As they walked in the stillness of the night, away from everything they knew, the two lovebirds swore to have each other’s back till the end of time.
A vampire, and an Oracle.
*****
THE END
BONUS: A WITHCY GIRL
Preface
Betraying his clan had never been a possibility for Avice Selleck. But with his hand clasped to Yarra’s, he knows that redemption was no longer a possibility. He was now an outcast, keen on being with the woman his mother had wanted assassinated.
Yarra had questions of her own. Why was Alicia Selleck, the leader of the clan, intent on having her killed? What secrets and resentments does she harbor?
As the two lovebirds escaped into the night, they found themselves reunited with one of Avice’s old friends; one who shared the same fate of banishment from the clan. Avice’s mysterious friend also held the very key to unlocking her past.
With the Keeper of the Blades hot on their pursuit, Yarra and Avice must rely on each other to survive.
Yarra has already seen the future; a happy ending with Avice. But, now she must work towards it. Will her prediction become a reality?
Chapter-1
Escape into the unknown
They had to say goodbye to the world they had once known. She, to a world of university assignments, partying and cramming for final exams; He, to a family and clan that he had betrayed.
Escaping into the night, they had successfully avoided the Keeper of the Blades who had been waiting in the Yarra’s vicinity. Avice had then used Yarra’s precognition to choose the best way to run past his former clan members without rousing any suspicion.
By the time that the Keepers of the Blades realized that Avice had in fact not killed Yarra Davis, the two lovebirds had gone ahead by a considerable distance, unable to be pursued. Or at least, not without time and planning.
Though Yarra had seen a happy ending for the two of them, it was not a destiny written in stone. She knew now that her visions, no matter how eerily prescient, could be altered.
Her vision of Avice killing her was one such example. For months, the vision had grown in its intensity, and it had always ended with Avice shooting her in the back. That had all changed when she had proclaimed her love for him.
For now, as they sat in a bus headed out of state, she held on to his hand, happy and content. The smell of his cologne, where it once scared her, now provided the reassurance that this was indeed their reality now.
The reality of them being together.
With her head on his shoulder, she felt his stubble graze her forehead as he kissed her temple.
“You awake?” she whispered, her eyes still closed.
Avice murmured an assent into her ear. He had not released her hands since they left her apartment. He too, was afraid that if he let her go, he would wake up from this dream. The bus’s wheel went into a small pothole on the road. The slight tumble made Yarra flinch, hitting her forehead into his chin. They both yelped in pain; it was a sign that what they had with one another, in the then and now, was not a vision, dream, or unreality.
Yarra gazed into Avice’s eyes, knowing that this was all real. The pain in her forehead throbbed, though not with the same ferocious intensity of the flare in her heart.
The bus ride was less than comfortable, wobbling through the interstate highway, pushed by an engine with one spark plug in an automotive grave judging by the sounds that it made.
“We’ve just left the state,” he said, looking out the window at a battered sign showing their current location.
The sun was just beginning to peek out of the skyline. Already, the horizon was painted with a golden orange hue. Dawn was fast approaching. It was a new day. All of the troubles that they had faced merely a few hours ago seemed like years long gone, only a distant memory to be reminisced on.
But they both knew that the troubles were far from over. If they weren’t careful, the Keepers of the Blade would be upon them.
“Where are we heading? ”
“A friend’s,” Avice replied, not bothering to explain further. He would if he had to but, for now, the need was not there.
She nodded, too tired to continue with her line of questioning. Sleep was what she needed. When they had escaped her apartment, her body had been galvanized in a constant ‘fight or flight’ panic state. Only now, did her muscles relax and the acute focuses of her mind begin to wane as fatigue both mental and physical began to sink in. She closed her eyes, but fumbled around in her thoughts, still too tense to relax. What if they were suddenly attacked by Avice’s former clan members?
He seemed to read her mind. Putting a hand across her shoulders, he drew her closer to him. The heat of his body sank into her, lulling her into a state of relaxation. Or as close to it as was possible, given the state of the transport they were using.
Yarra sighed. Just before sleep came, she wondered how long they would have to run till the Keepers of the Blade finally caught up with them.
Chapter-2
Ambushed
Avice’s friend lived two states away. After what seemed to be an almost full day spent on the bus, mingling with quick showers in filthy rest stops and meals in dingy roadside diners, they finally arrived at their destination. The bus creaked into the station close to midnight, bringing with it a thunderstorm of such intensity Yarra had not seen in many months.
She looked out through the fogged, grimy windows. Aside from a few people huddled underneath a small, shaded area where the lights flickered erratically, it looked like a place where people came to be deliberately forgotten.
