by Elle Lincoln
Which begs the question—what kind of a person was I? Obviously not a great one from what I recall. Even if I wish for a friend more than anything right now—a friend I probably wronged in some way or another—the dynamic between two people capable of sharing their frustrations is a desire I once took for granted.
Kelsie. The name is a whisper through my mind, with the image of a cherub face and a sense of innocence. An innocence I could never destroy. At least I left something pure and whole in that small town. I scrunch my face at that thought. I’m from a small town.
A piercing pain strikes behind my eyes, my palm flies to my face. The slap of skin stings, but it doesn’t compare to the feeling settling deep inside my head. I leave the clothing on the side of the tub and wander back into the cabin—shack. The only structure that can hide me from view. By the time I stumble through the door, I’m pushing my palms into my eyes to ease the pressure. A whimper escapes my lips when lightning strikes through my forehead, igniting every nerve with burning torture. I fall to my knees.
“What did you do?” His voice, so condescending, reaches through the burn in my brain. I can’t even feel anger toward him for assuming I purposely hurt myself. I didn’t, but I don’t even bother to say that.
Warm arms circle me, cradling me toward a chest. His warmth is almost scorching, heating me like a raging fire. My head spins as he moves me toward the pallet of rotten sheets. Dammit, I just bathed. But I don’t resist. Any comfort is a luxury right now and it isn’t something I will complain about. Besides, his closeness does something to me, sparking an intimacy deep in my gut.
If I let go of him now, the loss would be too great. I’m way too needy to let that happen.
“What did you do?” he asks again, his tone demanding an answer from me at any cost. He won’t let up. I know that voice, it reminds me of me. Who I was before death, is becoming painfully clear with each passing moment.
Another spike of pain rages through me, my body arching and shaking from it. The flashbacks are spiraling me toward the moment when the fog infiltrated me, the moment I died.
“What are you thinking about?” He lays me down, brushing my sweaty wet hair off my face. He wraps me up in the blankets and I burrow into them, while he lies beside me. My mental will is trying to superimpose over the pain.
My lips twitch, words form but break in my throat. I take a deep breath, trying to let them fall free, and they do so in a cracked voice. “My past keeps slipping through me.”
He grunts. The non-answer is even worse than his short sentences. I wonder what it would take to get him to speak to me.
“You’re a man of few words,” I mumble to myself. I can’t see him beneath my burrow, but his grumble makes my lips twitch. I doubt he knows what to do with me, this strange woman who has fallen into his den. He’s powerful, the hum of it rolls off of him and somehow I get the feeling he’s holding it all in. I want to ask about his past, anything to distract me from my pain. I doubt he would tell me who he is or why he is here. A prisoner. I’d do well to remember that. Then again I’m here with him. Does that imply I’m also imprisoned? Are we alike in some way?
“I haven’t held a conversation in centuries.” I peek out from beneath the blankets when I hear his voice. He’s close, almost too close. Yet I don’t push away, a small part of me feels comfortable with this stranger. Like a magnet pulling me closer, and if I allow myself to get too close, we will snap together. It’s a feeling I’m not comfortable with. Not yet. No matter how much my body warms up to the idea of his skin touching mine.
“How long have you been here?” I press, as thinking of something other than my past eases the pain in my head. A daunting sign as a theory arises. Maybe I’m only supposed to remember so much at a time. I’ve chased the white rabbit through the woods, I’ve consumed him, and now I need to forget everything. I wonder… would Alice enjoy this dark wonderland?
“I don’t know.” He pulls me from my wandering thoughts. I glance up to him, his brows are scrunched together, and I stifle a laugh as they form one giant, bushy brow. It’s an odd look, but it somehow works on him. Like a Viking warrior, he is all grit and power. “What year is it?”
I think back to the crash with a small ping of pain. My mental eyes scan over everything, looking for clues. “Why can’t I remember that?” It’s so simple, so easy, and yet it is as foreign as where I now rest my head. I neither know the year or my age.
