Descendant

by S. M. Gaither

  Never Miss a New Relase!

  Follow me on any or all of the following places to get new release updates:

  Amazon

  Bookbub

  Facebook

  Descendant

  Book One of the Shift Chronicles

  S.M. Gaither

  Contents

  Copyright

  a beginning

  1. goodbye

  2. oxygen

  3. insane

  4. plans

  5. visitors

  6. elias

  7. poisoned

  8. blackmail

  9. choices

  10. sure

  11. gone

  12. reckless

  13. descendant

  14. shift

  15. hostages

  16. love

  17. trust

  18. willing

  19. persistence

  20. left

  Copyright

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from S.M. Gaither.

  For more information about the author visit:

  www.smgaitherbooks.com

  Cover by Covers by Juan

  a beginning

  Late, late yestreen I saw the new moon,

  With the auld moon in her arms;

  And I fear, I fear, my master dear!

  That we shall have a deadly storm.”

  -The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens

  1

  goodbye

  It was a beautiful day for a funeral, and that didn’t exactly help the situation.

  Somehow it seemed that— given all that had happened to me over the past few weeks— the weather could’ve at least been catering to my feelings.

  So it should’ve been raining.

  No. More like storming, with gale-force winds and hail the size of golf balls. Enough of this sunny sky and cool breeze nonsense.

  It was seriously starting to piss me off.

  My dad was the guest of honor, the one we had all come to say good-bye to. The ‘we’ meaning only family and close friends—emphasis on the word ‘close’— because if we hadn’t tried to keep it as intimate as possible, it was likely the whole town would’ve shown up.

  Why, you ask?

  Two reasons, mainly.

  One, because in our rural, mountain town of Dayton, North Carolina, everybody knew everybody, and that somehow gave everyone the right to be involved in everyone else’s business.

  And the second reason was because my dad’s death, and the stories surrounding it, had been dominating the headlines of the local newspaper for the past week. It had even been a story on Channel Three’s six ‘o’ clock news one night—which was a big freaking deal for a town whose front-page news normally contained such fascinating stories as the one about Farmer Such-and-Such, who broke a long-standing town record with the incredible girth of a pumpkin he managed to grow. The sad part? I’m not making that up. That really was a story last November. Mr. Powers’s Pumpkin Patch.

  The thing had weighed like 950 pounds, apparently.

  But this.

  Man, this was actual, honest-to-goodness news.

  An accidental drowning, the newspapers had concluded. Which made sense. After all, as far as I knew, my dad didn’t have any enemies. In fact, he was arguably one of the most well-liked people in town. And stuff like ‘foul-play’ just didn’t happen here in Dayton—it had been something like fifty years since the last known homicide, I think. Plus, it had been raining for days before the one Dad went missing, and the lake we lived next to had been steadily rising to dangerous levels. Combine that with the fact that my dad had never been a particularly strong swimmer, and....

  Well, everything added up just fine.

  Not that any of this stopped people from coming up with their own crazy conclusions.

  I had to admit: it was tempting to come up with one myself. Because I couldn’t help but be a little bit angry with my father for going and drowning like that. I know that sounds awful. Really, really awful. But at least if he’d been murdered or something, I could’ve directed my anger at someone else besides him.

  Instead, I had to settle for silently cursing the bright sun as I stood beside my younger sister, Lora, and my mom, Anna. The latter had her hand resting lightly on my shoulder in what I think was an attempt to be comforting.

  She wasn’t fooling either of us. My mom was a very practical, no-nonsense kind of woman; she didn’t do the touchy-feely stuff much, so her hand being there came off as more awkward than anything else.

  I sighed and leaned against her all the same, and she wrapped an arm around my shoulder as I stared numbly forward.

  The pastor from our church—who had been a close friend of my father’s—was reading something from the Bible propped open in his arms now, his voice sounding like it might crack any second. A small group of mourners stood with us in a semi-circle around him. Most of them had wads of well-used tissue clenched in their fists and were dabbing at puffy, red eyes, which made me feel a little ashamed.

  My own face was dry, and it had been since I’d learned of my dad’s death.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t feel like crying.

  I just couldn’t make the tears fall.

  I think maybe I was too shocked to do anything except stare blankly at the world around me, which is what I was still doing as the pastor said his final words.

  A few other people spoke up after he had finished, but I didn’t hear a single word any of them said, because I wasn’t really listening.

  What could any of them possibly say about Dad that I didn’t already know, anyway?

  Silence eventually descended over our group. The pastor took a handful of dirt and tossed it across my father’s coffin while chanting something about ‘ashes to ashes and dust to dust’.

  And then it was over.