‘How apt’, she thought to herself.
The pine trees in the distance were bent at an angle, too weak to stand up to the torrential winds.
Avice got up and reached for the overhead compartment for their backpack. He smiled at her as he did so.
“What a welcome, eh? At least it won’t be a hot night!”
Yarra could not help but manage a small smile. She had grown to love his ability to see something desirable even out of a debilitating situation. It was one of his charming qualities. She watched him hoist up the backpack, his hands blindly swiping through the compartment for anything they had missed out or that might have been displaced.
The image of his body etched in her eyes began to fade away. So too did the seats of the bus to either side of them. Yarra began to lose all sense of being, her body floating through a room of light grey and yellow. She did not panic, knowing that the precognition was kicking in. Instead of struggling to get out of it like she had once done, Yarra breathed out and relaxed. Which was easier said than done, when the natural human response to such uncertainty was to panic.
Image after image came like cascading screens of a television. In one such vision, she saw herself and Avice standing under the heavy rain, surrounded by hooded figures in black. Another image was of her crying over Avice’s dead body in a dense forest, his bleeding body slashed grotesquely. Other visions were of them sitting comfortable in a home, cuddling; another vision was of her being visibly pregnant, Avice patting her belly with a laugh on his face; and the last vision was of her holding a baby and crying over a photo of him.
Mixed images, mixed visions, all overlapping alternatives.
“Yarra?” Avice gripped at her shoulder, urgently trying to both force her attention and to reassure her that he was there.
She was startled by the sound of his voice, jolting her back into reality. Her first instinct was to tell Avice all that she had seen in her visions, but in that split second, she decided otherwise. The visions had strayed too uncharacteristically into multiple outcomes. It would have been the equivalent of regaling to him a bad dream.
“Did you just have a vision?” he asked nervously.
She nodded.
“What did you see?”
Though a few of the visions involved Avice dying, or dead, they were too wooly to be considered roads into reality. Besides, in all of th
e vision, she had been looking at him from a considerable distance. As Avice’s mother had once said, precognitive Oracles often gauged the accuracy of the vision by how far they were from the vision’s point of view. The closer she was, the more information she could gather; sights, color, smells, tastes, even texture.
All the visions she had seen were almost equivocal to watching videos on one’s phone.
Shrugging, she just answered, “random stuff.”
“Anything about us?” he smiled, pulling her from the seat. He pulled her to him, his hands just clasping above the curve of her buttocks. Enough to get her heat starting to race in an entirely pleasant way.
Yarra was saved from answering the question as the bus driver yelled from the front of the bus. “Get off, you two! You wanna kiss, do it outside!”
She stepped out of the bus before Avice, running between the wet gap of the bus and the shaded area of the bus station. Though the gap was only a few feet long, Yarra’s head was soaking wet from the weight of the thunderstorm by the time she got to the shelter. She looked back to see Avice grinning at her, the raindrops running through his short hair and down his face.
He took a look around. From the squinting of his eyes, Yarra knew that he was in fact scanning the vicinity, even beyond the darkness impenetrable by human eyes, to see if they were being followed.
“No one,” he said with a slight chatter of his teeth as the cold began to sink in. He was tough, but not immune to being affected by the natural elements when he was in his human form.
Yarra huddled up in her jacket and pressed her head against his chest as they stood below the flickering lights of the bus station. The other passengers, about five of them, stood with their weak umbrellas, staring at the thunderstorm with a unanimous defeated look on their faces.
The bus peeled itself away from the station, heading off into the night. It was only a few feet away from them when the sound of the engine was easily overridden by the howling wind and rustling trees.
“Where is your friend?” Yarra asked. She looked around nervously, although her sight was nowhere near as good as his. Suddenly, the thought of her vision coming true worried her. What if the Keepers of the Blade had caught up with them? In her vision, she had seen hooded figures in black, which was strange, for Avice’s former clan members wore nothing of the sort. Their look was distinct, certainly, but not archaic.
“She does not know that we are coming,” Avice explained. His face was suddenly tense, looking at the other passengers. His eyes were stuck to one person, though Yarra could not see why.
He hoisted the backpack so it sat more comfortably and gestured for her to follow him to the rear of the bus station, where a small 24-hour convenience store was open.
“Avice?” she called out again, but he was suddenly tense. He led her into the shop where the cashier barely glanced up from his portable television. It sounded as if he was watching a soap opera. But given how quiet the place seemed, it might be the only source of entertainment that he got on a regular basis.
“The last I saw her here was about almost one hundred years ago,” Avice explained, looking out the glass window of the convenience store. “There were rumors that she was in this part of town, hiding from the Keepers of the Blade. That is why we are here.”
