Read Playing with Fire (Book 1 of the FIRE Trilogy) Page 34

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  Pain.

  She greeted it like a familiar fiend, an enemy she got more and more practiced at fighting, although never winning the upper hand.

  For how long had she been in pain? For too long.

  Sometimes it felt like needles pricking into her skin over her body, or like voracious ants chewing away at her with their tiny, surprisingly sharp teeth. At other times, she was sure somebody was skinning her alive, tearing her skin from her flesh and her flesh from her bone piece by piece with merciless persistence, like a butcher with a carcass of meat. Sometimes she thought she was exploding from the inside out because her skin couldn’t hold the pain in. Or was it called imploding, collapsing in on herself because her organs had been liquefied or pulverized, and there was gaping nothingness where life—blood, breath—had been? At other times, she must have been a glob of clay in the hands of a giant, punched flat, rolled out to stretch this way and that, modelled into a figure with heavy limbs of lead, left out to bake in heat and become stronger.

  Pain.

  So much pain.

  And still no sense of who she was and who she would become. Was she herself anymore?

  Where was the fire dragon and where had it led her? Had it been a messenger sent from hell, the underworld’s equivalent to angels bringing the dead to the gates of heaven?