by Gina Kincade
She thinks the worst that could happen while she's out alone in the middle of the night in a New York state park, is to be kidnapped and killed by a stranger. A human stranger.
How could she know her meditation would conjure dragons?
Her world is suddenly flipped upside down as she is taken to an abandoned house, spirited to an unimaginable realm, and thrust into death-defying dragon battles, all while falling for a snow-white dragon who is apparently her knight in scaly armor.
The kicker? It seems Grael is also her fated mate and the way to heal the scars of her past. Who knew she'd be living in a real-time beauty and the beast tale?
Chapter One
The late fall night threatened a first snowfall. According to the weatherman only a few flurries would fly, but Anna had come out to the labyrinth to walk anyway. Seeing a snow globe world under the nearly full moon would be stunning, if it did happen, so she’d put an imaginary check on the worth freezing her butt off column and jumped in her car. That wouldn’t even be out of character for her, as she didn’t think straight, or even rationally about life most days. A forced numb feeling guided her most of the time as she struggled to face the realities of her loss and fake moving on for her own benefit. As much as she could manage, she stayed shut away from the real world as humanly possible and disengaged from the majority of her still raw emotions. New York City enabled her to be beyond a wallflower, letting her fade into the rush of life all too easy, no more significant than a speck in the pavement of life.
Anna pried her fingers away from the long sweater jacket she clutched around her to tie an extra knot in her thick scarf at the back of her neck, keeping it out of her way. She had little patience for clothes these days. Once a fashion diva, attending college to be a clothing designer, clothes now served her as only cover or warmth with no regard for style. Comfort, camouflage, and cotton, had become the prime constructs in her 'who cares about chic' choices. Her choice tonight—an oversized, calf-length, brown, cable knit sweater—had belonged to her mother. The scarf—a thick cable knit, multi-shade with grays and blues and maroons—had been her father’s. A T-shirt, some alternative band her sister, Chelsie, had been into, remained hidden underneath the mess. She’d stay as close to warm as she could come, thanks to a set of long underwear leftover from an ski trip that seemed part of someone else’s life. Memories she only borrowed, now, but didn’t identify with.
So, in reality, she’d become somewhat of a walking shrine to those she missed so severely she often couldn’t breathe, the ailment only compounded by the fact the clothing from necessary washes had lost each person’s scent. The tragedy of this could not be understated. Yet, she tortured herself, needing to wear what caused her grief. Such had become her semi-lucid existence, run by a faltering psyche as she stumbled through a life of only what she absolutely had to.
Her memory would terrorize her at times. In a bittersweet way, turning the scent of baked goods into the same fragrance as the vanilla cream scent of mother's skin. Her senses were traitors, doing all they could to jab razor sharp sticks at her heart. A heart that seemed to only faintly beat most days. Sometimes, a laugh caught on the wind got through the clatter of the city, making her turn, expecting to see her sister. Other times, the brush of a hand against hers as she made her way along a busy street made her feel like a little girl again. The one her father had insisted on holding hands with when they were out. Only her taste buds remained true, never letting a single thing she ate taste as good as it had when her mother had made it.
She’d long ago given up, run away from the cheap clinic psychologist who told her she wasn’t healing, moving on as she should, having given her some bizarre timeline based on some asinine equation of years and loss. The analogy of using a spoon to dig her way through a mountain, or choosing to do the work required to move up one side and down over the other, had only served to enrage her. She’d canceled the next appointment, and never returned to that dreaded chair of despair where her hardships were not allowed to be swept under a rug of new age promises she vaguely sought after to ensure she didn’t completely lose her mind to the grief.
The trees, the moon, the small hope of meditation and walking a labyrinth, were all she needed tonight to occupy her overactive mind that stomped on her barely beating heart. A healthy escape, she could claim, at least, save for the danger of possibly getting taken and killed. Still, out here alone in the middle of the night in a New York state park, illegally, after hours, her damaged brain regarded the opportunity as perseverance, endurance, in what amounted to her life.
