Emerge
Lena Mae Hill
Emerge
Copyright © 2018 Lena Mae Hill
Kindle Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the publisher, except in cases of a reviewer quoting brief passages in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used factiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, and events are entirely coincidental. Use of any copyrighted, trademarked, or brand names in this work of fiction does not imply endorsement of that brand.
Published in the United States by Lena Mae Hill and Speak Now.
For more information, please visit www.lenamaehill.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-945780-40-0
Contents
Summary
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
From the Author
Resources
Acknowledgements
Summary
Love can save you...if it doesn't destroy you first.
Gwen has spent her life on the road, picking up and moving every few months when her mother has a mental break. They take care of each other. They don't need anyone else. Or so Gwen believes...until her mother announces she's met a man online.
When they arrive at his opulent home, Gwen is plunged into a world that seems too good to be true. Suddenly she's living in a mansion overlooking the beach and eating foods she's only read about in paperback novels. Her mother's new man has a gorgeous daughter and four irresistible sons who apparently don't mind her complete social incompetence. At last, her dream of going to school and being a normal sixteen-year-old is within her reach.
But the family they've joined has more than its share of secrets. Not all of them want her there, and her inexplicable attraction to each of them only complicates matters further. When strange phenomena begin to occur in their presence, Gwen must emerge from her protective shell and embrace a destiny she's never imagined.
***This is a slow burn RH with mild supernatural elements and a touch of Norse mythology. It's a full-length novel at approx. 82,000 words.***
Chapter One
Gwen
I blinked into the harsh sunlight that streamed through the door to our storage locker as it rattled upward on its rolling track.
“It’s time,” Mom said, her hair disheveled and an all-too-familiar frenzied look in her eyes. “Let’s get out of here. Now!” Rushing in, she began scooping up our meager possessions, grabbing toothbrushes and dirty laundry, throwing items at random into a banana box.
“What about your job?” I asked, already knowing the answer. On autopilot, I stood from the bed and began to roll up the foam mattress with the sheets still on it.
“They’ve found us,” she said, ignoring my question. She ran out to toss the box in the trunk of our latest car, a brown boxy thing she’d bought a month ago, when we’d landed in St. Louis. The continual, annoying ding alerting us that the keys were in the ignition answered all the questions I really needed to know. We were getting the hell out—and fast.
“Who found us this time?” I asked, carrying the mattress out.
“I saw a raven,” she said, grabbing up an armload of folded clothes, dumping them into the backseat. They cascaded across the stained upholstery, unfolding themselves like fans as they went. At least she’d taken the time to gather our things this time. Sometimes, she dragged me out of sleep in the middle of the night and we ran, taking nothing but our latest car.
She jumped in the driver’s seat and slammed her door as I closed the trunk, having thrown in the last random pieces of our lives. I hurried to the front door, my heart in my throat. Every time it happened, terror gripped me, as if her crazy were somehow contagious. As if I were afraid that one of these days, she’d be in such a hurry that she wouldn’t wait for me.
The car lurched forward before I’d had a chance to buckle my seatbelt. I grabbed the dash as we bore down on the exit to the storage facility. The numbered doors ticked past like a counter, counting down to the moment when one of her episodes didn’t end.
Talking kept her from sinking into the scary, semi-catatonic state she did sometimes when she saw things, so I tried again.
“Where are we going?” I asked, rifling through the stack of maps in the glove box.
“Just let me drive,” Mom said. “Look for ravens.”
I gave up on conversation for the moment, telling myself she’d calm down when we were out of town, away from the demons that had caught up with her yet again. Sometimes they were literal demons that only she could see, but sometimes they were giants or trolls or even dragons. Only she could see those, too. I worried more about the things I could see, like policemen, freezing temperatures, and people knocking on the car windows when we were sleeping in it. But most of all, I worried about us.
“Raven,” my mother screamed. I jolted upright, grabbing for the wheel. A truck on oversized tires loomed in front of us, and I swallowed a scream, yanking us back into our lane.
“Mom, calm down,” I said firmly. “Do you want to pull over so I can drive?”
Renewing her grip on the wheel, she took a couple deep breaths. “No, we can’t risk it. You don’t have your license. If we got pulled over…”
“You don’t have a license, either,” I pointed out.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, shooting me a forced smile. “Just let me get us out of here and away from that giant.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding. “So it was a giant this time. What kind?” If I played along, she’d calm down faster, and I wouldn’t worry for our lives quite so much.
“Frost,” she muttered, her eyes darting around as she pulled to a stop at a red light. Her fingers drummed frantically on the steering wheel as she waited for the light to change.