“Because they may not want you to remember yet.” His lips twist into an odd, one-sided frown that somehow makes him look handsome. His gritty face and ice-blue eyes draw me in, so I wiggle closer to him, rolling farther into his arms.
“I’m realizing as much. If I think too hard, it hurts.” I wonder if it was the same way for him when he first came here. His mystery intrigues me, his secrets draw me in. And for once I don’t think it’s because I want to exploit him, but because I want to know him better.
I need to stop thinking, my brain is full of gremlins intent on killing me.
“Casseus, the raven, tells me stories about the world. From what he tells me, I’ve been here for a long, long time.” It’s an interesting non-answer. A long time can have several meanings. To a child, a day is a long time. To a teen, a week is a long time, and to an adult, a year is a long time.
Yet to someone such as he, whom I’m beginning to think isn’t human, a long time could very well mean the centuries he speaks of. I’m honestly surprised the notion doesn’t bother me more than it should.
In fact, I should be a snotty mess, crying and mourning the loss of my life. Even if I did that, shouldn’t I be feeling something more? Losing my life notwithstanding, but the world I lived in. None of what I’ve experienced is normal in any way—the shock of a man transforming into a raven, a fog that can kill, the haunting whispers that live just out of reach of the clearing, deep within the mist, and Guy and Casseus. They speak in soft tones and slow words so that I can understand. Our verbiage is different, and yet similar.
Perhaps eventually everything will catch up to me once this repression cracks, spilling forth my grief. I can’t imagine too many people in this situation would react the same way. It means something, but I’m just not sure what.
I change the subject. “What are you?” He hints at transformation and speaks as though humans are not his kind. My heart skips a beat, maybe I’m more affected than I realize.
“Now? Nothing more than a faint shadow of who I used to be.” I’d growl in frustration except... He sucks in his lower lip, drawing his beard up. His back stiffens and straightens. And darkness bleeds through that one eye.
“Can you say nothing more?” I’m wondering about that damn eye patch. Again, I refrain from asking. Our friendship holds but a fragile foundation, one misstep and it could all come crashing down. Meeting someone under duress isn’t a surefire way to make friends.
“I can say more. I choose not to.”
“Why?” I fire right back.
His mouth lifts into a smile, but it turns sinister just as quickly as it forms. I pause in my elation, my spine shivering once more, reminding me he is so much more than who I see. My consciousness is telling me to tread carefully, and read between the lines.
“To say more would cause you to look at me differently and I like how you look at me.” His eye pierces me to the spot with intensity, and heat lurks there. He reaches out to me and my heart flutters, his calloused hand runs up my arm. I close my eyes in bliss as his hand threads through the strands of my wet hair. His thumb makes a lazy circle upon my cheek and I’m lost to his touch.
My belly flutters, and is that a blush spreading over my face? I feel the heat of it simmering just beneath my skin. I force my eyes open to meet his gaze. “And how do I look at you?”
“Just like that.”
I cough and look away, needing to change the topic at once. The peek at his playful nature is confusing me. It’s probably because he hasn’t seen a woman in so long.
“It’s
just the two of us for a while, we may as well get to know each other.” I don’t know if I want to curse the words that have fallen from my mouth or not. I find I can’t look at him as I fear his next words, and instead roll to my back, dislodging his hand.
“You should never believe we are alone here,” he almost whispers, the words spoken in a dark bedroom voice to soften their blow. But nothing can soften his words if he speaks the truth.
My head no longer pounds as adrenaline floods my system. I sit up, edging myself toward the wall. Bits of wood dig into my back and my hands clench in the blankets. “Explain.” My voice is harsh with the sound of fear, fear I didn’t know I still possessed.
“You come from the forest. Tell me, what did you see?” He sits up to the side, his own back pressing against the windowless wall. Just like hours before, his legs are bent. But as he looks at me with an increasing intensity, he drops one leg to lean forward. His elbow pressed against his meaty thigh.