  Just like that, my dad’s life was officially over.

  The pastor closed the Bible, and people turned to their neighbors and shook hands and hugged each other. Then, one-by-one, they directed their attention to us. I wasted no time ducking out of my mother’s one-armed embrace and attempting a beeline toward our SUV.

  Something about me must’ve been screaming I don’t want to talk to anyone, because I managed to escape most of the crowd with only a few discreet head nods and brief embraces.

  But I hadn’t quite made it to the safety of our vehicle when suddenly I had that inexplicable feeling of being watched.

  I tilted my head to the left, and I saw the reason instantly out of the corner of my eye— a young woman who would’ve been hard to miss, given how she was staring blatantly in my direction. Her solemn expression made me think of the creepy, sad angel statues that marked some of the graves in this place.

  For a moment, I couldn’t help but gaze back at her.

  Without thinking, I slowed almost to a stop. My hand had already reached for the car door. Now it simply rested on the handle.

  She seemed unnerved by my returned stare, but I was quickly growing uncomfortable. Seconds later, I admitted defeat in our staring contest and averted my eyes, pulled the car door open, and clambered inside. I slumped down as far into the seat as I could go—far enough that I couldn’t see out the windshield.

  I studied the shadows on the dashboard for a minute before sitting up and chancing a glance in her direction.

  She was gone.

  My gaze was met instead by what was left of my family just
as they reached the car.

  They didn’t say anything as they climbed in.

  I didn’t bother to interrupt the silence.

  That girl’s face followed me home. I’d seen her somewhere before, I was sure of it, and now she hung in my memory like a nagging tune I couldn’t name. I knocked my head lightly against the headrest in frustration, and my mother glanced over at me, her lips forming a thin frown.

  “You okay, Alex?”

  Bit of a loaded question.

  “I’m fine Mom,” I lied. “Just thinking about something.”

  She gave me one of her I-know-better- because-I’m-your-mom looks, but all she said was: “Okay.”

  The silence settled heavily after that, and lasted throughout the remainder of the trip. It persisted even as we turned left onto our long, twisting, gravel driveway. My nose was pressed against the window, causing a tiny cloud of fog to appear on the glass with each breath.

  Outside, the wind was picking up. The trees lining our driveway bowed forward, their branches skimming the top of the car. The glass was getting colder, despite my warm breaths, as the sun was now completely hidden behind the gray clouds.

  A thunderstorm—a nasty one from the looks of it—was rolling in quickly, as they had a tendency to do during our North Carolina summers.

  About time the weather got with the damn program.

  My door was open before the car made it into park. I jumped out and pulled the light jacket I was wearing more tightly around myself, and I took the front porch steps at a run. My house key was out and ready when I got to the door, and I hastily shoved it in the lock.

  I didn’t bother to shut the door behind me as I darted off down the hall.

  As I reached my room, I heard the wind fling the screen door against the brick siding with a loud bang!—which I mimicked a second later when I slammed my own door. I walked to the overstuffed couch in the corner of my room and slumped down onto it, promptly burying my face in its cushions.

  My eyes were closed within seconds.

  Outside, car doors slammed. Our dog, Apollo, was barking like mad as the front door opened and closed. The distant murmur of quiet voices and footsteps of our friends and relatives grew louder and louder.

  But none of that mattered right now.

  Right now, I just wanted to sleep for as many days as I could possibly get away with.

  * * *

  I hadn’t been to a lot of funerals in my seventeen years, but in the days following my dad’s, people were constantly telling me how ‘beautiful’ it had been.

  Beautiful is a weird word to associate with death.

  Still, I suppose it had been a nice enough way to say good-bye.

  Good-bye.

  Wow.

  That word was still painfully, bitterly hard to swallow. I guess now I understood the comfort people found in believing in life-after-death. It made things easier, I guess— the idea that you might see them again. As for what I believed? I wasn’t sure.

  I didn’t want to think about it.

  So, in an effort to keep myself from thinking, I spent the next few weeks doing anything I could to stay busy.

  I took extra shifts at the library where I worked during the summer. I volunteered my time to help out with Lora’s soccer team. I helped our elderly neighbor, Ms. Cartwright, with her yard work. I reorganized my closet about ten times. I reread nearly every book I owned (which was no small feat, given that I owned several bookshelves full) at least twice.

  But eventually I ran out of things to distract myself with.

  It happened a lot sooner than I would’ve liked, on an overcast Saturday afternoon exactly three weeks after my dad’s funeral. I sat on our front porch, my head resting on drawn-up knees clad in the sweatpants I hadn’t bothered to change out of when I’d woken up that morning. My iPhone’s headphones were wedged into my ears, blaring my music at a volume my mom probably would’ve fussed about.