She sucked a deep breath in through her nose, as she’d read to do, letting it fill her lungs, or what amounted to two hot air balloons ready to deflate and plummet to the solid ground. She attempted to imagine the air as a bright light, filling her, cleansing her chakras. Her whole pagan, new age obsession—a plethora of eclectic beliefs—served as her therapy. Her frail, half-hearted attempt at it anyway. The renegade treatments had yet to work, but her passion for the preoccupation had become a saving grace alone, a delusional neurosis to override all the others. Most nights it served as something to do on her laptop for hours on end. New things to try to pass the time, attempting not to focus on anything else especially not the nightmares that plagued her, sleeping or awake. She’d deemed herself healed, drunk on things like studying elemental representations, getting lost in meditations, and journeying to find her Shadow Self.
Tonight, unable to escape the year old memories as if they’d just occurred, the frequent butterfly visitors to her stomach did a dance of agitation to an unsteady beat. Jittery, like an addict coming down from a sugar high, she’d gone simple in her practice, given what, in her brain-fogged state, she could discern and devise. Walking in a labyrinth with the rustle of the winter wind making the bare limbs of the trees scratch, had been preferable to pacing her already worn-beyond-recognition carpet to the beat of the neighbors having yet another romantic dispute.
So, out here, poised on numb feet, she held tightly to her desperate cause emotionally. While, in reality, in one hand she had a death grip on a polished piece of black onyx, a cleansing stone believed to trap and then ground any negative energy. The damn thing, no bigger than a golf ball, couldn’t possibly be big enough to handle hers. Still, it remained one of two lifelines, aiding her fragile grip on moving forward. In her other palm, she used her fingers to roll a hunk of snow quartz meant to seal inner wounds. She persisted, the increasing chill of the rock burning her already cold digits, reminding her she indeed, unfortunately, remained alive. The thought posed as a double-edged sword in her mind.
Sadly, she needed both rocks and then some; more than her pockets could carry. This week had marked an anniversary of the tragic car accident that had robbed her of her family: mother, father, and one beloved younger sister. She’d been the sole survivor, left with scars inside and out, with each date on the calendar from birthdays, to anniversaries, to holidays bringing unbearable reminders in the form of memories she wanted to hide from as much as she cherished them.
On the outside, pale skin bore faint—yet to her, disturbing—designs on her face, cut by fragments of glass. She avoided mirrors as much as she could, but it seemed the whole world made them for her out of things like polished cars and clean windows. A jagged scar the shape of a crescent moon ran from her temple to her ear. To her eyes only, she’d been told, the healed skin tugged, making the corner of her eye wrinkle and curve up slightly on one side. Didn’t really matter how discernable it was to others, the reminder to her remained real. From there, the scars trailed through her eyebrows and then down over her cheek. Sometimes, when she caught a brief glimpse at herself in life's many reflective surfaces, the series of scars there resembled a game of hangman.
The remaining scars covered her arms, almost shredded from shards of glass. Beyond that, a surgical scar marred her abdomen, thicker, redder. While she tried to avoid looking at it, during times of high stress, home alone, she found herself often
fingering it, making the overly sensitive skin sing with light, pain-spiked sensations inciting her lungs to shudder and her eyes to tear.
On the inside, with temperamental, overwrought affections, she imagined her spirit to be a tattered sheet blowing in a violent storm set to the unsteady thundering of her heart. Orphaned, even if at twenty, still wasn’t an easy road, not with murmurings of post-traumatic stress disorder as the order of the day. She had organs inside that had been injured and fixed, bled and been stitched, and the symbolism of that in reference to the way she felt so damaged could not be understated.