My mouth is dry, and words fail me. I didn’t see much. Did I?
“There was just the mist.”
“Mist or fog?”
“Aren’t they the same?”
“No.” He comes closer, his large body pushing against the pallet of blankets. His presence doesn’t startle me as much as his words. And since he is talking, I dare not lead him astray.
“What’s the difference?” I didn’t realize they weren’t synonymous.
He purses his lips, his thoughts visible as they shoot across his eyes rapidly. I almost think he will not answer me, then he does. “The fog is denser than the mist. Both deadly, but the fog is more so.”
“That’s it? Fog is thicker?” I don’t understand his double meanings. He is gazing at me as though he wants to say something, but holds the secret close for another time.
“I won’t break from the information.” I shiver anyway, my body reacting, and making my words a lie.
“You will.” He moves away once more. “At least for now. Tell me. You saw nothing?”
I close my eyes, thinking back to the never-ending running and confusion. Feeling trapped and blind. Slamming again and again into tree after tree. My body aching from the pain of living, wishing I had died there on that forest floor and remained dead. Then the tunnels into the caves where the raven hid food away for me, and water to drink, yet always feeling ravenous. The hunger a constant reminder I was indeed very much alive.
Sleep would pull me under without my consent, only to wake me hours later to a noise. A crack of a branch here. A rustle there. I had assumed it was the man I now know as Casseus. I presumed the shadows just beyond my false safe haven were him.
“Shadows.” My heart picks up, then skips a beat with a painful pinch as my mind fits the pieces together. “I was never alone, was I?”
“You should rest.” He closes his eye, dismissing me.
I don’t fight him. I don’t even bother to argue. Because I’m not ready to hear more.
Yet he is a fool if he thinks I’ll fall asleep easily. And why the hell do I miss his body next to mine?
Chapter 7
Bette
A Strange New World
By some miracle I fell asleep somehow. I didn’t sleep long and when I did, my dreams plagued me with scenes I didn’t understand, memories that do not belong to me. Wars I held no part of. Beings that only a nightmare could conjure. Giants with one eye fighting against beings that were too beautiful to look at. Yet while my duress went toward the beautiful creatures, I faltered. My body hummed and the darkness inside of me pulled the evil from the battlefield.
Evil from those beautiful creatures. As blinding as they were too look at, their souls held a counterpart that Hell would abandon. They rotted, their essence changing into something neither good nor evil. A neutral party born of pureness and unadulterated evil. My mind, sight, and all my other senses warred with each other. The possibilities were confusing and misleading.
None of it made sense and that was if I took it as fact. Yet the beastly monsters that charged the lines weren’t all pure. Though their souls held shadows, Hell welcomed some with open arms. Others forfeited their lives to me. Their souls now forever belonging to the horde.
My body, drenched with sweat, woke over and over. My dreams forced me to face the brutality that occurred many years ago. Then I flew, my body transforming. My arms became wings. Stretching my body with ruffled feathers. The wind blew above me, against me, under me. Through all weather. Snowflakes decorate my beak in a kaleidoscope of colors.
I felt free, at peace.
Only to soar over another battlefield.
Blood drenched the soil, soaking into the earth where she drank from the sacrifices of the fallen. Streams and lakes ran red as monsters fell and beauty turned ugly. No side won. Nothing broke.
I thrashed. I cried. Still, I couldn’t wake. I begged for oblivion to end the destruction. To end me.
A warm body curled around mine, easing the turmoil that belonged to another, but one I shared. My eyes flutter open then close. Lost and tied to a place I cannot escape. Somewhere deep in my subconscious, I knew who lay wrapped around me. A stranger that held only one small prison in common with me.
Yet I drifted. Back beyond the walls of nightmares where hidden desires thrived and lust enticed. Where deadly sins were not frowned upon, but suggested. Encouraged. I walked through the rooms of bodies moving together in a sensual dance, their hips thrusting in slow pulses.
My body coils and tightens at the visions.