As he explained, his gaze did not leave the group of people nearby. Yarra’s eyes followed the trail of his stare, and it fell on a man. There was nothing significantly dangerous about him. Possibly in his middle age, he had donned a brown leather jacket, and in his left ear were multiple silver earrings.
She noticed then, that the man was discreetly looking at her and Avice, choosing to stare another way when he saw them looking right back at him.
“I don’t like the way one of the guys over there is staring at us,” he added.
Yarra took a better look at the man. His hair was in a ponytail extending all the way down to the small of his back. He had been a passenger on the bus they were on, sitting a few seats nearer to the front. She was not sure when he had gotten on the bus, having slept the most of her journey.
The man continued to give the occasional glance in their direction before looking away. Once, he even held his gaze longer than necessary. It seemed that he was quite interested in Yarra and Avice’s presence, rather to just a pointed, curious acknowledgment of their presence.
Yarra pretended to occupy herself with some candies on the display while discreetly keeping her attention glued onto the guy out of the corner of her eye.
“Do you think he is part of the Keepers of the Blade?” she whispered.
Avice flicked at a magazine, as cool as a cucumber, but she knew that beneath the thick layer of clothes, he too was as tensed up as she was.
“He doesn’t look too familiar.”
The man looked around at the sparsely populated bus station and made his way into the convenience store. Yarra heard Avice curse under his breath.
“Just stay away from him,” he said. “Grab what you need and let’s head out the moment that he comes in the store.”
She nodded.
The bell chimed at the entrance of the convenience store as the man entered. He caught Yarra staring, and forced a smile on his face. “Some rain!”
“Yeah…,” Yarra managed with a weak smile.
Behind him, she could feel Avice tugging at her coat to hurry her purchase. She kept shooting glances at the man whose back was turned towards them as he considered his purchase of the many array of sandwiches on display. He was a head shorter than Avice, and under the light, he looked older than he did when she had first seen him outside. He emitted an innocent, nonchalant hum as he seemed to ponder making a decision.
The cashier, too absorbed with his show, barely looked up when they came up to the counter. He rang up their purchases with his eyes still sucked into the small light emitting box. Which was depressing in a way, as his muscle memory of the repetitive, mind-numbing actions was drilled into him so much as to be automatic. They paid for a meat bun and two hot drinks, and were about to head out when the lights above them started to flicker ominously. Not just one, but all of them.
In that moment, Yarra had another vision. Not many cascading, overlapping screens as she had seen earlier, but just one. And in this image, she saw it from her own point of view. She saw the ponytailed man in the vision turn around and aim a gun at them. There was a leer on his face, and he had deliberately parted his jacket to reveal a shirtless body. There, inked clearly, was a tattoo of a blade similar to Avice’s running from his left collarbone to his navel.
As soon as the vision ended, she turned to face the man and felt the blood drain from her face in doing so. His body was still turned against them. But, all of that changed within a few seconds. She saw him turn, and something in his hand gave off a metallic glint.
“Duck!” Yarra shouted, lunging at Avice and bringing them both onto the floor with a painful thud. The sound of a single gunshot and breaking glass was heard above them.
The cashier screamed out, exclaiming a string of profanities, and then all was silent again. The lights in the store flickered, dimmed and then burned out, plunging the store into total darkness. All that she could hear was the sound of the actors in the soap mechanically talking on, and the sickening creak of their assailant’s leather shoes moving in the dark.
Avice removed his backpack and placed a finger on Yarra’s lips, beckoning her to stop panting so noisily. He took a small packet of chewing gum that was on display, and threw it into the darkness. It landed with a skidding sound and a thud on the floor at the end of the aisle, temporarily distracting their attacker.
“I should have killed you on the bus when I had the chance…,” the man called out. “Imagine that! Little Avice, a traitor to the clan with the slut he ran off with! Today must be my lucky day. Your parents have put a bounty on your head!”
Yarra gulped. The Keepers of the Blades did not play around with traitors. Just a few hours after their escape, and
a prize had already been put on Avice’s capture, or even worse, death.
Avice, however, seemed visibly unaffected by the threat. He knew that the man would follow the sound of the fallen object that he had thrown seconds earlier. Using this to his advantage, he beckoned for her to follow him in a silent crawl to the opposite side.
She followed, resting her clothed knees against the floor to prevent any squelching sounds that would have been produced by the boots that she wore. Her eyes were slowly adjusting to the darkness. Just then, a flash of lightning flooded in and she almost screamed at the sight of the man not even ten feet away from her. Luckily, he was facing the other way.
Love Beyond the wall (A Rizer Pack Shifter Series Book 1) Page 44