“Polo!” I yelled back.
I’d thought about her voice and it was there. I felt a smile stretch across my face. Whatever I’d done had brought me closer to her. I thought harder about her face, about the last time I’d seen her smile. I figured if my thoughts brought her voice to me, then I could think her up in the flesh just the same.
It wasn’t working. Time was irrelevant, as was space, but my logical brain knew I had to have been falling long and far. I wanted my feet on the ground and light to see around me. I closed my eyes, as if it made a difference, and focused on the white hallway where I’d last seen Tatum. I changed it up, putting clothing on my girl and a door at the end of the hall. A door, I told myself, which led back home.
“Please,” I whispered. “Please work.” I begged my brain to work magic. I really didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. Winging it would have been an understatement.
My butt hit something hard, knocking the wind out of me. In a huff, I hit and bit my tongue, and the copper taste of blood filled my mouth. Pain shot through my face. Wherever I was, I could still bleed. A soul away from her body shouldn’t have had any blood to shed. I made a mental note to bring it up to Lupe on the outs.
I opened my eyes slowly. Bright white light filled my vision and I squinted, blocking the light away with my hand. Blinking, I forced my eyes to open and adjust to the new lighting. Walls hovered over either side of me. Tall, immensely tall, narrowing the nearer the ceiling they reached. My head swam with sudden vertigo. I shook away the feeling and sat up to see my door, tiny at the farthest end of my white hallway. The shapes were odd; nothing seemed angled correctly, proportions varied. I felt like I’d fallen in to a Tim Burton flick. If it hadn’t been my version of the underworld, I’d have said it was pretty cool. As it was, it was fairly terrifying.
“Shit, finally,” I said, standing and brushing red sand off my clothes. “Where the hell did this come from?” I asked no one about the sand covering the clothes I’d been wearing for two days.
“Up there.”
I jumped and spun around at the voice which echoed through the space. Tatum stood behind me wearing a childlike variant of the vision I had in my head, as if a kid had recreated my design using scraps of fabric and Elmer’s glue. Stacked from wrist to elbow were the same white plastic bracelets she’d been wearing the last time we met in a white hallway. My head had pulled her away from wherever she’d been and saw her however it wanted. Apparently, my loose soul had a mind of its own. The place I’d traveled didn’t have the same rules we had on Earth. That place existed in the mind, the soul; anything could be or not be. Or so it seemed.
“You’re talking to me.” Tears welled at my lashes. “I miss you. My…we have to go.” I stopped my blubbering. There was no time for that. It was always the blubber moment when good shit went bad.
“Where are we going?”
“Home.” I grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the door end of the hallway.
“I can’t go home.” She stayed put.
“Yes, yes, you can. I made it right. I’m here to take you back.”
“Dylan. You killed me.”
Tears fell. “I know. I know I did. I didn’t…it wasn’t me. I didn’t have a choice. Now, come on, please.”
“There’s always a choice. I can’t go back.” She pulled her arm from my grasp.
“Tatum, you have to. You can’t stay here. This place–" I stopped and looked around at the odd space I’d created.
“Is yours. I’m here because of you.”
“I know. Look, I know everything. I know my hands took your life and my voice sent you to hell, but I didn’t do it. I didn’t want this. I sacrificed my own soul to save yours. Please,” I pulled on her again, “we don’t have much time.”
“Hell? Dylan, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Lupe, she said…that beastly thing said it devours you. You came to me. You came to me and died over and over again right before my eyes. You told me you were down here. Azelie punished me by forcing me to send you to Hell because I love you. T, what’s going on?” I shook my head softly; nothing made sense. I couldn’t understand who’d fucked up. “You stopped talking to me…then that thing came. That thing came here.” A familiar ticking scurried around in the space unseen. I searched the area for it, but came up empty. “Where did I go?” I asked, terrified of what might have gone wrong.
“Dylan, don’t you see? Your eyes are open, aren’t they?” she laughed. “You’re right here.”
“Where?” My heart thudded with the fear of possibilities.
“In your head, fucking dunce. Jeez.”
“You’ve said that before! Dammit, Tatum, I’ve done this with you before. You have to come with me. We have to go now. We have to get out of here.” I pulled on her again and the ticking clicked along the wall behind me. I pulled and searched at the same time.
“I’m not going anywhere. I never get to go anywhere.” She shook her head and looked at me as though I should have already known that.
“I don’t have much time. The magic that brought me here only let me come through so far and so long before I’ll be yanked back. You have to be with me when I go or you’re stuck here with that thing!” I was panicked. I’d known I was supposed to banish that thing that wanted me, but I didn’t care as much about it as I did saving Tatum. It was there, somewhere, and it was watching me.
It ticked along and finally she heard it, too. Her sparkling blue eyes followed the sound along the wall and up toward the ceiling. She smiled sweetly at it, then at me. I let her go. Her grin widened, wider, and wider, a Cheshire grin. Ear to ear she smiled, literally. I backed away from her, one step at a time, my bare feet slapping the floor.
“I’m down there,” she said from nowhere, repeating what she’d said before.
“What’s happening?” I asked, praying I was still talking to Tatum. I backed further.
“Or mine,” she gurgled. Her eyes flashed from blue to glowing golden.
My scream echoed through the Burton-esque space. The beast had my number from minute one. Tatum, wherever she was, wasn’t there. She wasn’t with the thing which festered in my soul. Whatever Lupe had seen in me was wrong. Azelie’s spell had nothing to do with Hell, or wherever I’d ended up. That thing, that beast unleashed upon me, had tricked me. It’d tricked the witch who saw it in me. It was a thing sent to torment me, and with it came an agenda which had the ability to fool everyone, even my unconscious soul that traveled to an unknown underworld.