Sunlight, so beautiful, and so foreign, streams in from large oval windows set in stone. I’m lost to the rays I long for. To feel their warmth seep into my needy skin. To strike me like poison and settle deep into my bones in a toxic euphoria.
Yet something more draws my attention and I force my gaze away.
He is there. Upon a throne. One eye is still covered in a patch, the other stuck on me. His gaze pierces through me. I can do nothing but allow my body to succumb to his yearning, his command. His demand. His body no longer holds the grit from Hell, but is clean and freshly shaven. A glow radiates from beneath his skin, healthy and vibrant. Muscles press against the open white shirt where a speckling of chest hair teases my gaze. I glance up to see the flare of heat in his eye, his lips part and the pink of his tongue swipes across the surface. I can do nothing but watch his mouth as I touch my own. Already feeling their plush satin push into mine. I pant as desire spirals through me.
He stands. He’s so much bigger here. His body broad and thick as though he descended from those Giants I saw before. Coiled with muscle, tense and ready to strike. I stop, peering up at him. A longing in our gazes to breach the distance that seems far too vast between us.
“Get out of my head.” I hear his words though his lips don’t move, and his eye tells a different story. Even though his command is firm, it holds a soft tone I can’t interpret. “Get. Out.”
The scene fades away, and I close my eyes as I do nothing to hold onto the vision. My body tingles with the remnants of sleep that holds on and lingers in my veins. My breaths are rhythmic and deep, calm though I feel anything but.
That warm body presses against my back, a hand splays across my abdomen, and I’m reminded of how very, very naked I am. The vision flashes behind my eyes and need swells inside me for this stranger. I don’t act upon it. I can’t. Not when the world around me is spinning too fast for me to catch up.
Yet... I want him. I want to allow myself this moment of carnal pleasure.
“It isn’t nice to delve into others’ heads.” He confirms my suspicions with those words.
“I didn’t know I could do that.” I hadn’t felt another person, or whatever he is, in far too long. Let alone in this recent fantasy world. His body wrapped around mine feels all too good. Every press of his body warms areas long dead, awakening them with his touch. I’m content just to lay here, the odd situation of our lives drawing us together in this strange scenario.
His hand tightens upo
n my belly, his nails scraping against my flesh. “Are you hungry?”
It was all so domestic. Nerves filtered through me and yet, I don’t want to break the comfort two people lost in time found. I think on his question, and oddly I wasn’t too hungry. “No.” A ping of worry spikes through me. It doesn’t feel right. As though I should be hungry, ravenous for something sweet or carb loaded. “Why am I not hungry?”
“You will not like the answer I give you.” The breath against my neck fires off heat to my nerves. I damn near arch into him.
I roll in his arms. Facing him. Without thinking, I push his hair from his face. Letting the strands filter through my fingertips. The oil from his hair coats my fingers, the dirt coloring it. “You need a bath.”
His smile devastates me. His teeth somehow white, straight, and healthy. My thumb ghosts over his lips, my eyes transfixed to where my fingers touch.
“I do.”
“Why won’t I like your answer?” He lay upon the blanket that wrapped around me. Our bodies only touching through the broken fabric. I want to wish away the blankets.
“Because your mind is programmed to the world of humans.”
“You speak as though you aren’t human.” I pull back to study him. His features give nothing away at my words.
“I’m not.”
I don’t push, instead, I watch the wrinkle in his brow as it waves on his forehead...
“Are you hungry?” I ask, I don’t know if there is even anything to cook here. I am lost in an era of the dark ages where homes are hand built and meals are cooked over the fire.
“I am always hungry.” He looks off, his eye seeing something I can’t.
“What happened to your eye?”
“You won’t like that answer either.”
“I don’t have to like an answer to understand it.” I trace the eye patch with my fingers. It feels like animal hide, smooth and rough at the same time. The intimacy of the moment isn’t lost on me and I snuggle in closer, our breaths mingling together as we play out this domestic scene.