Chapter 142: Sleeping Beauty

Chapter 142: Chapter 142: Sleeping Beauty

Persephone’s POV:

Persephone’s eyes opened to a ceiling she didn’t immediately recognize.

For a long moment, she simply lay there, blinking against a heaviness that sat behind her skull like something physical, her body registering wrongness before her mind could catch up to why. Her limbs felt distant, disobedient, the way they did after sleeping too long in one position — except this felt deeper than that, a fatigue that lived in her bones rather than her muscles.

She turned her head, slow, and the room swam.

Her bedroom. Her apartment. The furniture was where it should be, the curtains drawn tighter than she remembered leaving them, though everything else looked ordinary enough that for one disoriented second she almost convinced herself nothing was wrong at all.

Then the images came.

Not memories, exactly — closer to echoes, fragments overlapping each other with no clean edges, the way a photograph looked when someone moved the camera mid-exposure. A figure standing over her bed. Blonde hair, pale in the dim light. A hand pressed briefly to her forehead. A voice, low, clinical, speaking words she couldn’t quite catch, layered under another voice entirely — younger, male, anxious.

She tried to focus on the images, willing them to sharpen, and they only blurred further, smearing at the edges like watercolor left out in rain.

Who was that.

The question surfaced with a strange, distant unease — not fear exactly, not yet, just the deep wrongness of not being able to answer something that felt like it should have been simple.

She pushed herself upright, and the room tilted violently. Her stomach lurched. She pressed both hands flat against the mattress, breathing through it, waiting for the nausea to pass.

Something’s different.

She could feel it beneath her skin, a low, unfamiliar hum, like static caught somewhere between her ribs and her spine. When she flexed her fingers, the motion felt too fast, overshooting itself slightly before she consciously slowed it back down — her body responding to intentions she hadn’t fully formed yet, some new capability sitting just beneath the surface of her exhaustion, waiting for her to figure out how to hold it properly.

She didn’t understand it. She only understood that it was there, entirely new, entirely hers.

The blurred images kept surfacing at the edges of her vision, unbidden — the same blonde-haired figure, more than once now, checking something, speaking to someone else in the room, a boy’s voice answering. She reached for the memory of a name and found nothing. Just impressions. Weight and color and tone with none of the identifying details attached.

Was someone here. Multiple times. Why can’t I see their face.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed, testing her weight before fully committing to standing, and made it upright on the second attempt, one hand braced against the nightstand.

Her phone sat exactly where she’d left it, screen dark. She grabbed it, thumb swiping instinctively, and the home screen lit up — full battery, no missed calls, no messages. No signal bars at all.

Something cold slid down her spine.

She thought, suddenly, sharply, of the last thing she remembered clearly before the fog took over. The elevator. The strange couple who’d introduced themselves as her new neighbors. The satellite phone Dahlia had used to call her, urgent, frightened in a way Dahlia never let herself sound.

Stay away from daylight today. Sunlight. There’s a phenomenon.

I’m scared, Perse.

Persephone’s chest tightened.

She crossed to the window on unsteady legs and pulled the curtain back an inch, bracing for whatever she might find, and the world outside made no sense at all — streets she recognized, buildings she’d walked past a hundred times, and yet everything about it read wrong. No traffic. No pedestrians. A car sat crumpled against a lamppost two blocks down, undisturbed, as though it had been sitting there for days rather than hours. Somewhere in the distance, thin trails of smoke rose against a sky the color of an old bruise.

She let the curtain fall shut, breath coming faster now.

How long was I asleep.

The blurred images surfaced again, more insistent this time — the blonde-haired figure’s hand against her forehead, over and over, different lighting each time, different angles, the same gesture repeated across what must have been multiple visits. Days, maybe. Not hours.

Panic began climbing up her throat, quick and sharp.

Dahlia.

She grabbed her phone again, fingers trembling now as she pulled up her sister’s contact and pressed call, already knowing before the first ring finished that it wasn’t going to connect. It didn’t. Dead air, then silence, the call failing before it ever left the building.

She tried again. Same result.

"Come on," she whispered, voice cracking. "Come on, come on—"

She switched to messages instead, fingers flying across the screen, typing out something half-coherent — Dahlia are you okay what happened where is everyone — and hit send, watching the little indicator spin uselessly, refusing to confirm delivery, refusing to do anything at all.

Her chest heaved. The room tilted again, though this time she suspected it had less to do with her body and more to do with the sheer weight of panic finally catching up to her all at once.

She thought of her father. Of the estate, of Silver’s calm, steady presence that had anchored every crisis she’d ever lived through, and realized, with a fresh wave of nausea, that she had no idea whether he was even alive to reach.

She thought of her cousin.

Penny.

Persephone’s hands shook harder as she pulled up Penelope’s contact next, though some distant, rational part of her mind already knew, with sinking certainty, exactly what was going to happen when she pressed call.

The line rang. Once. Twice. Then dropped, exactly like the others, into the same hollow, useless silence.

"No. No, no, no—" She tried again immediately, and again, the same result each time, until her thumb was shaking too hard to keep dialing accurately.

She sank back down onto the edge of the bed, phone clutched in both hands, breath coming in short, ragged pulls, the fragmented, blurred memory of a blonde stranger still flickering uselessly at the edges of her vision, offering no answers at all — only the certainty that someone had been here, that time had passed in ways she couldn’t account for, and that everyone she loved most in the world had gone completely, terrifyingly silent.

Something happened. Something happened and I missed all of it, and I don’t know if any of them are even still alive.

The apartment held nothing but silence in answer, the storm beyond the window pressing steadily against the glass, and for the first time in her life, Persephone Azar had absolutely no idea what to do next.