But she wasn’t scanning documents or typing or surfing the internet or doing anything at all. She was just staring blankly. She looked dazed but not bothered. I wanted to see how long she’d sit like that and it was a full of couple of minutes of her sitting there unmoving before I got a cold shiver up my spine. Her behaviour was creepy. She looked like a robot who had been told to sit quietly until further instruction.
“Dana?” I stepped into the room and Dana’s head jerked a little and she stared at me too before finally smiling softly but the smile didn’t reach her eyes.
“Hello…” Dana’s mouth twitched and her eyelids fluttered as if she was trying to say something but couldn’t get it out.
“Darling, are you alright?” I walked up to her and she flinched so slightly, I almost missed it. I couldn’t tell what it was though. “Dana…?”
Dana looked up at me and blinked and said, “I’m fine, thank you.”
Chapter Twelve: David
“You don’t seem fine,” I said slowly.
Now that I was standing in front of her and seeing her face occasionally twitch as if she were periodically being pinched and was trying not to show it, I felt much more uneasy than I had before. Something was wrong here. It wasn’t just how she was talking and staring at nothing, it was in her very posture. She stood now, ramrod straight and just a little too stiff.
“I’m fine,” Dana said again. “I…”
She swallowed and shook her head and I walked up to her and put my arms around her. She felt wrong. I felt as if her skin was crawling as I touched her and she squirmed, pulling away, and looking pained.
“Dana,” I said slowly. “You’re scaring me. You’re acting very strangely. Please tell me what’s wrong?”
“I need...to be alone,” she muttered. She spun around and marched out the door and I looked after her, feeling as if snakes were writhing in my belly. This wasn’t right. Something was direly wrong and I had to find out what it was.
I followed after her but I didn’t speak, only curious now what she would do next. Dana was usually the one saying she needed to work more as if she owed it to me so to see her cutting out of work was out of character too. I followed her upstairs to her room and paused in the hallway.
Hormones? They could really do a number on a person. Maybe Miles and I were both truly overreacting. Sometimes it was difficult to trust my own judgement in these matters. I tended to assume the worst.
Hesitantly, I pushed open her door and leaned in the doorway, watching Dana again. She was standing in the middle of the room, staring again.
“Are you sure that you're feeling okay?” I said. “Did you have lunch? Maybe you need some protein-”
“I don’t need anything,” Dana said.
She sat on the bed and her expression shifted slightly from blank to bothered. She was looking just past me but her brow furrowed, her mouth collapsing into a despairing frown. I knelt down in front of her and cradled her face in my hands.
“Sweetheart,” I said softly. “Something’s wrong. You’re acting so strangely. It’s worrying me. Please…”
“When you touch me, she said, closing her eyes and curling her lip, “it feels like a snake slithering on my skin.”
I pulled away, horrified. There was a fine sheen of sweat on Dana’s skin and she wiped her brow, sounding a little breathless.
“Why…” I shook my head.
That evil voice was there again. The Collector was in my head.
You thought you deserved her? You’re nothing but my pet.
I closed my eyes, willing it away. Every doubt and insecurity I had was rising to the surface. Every dark thought about myself was at the top of my head. I was still in that cell with The Collector. I would never see the sun again…
“Why are you saying that?” I said thickly.
“I wanted a place to stay,” Dana said, sounding as flat as paper. “I needed money. Clothes. Food. You believed me.”
“What are you talking about…” I shook my head, willing her words away. The evil voice said it was true, it was what I had always known. But some deeper bit of faith in me resisted.
She loved me. I loved her. She was my mate. We hadn’t said that yet but-
“I have to get out of here,” she said, sounding a little bit like herself even as her eyes flashed and she shook her head. “I have to… I have to…”
I could hardly move. I was frozen, my mind racing trying to come up with some cause for this. Yet what if it was true? I went back and forth in my head, the thoughts bouncing around like spilled ping pong balls.
She doesn’t love you, she doesn’t love...she played you because she needed a place…
Could I even blame her if that was true? I felt a flash of epiphany; what if I had thought of it all wrong? As much as I’d told her I didn’t want to take advantage of her in her vulnerable position, what if that was exactly what I had done? A woman who was homeless and pregnant and desperate for help? She’d traded it for sex, submitting to whatever I wanted even if it was a little rough or she was already tired or she didn’t want to at all... She’d always said yes but what if she had not wanted any of that? The thought made me sick to my stomach. Suddenly the memory of taking her last night on all fours, pounding her… What if…?
“Did you not want me?” I said thickly, tears behind my eyes. “Or do you just not love me?”
“I…”
I watched a tear slide down Dana’s cheek. “I have to go.”
“Dana…”
She pushed past me, shoving me away, and dashing out the door. She was running wildly through the house and I chased her all the way downstairs and through the foyer. She threw open the front door and ran outside and on the sidewalk she paused and looked back at me. Her eyes were too wide and her mouth twitched.
She shook for a moment, her hands clenched at her sides as if she were fighting something, before she said again, “I have to go.”