I turned and ran toward my make-believe door, but the angles and proportions brought on a dizzying lack of coordination making a speedy getaway impossible. Its sounds scurried behind me, clicks and ticks which could only have been the sounds of its bones crackling within its black body as it climbed over itself toward me. I’d seen it for what it was and knew without looking the horror it brought with it.
“I don’t accept you!” I shouted over my shoulder. “This soul is mine; this body is mine. It belongs to me. It is bound to the Earth. You can’t have it!” I screamed.
A thick, sharp claw caught the center of my back as I ran, and a guttural howl came from deep within me as I fell to my knees. Huffing, I pulled my feet and hands forward, scuttling toward my door. There was no option. I had to fight. Tatum didn’t need saving. I did. No one was coming for me. I was alone. I was my own Goddamned hero.
“Come here, girl,” the beast gurgled. “You think you can escape?” It laughed, a hissing sound, deep and disgusting and crawling across my skin like maggots.
I didn’t respond, didn’t waste time to acknowledge its threats. On my feet finally, I pushed on. I told myself that door would take me home. That door would open and I’d be standing in the dining area of Sween where people who gave a shit about me were waiting. And that thing behind me would disappear forever.
Feet from the door, the thing snatched my braid and stopped me in my tracks. My feet came out from under me and down on my ass I w
ent. The thing howled and released my hair. I turned and shoved my back against the door.
“You come here with blessed trinkets. You think that will stop me?” The more words I heard, the more it became clear that I wasn’t hearing just one voice, but many, all jumbled together to warble and gurgle.
That ribbon Lupe had tied in to my hair had obviously been a deterrent. “You bet your demon ass I did. You wanna see what else I’ve got in my bag of tricks?” I threatened falsely.
I jerked on the knob to find the door opened inward against my back. I cursed my own brain for making it so. The thing smiled and clicked its long legs over its shoulders as it crept slowly toward me. Bile churned in my gut at its stench. The sight sent fear to my toes which made me want to curl up and tuck my head under the covers I wished I had. A thing of nightmares, the beast which stalked me had sunk its teeth in my soul and wouldn’t let it go.
Its long, slender fingers wrapped around my ankle and pulled itself onto my legs. I tucked my chin and pulled my back as far away as the door allowed. It slid up my body, running its spindly, pointed fingers over my thighs and between my legs. As it grew closer to my face, the threat it presented dug deep. It had me cornered. I had nowhere to go, and that thing would surely crawl its way up and take me over completely.
Power was all I had left. Strength I’d brought down with me. I shoved my hand into my shirt and dug graveyard dirt from the depths of my bra. It was all I had left. I didn’t know how to use it properly, so I made shit up.
“Remember this?” I asked and flashed the baggy of the dirt I’d shoved in to its gullet. It stopped and eyed what I held in my hand. “I’ve got power, too. I may be in your world, but I packed a bag for the trip.” I shook it and the thing backed an inch.
The beastly thing was scared. Maybe not as scared as I was, but I hadn’t expected much. I held in my terror, a horror so intense I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. Cyrus said there was no Hell, only levels based on individual experience. Whatever individual drummed that thing up was one sick motherfucker.
I resent that.
Dad, if you’ve ever listened to me, ever, please make it now, I thought.
Be a fucking bad ass. You’ve got nothing left to lose.
The thing tapped a pointed fingertip along my belly. “I’m already inside you.” It grinned.
“So am I,” I said through clenched teeth.
“I am the beast that dwells within you. I am your sin.”
“I am the bitch your mother warned you about. I am your executioner,” I sneered back at it and shoved my bag of consecrated dirt into the beast’s face.
The thing scampered backward off the top of me. I jumped to my feet and climbed over the whimpering mass of legs and arms. Opening the bag, I held its thin jaw and dumped the contents into its mouth.
“Your soul is mine!” it wailed with its dirt-filled mouth.
“Go to Hell, motherfucker!”
I slammed my palm into its chin and sent the holy dirt home. I’d found my power and it was a bitch. The beast writhed along the floor, inhumanly-long legs and arms flailing about as it screamed in pain. I kicked it in its side and it slid down the hall on its bony ass away from me. The white walls I’d built in my head crumbled. I turned, not caring to spend another second in whatever form of Hell I’d been standing in. My door was right where I’d left it. My mission was complete, or as complete as it was going to get. I reached for the knob and cranked it over. The beast screeched, echoing through the space which was falling in on itself. I flung open the door and heaved my shaking body through the opening.
The door slammed behind me, cutting off the screams of a dying beast. I let out the breath I’d been holding and caught the next which pulled in to my lungs. The door hadn’t led where my brain had wanted it to. The space I’d created had been under false pretenses. Everything I’d done was wrong. The plan, from minute one, had been fucked. I was finally, truly, fucked.
You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.
From the author:
From the first word to the last the Dylan Hart series will, above all else, be a story of a girl who completely loses herself. The question is, will she find who she is or forever be lost? I hope you’ve enjoyed this installment of the series and look forward to bringing you more. Nothing is as it seems with the Dylan Hart series so please never assume you know what's to come. Thank you for your support of the series that refuses to follow the rules and promises to bring to the forefront a not so average heroine.
Cheers!
R.M. Gilmore lives in California with her husband, spawn, and a million pets. Author of mystery and suspense novels with a thread of the paranormal, R.M. creates real-world characters and heroines unlike most in the literary world.
For more, visit www.RMGilmoreAuthor.com.
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Forsaken Page 18