  I was, not for the first time that week, mulling over the idea of taking a walk down to the lake.

  My eyes drifted toward it—or at least to what I could see of it through the fortress of thick-trunked trees that separated the two of us.

  That was where my father had taught me how to swim.

  My fists clenched at the memory.

  He should’ve spent more time teaching himself.

  What had been the very first lesson he’d taught me? Never swim alone. But he’d been alone. And dead almost an entire day before anybody knew because of it.

  I got to my bare feet and started toward the trees. I pushed aside the branches along the forest edge and made my way down the well-beaten path that led to the lake’s edge, stumbling over the limbs littering the ground as a result of more storms that had rolled through last night. It had been an even stormier summer than usual this year, and today was looking like it planned to continue that trend.

  I cleared the trees and paused, admiring the enormous body of water. The surface of the lake was dark and foreboding in the meager light of the gray sky, but it was surprisingly smooth given the deteriorating weather conditions—except for one odd group of rings some twenty feet from the shore.

  Just a horde of fish, probably.

  So I don’t know why I couldn’t stop staring at it, or why I was suddenly desperate to get a closer look.

  The wind was picking up. I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head and huddled down in an attempt to shield myself. Shivering, I picked my way down to the pebble-strewn beach until I reached the water’s edge.

  The rings disappeared.

  I thought I saw a shadow moving beneath the grey water, but it was gone in a blink. A memory of my dad struck me—him laughing, teasing Lora and me about monsters that lived in this lake and feasted on unruly children.

  My eyes closed as I inhaled that fishy, soggy smell of the air. Every now and then a gust of wind would urge the water to slide over my feet, causing chill bumps to erupt across my skin. The lake seemed unseasonably cold, but I rolled the bottoms of my pant legs up and waded further out anyway, until I was knee deep in the murky water.

  This had always been my place.

  No matter what I was going through, no matter how horrible a day I’d had, I could always count on the lake and all the memories I’d made here. They would always make me feel better.

  But now, standing there I felt empty.

  Alone.

  Like I was drowning in the knee-deep water, even as I took slow, deliberate breaths of air.

  And then, very suddenly, I realized I wasn’t alone at all.

  A distinct click sounded behind me. I spun around, forgetting for a moment how deeply I’d waded out. My balanced swayed dangerously. I threw my arms out to steady myself just as my gaze found the source of the click.

  I froze, hands still in the air.

  My eyes were the only thing I dared to move. They widened slowly as they took in the sight of the young man standing before me, staring me down through his icy blue, narrowed eyes. I didn’t recognize him as anyone I’d ever seen around town.

  But I didn’t linger too much on who he might’ve been.

  Because at the moment I was a bit preoccupied by the gun he was pointing at my chest.

  2

  oxygen

  I couldn’t run.

  I couldn’t move.

  The water suddenly seemed even less like my usual escape and more like a pool of rapidly-setting cement.

  I couldn’t focus on anything but that gun. I started to feel light-headed. Then I remembered to breathe. My head cleared a little, and I had this crazy idea that maybe I could escape under the water.

  I was pretty sure this plan would fail miserably, but within a split- second I’d decided I was going to do it anyway. What other choice did I have? Stand there and let him blow my brains out?

  Yeah, no thank you.

  I may not have known where we went after this life, but I planned to arrive there kicking and swinging.

  I moved. Bare
ly an inch, but still the guy’s finger itched towards the gun’s trigger, and I inhaled a little sharper than I meant to in response.

  He didn’t seem to care.

  I tried to focus, tried to steady myself and take the deep breaths I’d need to follow through with my plan without being too noticeable.

  Easier said than done.

  He was so close. So close that I could see the cold expression in his pale-blue eyes. So close that I could see that the weapon he held didn’t so much as quiver when he took two steps toward me.

  And so close that, when his eyes darted ever-so-slightly to my right, I saw that, too.

  Then I watched him move the gun, slowly and deliberately, to follow his gaze.

  He wasn’t looking at me anymore.

  I was stunned and curious about why—but I also wasn’t stupid enough to miss this chance to escape. I took a deep breath, sucking in as much air as I could possibly hold, and I dove. I swam maybe five, ten feet under the water, intending to make my way to the opposite shoreline.

  Then something brushed against my arm and wrapped its way down to my waist.

  Something warm.

  Something that was definitely alive.

  I twisted back out of the water, mouth opening and a gurgling scream rising in my throat. But before I managed to let it rip free, the guy on the bank spoke for the first time, in a deep, calm voice,

  “Don’t move, Alexandra.”

  “How do you know my—”