Come on, come on, I urged the light, my hands curling into fists. The longer we sat there, the more agitated she’d get.
“Better than a fire giant, right?” I offered as the light turned green.
She stomped on the gas, and the car hesitated, then charged forward into the intersection. Mom didn’t answer, so I began the tedious process of yanking my seatbelt out of the door, one halting inch at a time. The cars she could get with her limited cash were usually not in great shape, so I was lucky to have a seatbelt at all, even if it took five minutes to pull it out.
Once my seatbelt was o
n, I leafed through the pile of maps until I found the Missouri map. Flipping it over to the oversized city map of St. Louis on the back, I looked for a street sign outside the car, then found it on the legend, then placed my finger on it on the map. My heartbeat had already begun to slow, and as I directed Mom toward I-70, a sense of purpose descended over me.
Get us out of St. Louis, and we’ll be okay again.
Maps were predictable. They didn’t make sudden changes. Sure, sometimes they led us into construction or to a closed road. But unlike us, the symbols and place names on maps remained in the exact same place for a whole year, until the next year’s map appeared in the rest stops and visitor centers across the country.
“There,” I said, nearly choking with relief as the overpass came into view, looming above the red-and-blue, shield-shaped signs with interstate numbers. It didn’t really matter which way we went, which highway we took. The center of the country was safe that way—you could run in any direction, disappear into another town or city, and you’d still be in mid-America.
Mom swung the car onto the on-ramp, and I started to breathe normal at last. We’d made it. We were okay. As okay as we ever got, anyway.
For now.
Chapter Two
Gwen
Two days later, I sat in shocked silence, trying to absorb my mother’s latest announcement. By now I thought there was nothing she could say that would surprise me. Turned out, I was wrong.
“Gwen…?” Mom prompted.
I had to say something. She was waiting for my reaction. If I looked at her now, though, I might laugh, or cry, or scream. After a minute, I pried my lips open. I tried to keep my voice neutral, so it didn’t break as I forced out the word. “You met a guy?”
Mom nodded, a tight smile on her lips. Before I could ask, she answered one of the million questions I had. “On the internet.”
“But…how?” I asked, letting the incredulousness out. I stared across the picnic table, wondering if this was her total break from reality.
My mother did a lot of crazy things, but she did not use the internet if she could help it. That’s how the government spied on people. And she definitely didn’t talk to men in chat rooms.
There were a lot of other things my mother didn’t do, but I loved her fiercely. She may have had trouble holding a conversation without lapsing into ramblings about the end of the world, but she was my mom. She had literally pulled me from a burning building once.
“When we went to the library in St. Louis, they let me sign in as a guest, so I got online,” she said. “Don’t worry. I didn’t give any personal information or sign in with any identifying details. He wants us to move in with him. He’s giving us a home, Gwen.” She put a hand over mine, smiling wanly at me.
“Who is this guy?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. “Exactly what kind of site did you meet him on?”
“A site for people who have been…left behind,” she said, avoiding my eyes.
Since my mother wasn’t religious, I knew she didn’t mean it in the sense that the Left Behind books did. Which could only mean one thing.
I twisted a strand of my long blonde hair around my finger. “By Dad?”
“By love,” Mom said, a faraway look in her eyes.
I knew my mother loved me, but I didn’t think I’d ever heard her use that word before. I’d never really thought about being lonely because I always had her. And I’d never considered that she might be lonely, either. Now I studied her, wondering if I’d done something wrong. If suddenly, I was no longer enough.
Nothing had changed that I could put a finger on, which meant this creep had somehow gotten to her. My mother didn’t trust the chick behind the counter at McDonald’s, but somehow this guy had convinced her over an anonymous chat that we should go to his house…and stay? What the hell had he said to gain her trust that fast? There was exactly one person in the entire world my mother trusted. Me.
Not that my mother didn’t have qualities that would make her a wonderful companion—she could be kind and brave and funny—but trusting? Never. I didn’t want to be rude, but what kind of man would want a woman who had been voluntarily homeless for over a decade? Whose only permanent addresses had been storage lockers because the metal would block the giants from tracking us?
Now she wanted to move in with some random guy?
I gripped the edge of the table so I wouldn’t pass out. My head was spinning, my stomach churning. This was wrong, all wrong. “Did he blackmail you?” I blurted.
“No, of course not,” she said. “This is a good thing, Gwen.”
“But…you don’t even know him.”
“That’s true,” she said slowly. “We’ll get to know him when we get there.”
“Where?”