Then she shifted, transforming instantly into a magnificent green and silvery dragon. Her scales shown in the sunlight. I had always been told that pregnant dragons were especially beautiful. But Dana… I was distracted by her beauty for a moment and so shocked by her behaviour that I felt frozen. This was a high degree of difficulty for me. I couldn’t fight her. I was used to problems I could fight. I couldn’t force her to stay and I didn’t know how to prove that there might be something else at work here beyond what she was saying to my face.
It took me too long to shift and fly after her. I had to shake myself out of my astonished reverie and then I finally shifted and flew after her but dragons can cover a lot of distance in no time at all. She was already a distant, dark dot in the clouds far above and getting farther and farther away even as I pushed my wings to the limit, trying to make up the distance. I blew fire, just trying to get her attention but she was too far away. The clouds were low over New York and we weaved, the two of us, through the sky and in and out of the giant tufts of cloud cover.
It made me angry suddenly that this was the first time we had shifted together. I should have taken Dana along with me on a flight only it felt as if so much had been happening, it hadn’t even been very long… Still, I was full of regrets now as I chased after her.
Was there something I could have done?
Fuck…
I was losing her. She was a little dot so far away now that I wasn’t even sure what it was that I looking at and then she was gone.
I began to panic, weaving in and out of the clouds. Had she turned? I flew one way for a while and then another, trying to find her again. I sniffed the air trying to track her scent but she was too far away and there was far too much wind to follow it. I flew for what felt like hours trying to find Dana again. I criss-crossed the skies over Manhattan and finally flew further into Connecticut. Where would she have gone?
I couldn’t believe that anything she had said about Darien had not been true. I had seen the truth of it in her eyes. She couldn’t possibly be going
back to him.
Unless there was some sort of magic at work here.
Unless this was the plot Dana had warned me Darien might attempt.
Jessie had told me he’d tracked Darien down to New England but if this was a ploy of Darien’s, I needed more information than that. And I needed some help too.
Because I was going to kill him.
Chapter Thirteen: Dana
I was trapped within my own mind.
It had begun upon waking up.
The night before, I had been perfectly fine. More than fine. I had been enraptured, basking in my love for David. We had told each other we were falling in love but at this point, it felt only like a half-truth. I was madly in love with David. I was absolutely sure he was my mate. I had been taught my whole life that I didn’t deserve anything like this and yet here it was, laid at my feet. David loved me. Of that, I was sure. It was in his eyes every time he looked at me. It was in his every touch. That night, we had been insatiable. The only thing that had stopped us from not making love into the dawn was the need to sleep. But our bodies had been so in sync. That night we’d made gentle love, laughing love, and then rough, explosive love. We had been together every which way there was to be together. I’d fallen asleep in his arms, with my fire still burning for him. He’d made me come several times and still as I dozed off I had been smiling, imagining how we would start all over in the morning and be late to breakfast. I never wanted it to stop. It was the physical manifestation of everything we felt for each other. Every time he thrusted his cock inside me, I felt his love.
Then in the morning, I had felt...all wrong. It had begun with some slight nausea and disorientation. I’d woken up early, too early considering how late we’d stayed up. I’d had a horrible urge to throw up and then I’d felt as if David’s arms around me were wrong somehow. They felt eerie, almost like tentacles. It was a creepy, surreal feeling and it had pushed me out of bed and into the bathroom where I’d wrapped myself in a robe and stood over the toilet, dry heaving for several minutes and panicking that something was wrong with my pregnancy.
I took a shower and the hot water felt a bit better. I stood there in the shower for a long time under the hot stream that was easing my muscles, still sore from the night before. Suddenly, I’d had these horrible visions in my head of David mutating, his handsome face was twisted in my head, his eyes bulging, his skin greying. More than that, his veins darkened and a slick kind of mucus oozed from his pores. But it wasn’t just a random, dark image that I was imagining. It was a kind of nightmare that I couldn’t get out of my head. I thought of David’s arms around me as I’d shakily dressed for the day and they were tentacles in my mind. I brushed my teeth and my gums hurt and I thought of David’s long, snaky tongue forcing its way into my mouth. But that had not happened at all. I knew that. Yet somehow my mind was rewriting history.
I felt as if I were going mad.
It got exponentially worse with every minute that passed. My mind was assaulted with those nightmarish images, moments that I’d been treasuring between David and I now twisted to fit some new narrative that was being written into my memory. David was a villain. He had trapped me here and I had to leave by whatever means necessary. I had been tricked all this time. It was Darien I wanted. The thought was an insistent chant in my head. I had to get out of here and back to Darien. Why had I left him in the first place? He had taken care of me just like he’d promised. I’d been a disloyal whore running from him. Not only that, but he was my child’s father. I owed it to him to return and I would have to fall to my knees and beg him to forgive me.
The thoughts were so demanding and intrusive that I couldn’t think around them. All that happened by the time I’d descended to the first floor for breakfast.
Then Miles had talked to me and I’d felt as if my mouth was saying things I didn’t even want it to say. I had the feeling of being trapped inside my body. Suddenly my will, my consciousness was locked in a cell and when I tried to make my mouth move and say what I wanted it to say, nothing came out but words I didn’t mean at all.
