longer.blue

Before we begin regularly posting, a recap.... Part 6 of 8 The Skye Sisters Saga with Raine Skye (@@romanticraine.bsky.social) and Billie Skye (@billieskye.bsky.social) Billie Continued Through all of it one word pulsed, soft at first and then relentless, threading every image together like a spell: Taken. Taken. Taken. The chant vibrated through the air and the bones of my head until I could feel the syllables scraping behind my eyes. Faces emerged from the fog, half beautiful, half ruin, stretching their pale, damp hands toward me as if to reel me back to the place they’d stolen me before. The sound of them wasn’t loud in the world; it lived inside my ears. I pressed my palms hard to the sides of my head, screaming, but the voices only tightened, the ground tilting under me until the street and the sky switched places. “Stop!” I rasped, stumbling out into the road, but the visions only crowded closer. The black trees, the endless grasping hands, the sense of being carried where I had no choice, they all flared at once, until my own scream was just another line in their chorus. Taken. Taken. Taken. I staggered in the street. Cars honked somewhere far away, thin and unreal against the roar in my head. My breath came ragged and wet. And then something in me snapped from terror to fury. I tore my hands away and threw back my head, dragging air through my lungs until the cold burned. “I’m not scared of you!” The words ripped out raw, each one cutting through the chant. “Do you hear me?” I’m not scared anymore!” +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Raine ***A Hazy Shade of Confusion*** **Continued SL with BillieSkye** *I stood there, in the middle of the ancient, cobbled, rain slick York street, my eyes anxiously scanning every inch…with no sign of Billie anywhere. No sign of anyone anywhere, actually. The streets were empty, silent and ominously heavy. My shoulders fell further than before, the feeling of being utterly lost and helpless taking over. I took two steps down the road, really unsure where to go from here. I pulled my phone out of my bag, dialing Billie’s number, only to get an out of service tone, as if the number didn’t even exist. How was that even possible? I’d just been texting her hours before. I took one more step and some crumpled under my shoe. I bent down and picked up the worn piece of paper. The Bingley Arms. In Bardsey. The flyer was for a show…in 1975. What the bloody hell was going on? I shoved the flyer in my bag and broke into a near run to my car down the street in the car park. Jumping in, I revved the engine and headed out of the car park with skidding tires, determined to make the 45 minute drive in record time, though I had no idea why or when I was headed. The night became darker, more foreboding the closer I got to Bardsey. By the time I entered the village, the fog was so thick I couldn’t part it with my headlights. Maybe I was driving too fast. Maybe the events of the night had gotten to me. At this point I no longer had any grip on the reality of the situation as my sister appeared in the middle of the street, with me unable to stop as my lights illuminated her terrified visage. But my car passed right through her, as though she was no more than the fog that blanketed the streets. I skidded to a stop and pulled over to the side of the road, half up on the sidewalk. I pulled myself out of the car, my hands shaking, my knees trembling as I walked up and down the street, finding nothing, no one, anywhere. I dropped down on the sidewalk’s curb, pulling at my hair and dropping my head down on my knees, my entire body shaking and on edge, completely at a loss of what to do or where to go now* +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Billie My scream shredded the night until there was nothing left in my throat and I dropped to my knees, sucking down air and trying to refill my lungs between scared sobs. My knees, suddenly stinging from abrasion, shifted my focus and I forced myself to stand back up again. I had fought through too much to lie here and wither, though I was certain my surrender was exactly what this night wanted from me. The street lay open and black, rain slick and endless. I staggered to the curb and leaned on a cold iron bollard, drawing air that tasted of centuries of smoke and wet stone. My phone was dead. Hell, I might be dead too. The city certainly was. Feeling faintly steady, I knew I had to move. I forced myself forward, the cobbles running slick under my boots. The fog thickened and shifted as if it were rearranging the streets themselves. Corners folded back on themselves. Shop fronts I swore I’d passed were gone. With every turn, the world felt less like York and more like a trap built just for me. A hiss of laughter came from the fog, soft and close, like something breathing against my ear. I spun, fists up, but the street behind me was empty. Only the smell of damp