“He lives in Massachusetts,” she said, slipping a scrap of paper across the table with an address scribbled in pencil. “I wrote it down.”
“And that’s all you have? An address?” I tried to keep my voice level so I wouldn’t freak her out. I didn’t want to feed her paranoia, but this was batshit crazy. She couldn’t just drive across the country to meet some internet weirdo. Blood rushed in my ears as I tried to figure out what to do. I had no one to call. No family but Mom. No relatives, no friends. All I had was her. She’d always told me we didn’t need anyone else, that we couldn’t trust anyone else.
And now that I needed help with her, I had no one to run to. That was the thing. We didn’t run toward things. We ran away.
Mom and I sometimes talked, when she had good days. But I’d never questioned her method. Over the years, I’d gotten used to the way she was. For a long time, I hadn’t realized it wasn’t normal to be woken in the middle of the night, hurried into a car I’d never seen before, and driven to another state. That was just how we lived. And even now that I knew it wasn’t normal for other people, it didn’t bother me that much. It was normal for us.
Meeting random men on the internet? Not normal.
Driving across the country to meet some guy instead of running away from imaginary monsters? Not normal.
I couldn’t tear my eyes from the gum wrapper blowing across the patchy, brown grass of the rest stop in Akron, Ohio, where we’d spent the night. That gum wrapper was us. Always moving, blowing from one place to the next. We might get caught up in one town or another for a few months, but only until we saved enough money to move on. Then we’d blow away again.
Back in the car, I closed my eyes and prayed that she’d snap out of this. That I’d fall asleep and wake up to find her being her usual self instead of a stranger who met guys online. I wished I had a real phone like pretty much everyone else on the planet so that I could Google this guy. My mother couldn’t tell me a single meaningful thing about him. She didn’t even know what he did for a living.
By midway through Pennsylvania, I’d worked myself into a panic. I couldn’t sit still in my seat, shifting around every few minutes to try to get comfortable. This turned out to be impossible, since the discomfort was in my insides, churning like a stomach flu that cramped my guts and nauseated me. What if he was going to lure us in and murder us? Chances were, he didn’t even live in a house. He was going to want to ride around with us in the car. And since we basically lived in a bubble, no one would miss us. If the TV shows I’d seen in laundromats were to be believed, that’s how serial killers operated.
“Mom,” I said at last, when I thought I’d explode from holding it together. “Can we talk about this?”
“About what, honey?” she asked, as if she didn’t know.
“About moving in with a stranger. What if he’s dangerous?”
“Giants are dangerous,” she said. “I don’t think he’s a giant.”
“How do you know?” I blurted, then immediately cursed myself. I didn’t want to freak her out. I just wanted her to snap out of her weirdness for a minute, stop acting so un-momlike.
“I saw him,” she said.
I grabbed the door handle, my head spinning.
“What? When?”
“In here,” she said, tapping her temple. “I knew he would find us the same way I know the ravens are reporting back what they see. I didn’t know when, but now it’s happened.”
“If you told him you saw some guy in your visions, and he said he’s that guy, he’s lying,” I said through clenched teeth.
“I know I haven’t given you the best in life,” she said. “Always on the road, always running. It’s time to slow down. I want you to be happy. And maybe I can be happy, too.”
Hands shaking, I covered my mouth, forcing the words to stay inside me. How could I deny her that? How could I argue with something that would make her happy?
Needing a distraction, I picked up one of the paperback novels on the floor at my feet. The pages were yellowed at the edges, the cover creased and worn. On the front stood a tall man, his long hair flowing in the wind, his shirt open at the neck to reveal bulging, tan pectorals. A woman was draped over his arm in a swoon, her enormous bosoms bursting from the top of a red satin dress and her blond hair hanging to the ground behind her. In the background, a crimson sunset shone over a prairie. Big, jagged letters spelled out the title, Her Savage Passion.
I opened the book, folded my knees against the door, and started reading. We’d picked up a whole box of similar titles at a garage sale for one dollar, paid in cash. This was my social education, since school was out of the question. This was where I learned about flirting, sex, and dating; about the Scottish Highlands, the Old West, and England’s Regency era. I’d read my way through hundreds of classics, sci-fi tales, and tearjerkers, too. But today, I needed a happy distraction.
Somewhere in New York, I fell asleep. I woke up when Mom cheered. Unfolding my legs from where I’d curled them in the front seat, I stretched and looked around. It was morning. We’d driven all night.
“Where are we?” I asked, kicking some paperbacks under the seat and reaching for a gallon jug of water at my feet. We were getting low. We’d have to fill up at a rest stop soon.
Emerge: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance Page 1