to make that as difficult as possible.
She stops suddenly, and every muscle in my body tenses as I collide into her. I don’t, of course—I walk through her as easily as walking through a doorway.
As if she was never there to begin with.
“Because she isn’t real,” I remind myself, my own voice too loud in the silent tunnels.
“Sebastian, that was downright boorish.” She appears before me once more, continuing to stare at me as she walks backward, always directly in front of me. “You’ve changed. My sweet Sebastian would never treat a lady with such poor manners.”
“You aren’t real,” I tell her. “You’re dead. Manners don’t apply to the dead.”
She pouts and almost looks like the woman I knew—the real Manon. “That hurts, darling. When did you become so cold?”
Even though I know it’s not real, her admonishment still feels like the cold blade of a dagger in my chest.
I shut my eyes, taking refuge in the blackness of my mind to escape from my ghosts. I’ve walked this path thousands of times—I could do it by touch alone if I had to. But I shouldn’t have to.
This is pathetic.
It’s absolute foolishness, navigating my way through the tunnels by sound and memory, hiding from an entity that no longer holds command over me. Whatever she is, she can’t hurt me.
This isn’t Manon. It’s a figment of my imagination—that’s all. A manifestation of my guilt.
I consider, for the millionth time, confiding in Rune about my sufferings. Except doubt stops me each time.
How would he take it?
If he is loyal to me, he might be able to help.
If he is loyal to the French Quarter horde, he wouldn’t hesitate to take me out.
And he shouldn’t.
I’m nothing more than a liability at this point.
Fintan is more practical. Logical. He wouldn’t think with emotion. He would assess me as the dangerous monster I am and he would lock me up while he tries to cure me.
That would leave me to spend the rest of my days rotting away in my own dungeon.
It’s not like I haven’t looked for a solution. There is little research on the topic. Short of rereading King Lear, or Caligula, I’ve got nothing to go on.
