Airel: The Discovering (Airel Saga Book Two)

Chapter VI

I KNOW WHAT YOU are.

The words reverberated through unconscious randomness inside of me. I had heard stories of comatose people having dreams, sometimes hearing what their loved ones were saying but being unable to respond. That, to me, was hell assuredly: to be trapped and screaming, “Hey, I’m alive. Don’t give up on me.”

“I know what you are,” came the words again, voiced vaguely, the tone probably resembling my dad, but mixed with every memory I ever had, and somehow, not Dad at all. Was someone speaking them? And if so, who?

There was a fight, a gun. But those things were wrapped in cotton, insulated against the touch of my awareness, shifty. Every time I tried to come to rest on something concrete, it would vanish in smoke. Everything I had known to be real was a distant, abstract world, and I was not a part of it anymore. I feared at any moment I would wake up, caged again in the dark, in a broken world, kept by my demonic jailer—and that was a nightmare I did not want to be having, not again. Certainly not for real.

My dreams turned hazy and soft. Michael was sitting in his truck and I was sliding close to him, looking out over the city lights from Table Rock, high up in the foothills, where other young lovers were parked in darkened cars. We sat in silence because there was nothing to say. The city lights twinkled below, becoming his beautiful blue eyes into which I poured myself like water. If perfection could be defined, this was it.

“I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE, AIREL.”

I gasped. I was aware of cold metal straps around my wrists. The voice boomed off the empty canyon walls of my mind one last time, dissipating into nothingness. I realized that my eyes were open, trying to focus, to register what I was seeing.

I knew that the metal straps were real; I felt them against the skin of my wrists, cold and harsh. I was seated in a reclined position, strapped down to a hard chair, and when I tried to move my feet, I realized they were bound.

I started to panic; I was defenseless. My eyes were swimming and reaching for the wall. I wanted desperately to know where I was, but knew I would regret knowing.

Inches from my face, I felt something warm, something that tasted sweet. I turned toward it, begging my eyes to focus. Slowly, taking shape in front of me in the dark, were the important details. A car. I was inside a car. I could see the shape of the open door to my right and the yellow light of a street lamp filtering in. I heard breathing to my left and knew it was Michael. It sounded just like him, like the way he spoke, the tone of his voice.

My eyes went wide, filled with the horror of blankness, grasping desperately for sight. I knew I was in the black Yukon, strapped to some chair for crazies that kept them from hurting themselves. That left one possibility. The man with the gun was standing over me, probably gloating over his fresh catch. But that wasn’t even half of it.

My eyes began to focus on two dark orbs set into the shape of a face. They were black, the surrounding skin fair, pale, stony. Crowning his head, I saw blond hair and heard him whisper to me, “I know what you are, Airel.”

I gasped, deeply and jaggedly, like my first time through a haunted house when I was eight—completely terrified.

The killer. The theater. The stalker. The note in the mailbox. My weird dreams. I struggled frantically against the restraints, my breath ragged, throat dry, pulling myself away from him as much as I could, completely crazed.

“If you keep quiet, I will not gag you. It is your decision.” His voice was firm and could have commanded tens of thousands. Impossibly, it calmed me, if only a little bit. “If you insist on defying me, I will gag you as well as drug you. Do you understand?” In his voice was thick and pliable kindness that did not make any sense to me.