Just a few weeks after the torturous funeral obligations had ended, the events of which she’d missed due to healing herself, when well-meaning people, lots of friends of the family, finally began to give her some time alone, she’d packed up her previous life. Still dealing with stitches and bandages, she’d taken only what she assumed in her grief she would want some day. She’d basically filled the trunk of her car and abandoned her childhood home for a destination undeclared. She’d fled from her small hometown full of wonderful memories that abused her mind with each awkward, excruciating breath she was forced to take.
She’d landed in New York, at the time loving the way the crowds hid her, allowing her to disengage. Big city living had that absurd irony of being able to be alone easily within large crowds of people. The boxes she’d packed remained unopened in her tiny apartment, serving as the only table in the dingy place. Covered by a towel, they housed her laptop along with the clutter of living from junk mail to half-drunk mugs of coffee. Within a month of being there, she’d failed to return to college when the new semester began, hadn’t even thought to sell the house, and secured a sad excuse for a part time job to pay for necessities. All she actually needed was four walls and a roof, some meager amounts of food, and a library card.
Lately, she passed many a sleepless night at this labyrinth out in the middle of nowhere. She found the hour drive just as cathartic. Being out on the open back roads with few cars, she could fly away from it all: her life, her loner existence, along with the horrid nightmares whether asleep or awake. Alternately, she had a hard time driving at all during the day, especially in traffic, and never on sort of interstate like where the accident had occurred. She walked to work, to the grocery store, to everything from her dinky apartment.
Wandering near traffic often torture enough, she flinched at the squeal of brakes and the crunch of fender-benders—all too common predicaments. It all caused flashbacks. So she used her mother’s car only for trips like these: late night and backwoods. Without her need to get away, to lose herself in a dark mess of trees, she’d probably never have gotten in a vehicle again. A necessary evil.
Hardly a soul outside of work knew her name. Maybe her face from the stores she frequented. She figured most couldn’t forget the scared beauty, a term she’d overheard a whispered in her own home few times in the days after she’d gotten out of the hospital. The tense lines of people's mouths and big puppy dog eyes she received most of the time confirmed reactions. Although, no one asked her name, or even made small talk here. Even though she did little to groom, her gift of thick, blond waves of hair framed her thin face hosting ocean blue eyes.
She’d been deemed a beauty before, and she figured now people only saw her scars and thought 'what a tragedy.' If they only knew. Her lost physical appearance, simple collateral damage mattering little in the scheme of it all. She pitied those who didn’t know that, even as she mourned how she’d learned the lesson. Her anger remained a viable entity pulsing inside of her, keeping her sane, holding the ache of the sorrow at bay.
A harsh breeze with bitter cold undertones picked up, tossing her blonde waves in its grip. Strands, that should have tickled, scratched against her already nearly frozen face. The overly sensitive scar tissue gave off the odd sensation of pinpricks before going numb. The rustle of the fall tree branches screeched, sending an eerie tingle snaking down her spine. With her coat and scarf on, facing the wind, her back had been about the only part of her still warm, and yet now she felt invisible cold fingers tapped from her neck to her waist.
Ghosts came to mind; real ones maybe. As she existed on a daily basis haunted by the ones in her mind, oddly, this idea didn’t seem so far off, and brought a sense of frivolous, insane comfort. Not physical, but mental apparitions. The images of her family, their final moments, like wisps of smoke that groaned, existed in her mind—vivid, real. Something beyond any horror movie she’d ever seen. To have them, any semblance of them, in real life, even if incorporeal beings, would have to be better than what she possessed of them now. Things. Memories.
Shaking the chill off until pain shot through her head temple to temple, she closed her eyes tight so when she opened them, dots, like dirty snow, moved over where she looked down at her feet.
Old, worn boots, nothing practical for walking, stood just at the edge that began the circular path of the labyrinth, the line on the ground where grass gave way to soil. A tear slipped from her eye as she blinked and nearly froze on her face. She took it all in stride. This weather made her feel alive on the outside, at least, while she remained dead inside. She floated through life like a phantom on this earth, did the bare minimum to survive—unless you called stocking shelves a few nights a week at a local superstore and living on ramen noodles and weak coffee a life.