earth and something older, metallic and almost sweet, remained. I walked faster. The fog didn’t so much lead as conspire, parting in a slow, deliberate seam that stitched me forward until the city I thought I knew folded into a different map. I kept thinking I could outwalk it, that I could pick a street and the mist would have to rearrange itself around my feet, but it had patience. It nudged me, softened the edges of the houses, muted the lamps, and when I blinked the place I’d stumbled into had the wrong kind of light: low, amber, smelling of peat and old wood and a coal glow I recognized from photographs I’d never held. There was a sign above the door, hand-cut and hanging in a gentle swing like it had waited for me all my life. No brass plaque, no tourist gloss, just a name: The Botanist. It was the kind of place parents go when the world needs to be quiet and small. My legs moved before my brain agreed. Inside, the pub was a shallow bowl of heat. People sat with their elbows on the wood, faces softened by lamplight. One of the faces at the bar bent wrong at the jaw, a distortion so quick I might have blamed the lamplight, except it hit a memory like a strike of match light. Years ago in Shoreditch I’d wandered into a backroom gallery and found a series of grotesque old woodcuts: changelings with hollow eyes and fingers stretched too long, children stolen and replaced by something not quite the same. I’d laughed at them then, dismissed them as Victorian nightmare fuel. Now the memory pressed in like a bruise. And suddenly there she was. At the far end of the bar, under an old oil lamp that made the varnish glow the way photographs do, my mother’s profile sat like it belonged to that light. Not the portrait I’d seen earlier, not the painted glamour burned yellow by smoke, but her, smaller, softer, hair loose and framing her young features, the way it used to, a coat wrapped tight around her shoulders. She raised a glass to her lips, slow and blasé, and for a stupid second I thought my brain had finally given up and made me hallucinate the face from the painting. The room shifted the way the fog shifted, not forward or backward in time, but folded, where two moments could sit side by side like pages pressed together. I moved without thinking, sliding onto the stool beside her like I was a child, her child, reclaiming a place at a hearth. The wood under my palms felt older than it should have, but that only sharpened the impossible. I couldn’t stop staring at her. She turned then, just enough for me to see the ghost of the woman who used to hum under her breath while folding laundry or cutting out paper hearts with her children on the floor. Her eyes found mine and something like recognition and sorrow and tiredness washed through them. “Billie Blue Skye,” she said, my name on her tongue like she’d used it yesterday. The voice was softer than I remembered, and it moved along my skin like smoke. I wanted to ask everything at once, how, why, when, but the words braided into useless knots. Instead I said the only thing that came out clean: “Mam?” She smiled, a tiny, private thing. “I ran once,” she said quietly, almost to the glass in her hand. “Back when I was at Stanford with your father. I loved him, God, I did, but there were things about me he didn’t know. Things I wasn’t sure I could ask him to live with. So I left. As far as I could get with the money I had. I came here.” Her fingers tapped the bar once, a small, measured knock. “I sat right here and thought about whether love could survive the truth. I nearly stayed gone.” I blinked, caught between the shock of hearing it and the sense that she was talking directly to me. My blue eyes swam in briny water, and a trembling childlike voice spoke, “But you went back,” I said, the words more question than statement. A faint, bittersweet smile touched her mouth. “I went back,” she answered, and for a breath her eyes looked far past me, as if she were still watching the decision unfold somewhere in time. “Because some ties are meant to be faced, no matter the cost.” She lifted her glass, set it down, and glanced toward the door. The warmth in her eyes shifted to something urgent but unreadable. “You need to go now,” she said softly. “Raine is calling you.” I opened my mouth to speak, but she lifted a hand, a finger to my lips, gentle and final, sending tears spilling down my cheeks. “Be careful.” The bell above the door rang once, though no one entered. When I turned back, the stool beside me was empty. I shot to my feet, heart hammering. The pub felt suddenly thinner, the air too light, dusty and stale as if it had already begun to forget I was there. I shoved my shoulder into the door and it gave way with a jolt, the cold air rushing at me as I stumbled into the street and the night. The fog was waiting. But through it, cutting sharp and real, came a familiar sound, my name shouted with a force that cracked the quiet.