Bit by bit over the course of the morning I had the feeling of losing more and more control. I spent about two hours just trying to scan documents and only managed three until my hands simply wouldn’t abide my commands. I was inside my mind, telling them to work and they wouldn’t. Then I felt like an idiot. Something here was horrible wrong. It was all so nightmarish, I’d thought a few times that I might still be asleep. But this was all too real.
I needed David, I told myself. A thundering and warring voice in my head told me no. David was a monster. David was my captor. He had forced me to be here and I needed to get away. I needed to get back to Darien who would keep me safe from the monsters. I’d felt my legs trying to take me toward the front door and I’d resisted. I succeeded, for a few minutes anyway. I managed to stay away from the front door. I found myself petrified at the thought of what would happen if I left the house.
My mind was divided. There was that invasive voice from the outside telling me I needed to go and that David was evil and Darien was good, and then there was my own little voice, trapped now in a smaller and smaller little box and trying to insist that I loved David, that he was safe and would protect me and my baby. For a while, I ended up curled up on the floor in the shadows near the main staircase. No one found me, Miles and David probably imagining I was happily working. But I sat there, huddled, for a long time. I was shaking and afraid. I was trying to will myself to get up and go to David. I needed to find him. I needed him to hold me and tell me he would find out whatever this was and stop it.
I only managed to get back to the library and then the thundering voice took over completely when David walked in. I tried to fight my body. I felt my face twitching as I fought to speak for myself but I couldn’t. Then upstairs, I couldn’t believe the things that were coming out of my mouth. I was straining so hard to fight it all, I was shaking and sweating. But I exerted so much effort just trying to get my own words out and tell David that something was wrong, that I inwardly just collapsed. It was like lifting a terribly great weight and having to hold it for a long time. It was just too much. I couldn’t keep it up. And when I gave in from the strain and the pain of it, it all came crashing in on me.
I fully lost control of my entire body. I was thankful at least that I hadn’t said to David’s face that I had never wanted him and never loved him. I might as well have, I supposed. I ended up running off and shifting, soaring into the air and right back to Darien’s estate. But I still saw the heartbreak on his face. I’d opened up the heart of this tortured man, so much of whose life had been stolen. I had brought him out, bit by bit, and I had fantasized about bringing him out more and more. Now I was taking it all away again. It was killing him. I saw it in his eyes before I ran away.
Inside of my body, I was screaming and sobbing. I was pounding on the bars of this new cage, begging for control again. But it never came. Instead I was flying away from happiness, away from joy, right into the arms of terror.
David had told me that his friend Jessie had found that Darien no longer lived in Maine so I hardly knew where I’d flown, only that I was going towards him. It turned out to be Boston.
I found myself touching down right in front of a sprawling old estate hidden away far from the city somewhere. The place was beautiful. The trees were full of blossoms and the grass was lush. The house was an old Colonial brick thing. Everything was picture perfect. But to me, it spelled only doom. Yet even so, I found myself shifting back into human form. I tried to resist for a moment but at this point it felt so painful, that I couldn’t make myself do it. It was like a knife plunging right into my brain.
My body was on autopilot, walking me down the cobblestone path to the giant, white front door. I couldn’t so much as cry of my own volition as I found myself knocking and immediately the door opened to reveal Darien with a lascivious smile on his face. He looked just like I remembered him with his slicked back, blon
de hair and grey eyes. There was an older woman standing next to him. She had a cloudy mass of frizzy black hair and eyed me coldly, leaning there next to him in the doorway.
“I told you it would work,” the older woman said. Now as I stood there, I could sense the magic coming off of her in waves. She was a witch. She’d done something to me, that was obvious. She’d cursed me or something.
“You’re a genius, Layne,” Darien said to the woman. He stepped forward and took my hands, leading me into the house. His hands felt cold. They didn’t feel gross like my mind had insisted David’s hands felt. But they felt cold and alien to me. But if Darien was still just as I’d left him, it wouldn’t be like that for long. He would lock me up or take away my food. He would have me beaten for leaving, I was sure. Whatever it was, a terrible reckoning was coming. And my body had brought me to meet him against my own will.
“Darien,” my voice said. It had such a flat affect. I wanted to scream and run. I wanted to shift and fly away. Instead I was stuck. I felt my lips curving up into a smile that made me want to be sick.
“It’s alright, Dana,” Darien said. He reached up with both hands, cradling my face like David sometimes did. Except there was too much force in his hold. He was squeezing too hard, so hard that it hurt. Yet I couldn’t fight him. He could do whatever he wanted. I wouldn’t be able to fight him. I wondered if this curse would last forever or if it was temporary. I feared that if I had really lost all control of my body, destined forever to be a prisoner of my own mind while I watched my automaton self submitting to Darien’s every command, I would completely lose my mind inside. Even my consciousness would lose all sense of coherence and self. What would be left of me? I wouldn’t even be able to take my own life and end it all. I’d be trapped forever this way and no one else would even know.
Darien squeezed my face hard enough to bruise, pressing his thumbs into the delicate skin under my eyes. I just stood there, taking it.
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