Not that she would have needed the money if she had been able to sell the house. The thought crossed her mind often, only to be crossed out again. She couldn’t, not yet, just like she couldn’t open the few boxes of stuff she’d packed from it. The clothes of theirs, a few of their favorites that she’d put in her suitcase, would remain, for now, her only ties. Those shreds of fabric made her feel attached to them still, at least as much as she could bear.
A few more deep breaths later, she shivered violently, but began her trek around the labyrinth. She stumbled over the stones that edged the pathway a few times when patches of clouds blocked out the moon’s light. Looking up, she expected to just see a glimmer of white brilliance fighting to shine through the delicate filaments that had become infused with dark gray matter. Instead, a shadow flew over her. One too large to be anything her mind could figure out.
She hadn’t realized that she’d fallen to a crouch until her body swayed as she looked up, trying to get a better impression of what had to be a plane or something descending to the earth. Strangely, she hadn’t heard a sound. In fact, the eerie silence unnerved her further. Her trembling fingers pressed against the frigid dirt as her only source of support. Falling to her butt as her gaze followed the tremendous mass, she made out a body too rounded for a plane, with wings too animal-like to be inanimate. In a split second, a scream lodged in her throat as the wing things flapped, rustling the tree branches with sudden gusts of air. A long tail seemed to follow behind, swinging to one side as it glided effortlessly around to come back her way, losing altitude as the thing moved.
She stayed in that odd position, seated on the ground, body curled up, with one arm back behind her holding her up as she used the other one to cover her face while the ground shook beneath her when the beast landed maybe ten feet away. With her heart pounding so hard she could hear the erratic beat of the damned thing in her head, she blinked several times as the image before her registered to fantastical proportions. The fact that Anna saw something out of a storybook or a fairy tale made the only sense her perceptions could come up with, and that unnerved her. So much so, she was wound up like a clock about to explode, spewing gears and gadgets all over the place. The analogy for her head being about to explode based on an image from an old cartoon she’d watched as a child gave her pause. A moment of lunacy that served as a much needed reprieve, since reality didn’t make any sense at all.
Coping mechanisms. She’d heard a lot about them in therapy. In fact, she’d basically left the practice since she hadn’t been ready to give them up. Snippets of songs would come into her head now, memories from childhood of danci
ng like a loon in the kitchen with her mother when holidays provided long days of baking. These created a preoccupation with remembering every word of the tune, looking up the video, studying the career of the singer, all in an attempt to calm the sudden onslaught of tears. To numb the painful ache in her chest.
At times, she raged at her body. Her heart had the audacity to feel like it had stopped beating, if even for a second. Her lungs deflated, ceased to do their job. All of these sensations served as a tease when she had to remain in this life, too squeamish, too much a coward, to end her own existence though she’d failed their suicide test more than a few times. The desire to find peace in the afterlife with her lost family got trampled by a lesson on suicide and sin her mother had once taught her. Though, she didn’t even know what or if she believed anymore as far as beliefs went, anything to do with faith and religion. The closest thing she’d come to prayer was the screaming in her head. The raging at some invisible entity around her so-called life.
This confusion continued, rattling her to her core, as this thing, whatever the hell it was—and hell born it could be, given its monstrous size and shape—stared at her. Metal-colored eyes glistened in the faint, cloud-infused moonlight. The size of footballs, they blinked in a never-ending gaze that mesmerized her. The world seemed to spin as millions of overacting nerve cells tensed her muscles to run. Yet, she didn’t move for some strange fear of being swallowed up whole or burnt to a crisp like in those stories of dragons. Sadly, as her eyes focused, the more this thing as tall as a house resembled just such a mythic creature. It seemed the fundamental law guiding her decision to remain a statue was the thought that if prey moved, it got eaten.
