Claimed by the Desert

Chapter Six

This chapter is dedicated to my husband, Casey, who has always thought I am a great writer and has been supportive of me even when I wanted to stay up and write at three in the morning. 

Chapter Six 

There are things a person feels when waking up from a deep sleep: disorientation, dizziness, anxiety. Vera felt all of these things upon waking and they only increased as she regained awareness, instead of waning. The more she thought about the night before, the more she felt uneasy about everything that had happened. At first she had thought Amias's offer to be friends a nice gesture, but now she was worrying over every tiny detail of their conversation. How could you trust someone you couldn't even see?

That thought had kept her awake long after she had wanted to go to sleep. To try and calm herself down she had spent a few hours reading her favorite book by candlelight.  She couldn't remember when she had finally fallen asleep, but it had been very late – or rather, very early.

Dragging herself out of bed, Vera decided that she needed to at least try and talk things out with the one person who she knew she could always trust. That was one thing she could say about Halsten; he was always brutally and uncaringly honest, no matter the situation.  Unfortunately, he was also incredibly protective of her and tended to overreact when she was in danger. If he thought she was ill or had gone mad he would probably take her to see every physician within five hundred miles and never let her leave his sight again.

She sighed and started pacing the floors with worry. There had never been any signs of madness in her family. Not a single one. Completely sane and normal, the lot of them. She should have known better than to have dealings with an invisible voice. Now she was questioning her sanity.

But Amias had claimed he wouldn't be invisible any longer – that he would take on a different form. Perhaps she could wait and see how things turned out, at least before she went running to Halsten for advice?

She threw on some clothes and trudged down the stairs just as the hall clock chimed ten. The kitchen was empty when she peered in, but her father had left her some toast along with a message saying he was at the dig site and wouldn't be home anytime soon.

"Halsten?" she called out into the hallway, hoping he would hear her and respond.

When there was no response Vera huffed in frustration and wandered around to the back of the house to see if he was outside. Sure enough she found him watering what was left of his teeny tiny little garden. He had been trying to get plants to grow in the little plot of dirt for weeks, but the weather was too dry and he had far too little patience.

"I don't know why you ever even started with that," Vera said to him as she motioned toward the shriveling plants.

"Yes, well, I've never understood why you and your father like to spend so much time in the desert digging up corpses," he replied.

"For one, there are rarely ever any corpses involved. We see a lot of pottery and ruined buildings, but not a lot of dead people. And it's important to learn about the people around us."

Halsten shook his head. "You sound just like your father. He was up at the crack of dawn this morning going on about how he had uncovered the find of a lifetime and that one of the locals was close to 'solving the puzzle.'"

"What puzzle?" she asked as she tried to remember what her father had been talking about the last time they spoke.

"Oh, whatever that was he found in that godforsaken cave," he grumbled.

Vera froze on the spot, her eyes widening in realization. "The markings? The one's on the wall of the cave? Is that it?"

Halsten frowned at her. "Yes, yes. I suppose you're excited about it now too?"