Contents
Never Let You Fall
Never
Let You
Fall
Michele G Miller
Never Let You Fall
By Michele G Miller
Copyright © 2013 Michele G Miller
E-book Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems -except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews- without permission in writing from the author.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author's imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I will forever be indebted to the following people:
Blogger Heather ‘SupaGurl’ Robbins for convincing me to go to YALL Fest 2012, adding me to the SupaGurl Books family and for being an awesome blogger, “fake” publicist and friend.
Author Nancy Straight, who hosted me during YALL Fest 2012. You answered all of my writing questions and gave me perfect advice. Three months later this book was born!
Author Amy Bartol for creating characters so compelling in The Premonitions Series that you brought an amazing clan of Reed and Brennus fans into my life. Your books were the key that sparked my blogging and reviewing which led to my writing again.
To my “Booster” Club listed on my blog. The #bondcrew, blogging friends, writing partners, Lovers of Paranormal group on Goodreads and my beta-readers.
To those who made my cover so beautiful, thank you.
Model Madalyn Vieira
Cover Photographer Nikolai Designs
Cover Design by K Keeton Designs
Last but so not least my AMAZING editor
Stacy T Sanford
You fixed my tenses, deleted my excessive commas and put up with my e-mails “just a bit” :)
[email protected]
Twitter: @chelemybelles
Facebook: Michele G. Miller
Goodreads: Michele G. Miller
To Grayson, Gabriel and Isabelle you inspire me daily.
Always remember to hold fast to your dreams, they CAN come true!
To Jonathan
Thank you for never letting me fall
I love you with all my heart and soul
To My Savior
I can do all this through him who gives me strength- Phil 4:13
CONTENTS
One - My Reality
Two - Nightmares
Three - Do You Feel It
Four - Run
Five - I Must Look A Fright
Six - Tyalbrook
Seven - History
Eight - Jealousy
Nine - You Are Everything
Ten - The Plan
Eleven - There's More
Twelve - Hideaway
Thirteen - Everything Changes
Fourteen - I Trust You
Fifteen - Selene
Sixteen - Together
Seventeen - Going Home
Eighteen - Secrets
Nineteen - Practicing Magic
Twenty - Dream A Little Dream
Twenty One - For Your Own Good
Twenty Two - Brave
Twenty Three - Trust
Twenty Four - Village Sheridan
Twenty Five - Virtue
Twenty Six - White
Twenty Seven - Unforgivable
Twenty Eight - Unexpected Company
Twenty Nine - Three Days Time
Thirty - Lost
A Special Excerpt from Blood Debt by Nancy Straight
Prologue
“Skye?”
A distinctly male voice called out to me.
“Skye? Can you hear me?”
As the voice kept barking questions, something warm touched my cheek. My head lolled back as I tried to pry my eyes open to see who was yelling at me. They wouldn’t cooperate, and my head spun dizzily.
“What the hell are you trying to do to yourself, Skye?” The voice asked, as I felt myself being lifted into a strong pair of arms. I rested my head on his chest and closed my eyes as he carried me away.
“Skye?” the voice whispered in my ear. I could hear a touch of fear in his voice. It was deep and strong and laced with panic.
Groaning, I rolled over slowly. “Stop shaking me,” I heard my voice reply. I was so groggy that I couldn’t tell what was up or down, and my stomach and head felt as if I had been on a boat for weeks, they were so topsy turvy.
I felt something hot touch my ice cold head again, as a worried sound was emitted from my male companion. I actually felt myself push into the warmth, trying to seek out more.
“Skye? What did you do tonight?” his familiar voice asked. Why was it familiar? I couldn’t make out who he was. I tried again to open my eyes, but found myself starting to retch.
“Damn,” he spat out; the panic in his voice gone now as he rolled me over. I emptied my stomach of the mostly liquid diet and I was spent. The smell was so revolting, and I wanted to remove my clothes, but I couldn’t get my arms to cooperate with my brain. Or perhaps it was that my brain wasn’t functioning properly? I choked out a sob and asked my rescuer to help me, but there was no answer.
“Hello?” I called out weakly, as I lifted my head and tried to take in my surroundings through my tear-blurred and alcohol-induced hazy vision.
“C’mon,” he replied, startling me from behind. “Let’s get you cleaned up so you can sleep this off.”
I could feel him as he sat me up and struggled to pull my vomit-stained shirt off. I tried to help him, but all I succeeded in doing was rolling from one side to the other. After a few moments, his strong arms picked me up again and carried me into a bathroom. He easily placed me into the shower, holding me up under my arms, while he stood behind me. I felt the hot water begin to stream down my front.
Xander
I was sickened by her behavior, again, as I stood in the shower and held her in my arms. Her head hung low, as the water hit her hair and streamed down in a waterfall; rinsing vomit from the long, dark brown strands. She was so wasted, that her entire weight rested on my arms. If I were to let go of her, she would collapse like a rag doll.
I gritted my teeth as I thought about what she was doing to herself time after time, going to parties and drowning her sorrows. She was running from something that she would never be able to outrun - not on her own anyway, she just didn’t know that yet. I had been watching her from afar for so long, but that night I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t watch her kill herself anymore.
My arms were wrapped around her waist, and my fingers skimmed the soft skin of her ribs below her breasts. It was torture! Removing her shirt had been necessary, since it had been covered in vomit and liquor. Standing behind her, I tried to keep my hands from roaming over her bare skin too much. Her low rise jeans were slipping down from the weight of the water, revealing more and more of the small of her trim back.
I needed to get away from her - and quickly - because the longer I stood with her in my arms, the harder it was for me to remain aloof.
As her Guardian, I was not supposed to make contact with her. I was to watch her from afar and keep her safe until it was time for her to learn about us. As I thought about the consequences I would probably face because of this night, I felt her shoulders start to shake. She was crying quietly and I leaned in, trying to hear what she was mumblin
g.
“Are you safe?” she whispered brokenly over and over. I remained quiet for a few minutes, waiting for her to say more, but she just kept repeating herself.
Finally, she managed to voluntarily move her arms and pushed her hair back from her face. Still unsteady on her feet, she looked over her shoulder and raised big brown eyes to my face. They were dilated still, but seemed a little clearer. She stared into my eyes as she spoke once more, “Are you safe?”
I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t know what she was asking, as I looked into those eyes and saw the tears stream down her pale face. Her voice was shaky, and the small hand that held the hair back from her face was trembling.
Although I could tell she was standing a bit straighter, I was still supporting most of her weight. Sighing, I resigned myself to the trouble I was about to get myself into.
“Yes, Skye.” I leaned down, holding her eyes with my own. “I promise you, I am safe.”
She gasped as she heard my answer, and to my astonishment, immediately broke into loud sobs as she crumpled into my chest. I sank down to the tile floor and held her close to my chest as she cried.
The steaming hot water of the shower pulsed down on us and washed her tears down the drain, along with the last of my resolve to stay away from her.
ONE - MY REALITY
Skye
I woke up to the same cold, empty loneliness that I had been waking up to for years. As I slowly opened my eyes, I stretched a bit to test how severe my inevitable hangover was. Tentatively I turned my head, and my whole body protested the small movement. Even my eyeballs hurt as I rolled to my side and pulled the comforter up and over my head.
My fingers registered the foreign soft texture of the blankets before my head did, and my eyes flew open as I took in the clean scent of the sheets. I sat up as quickly as I could without getting sick and looked around at my surroundings. “What the…?”
I was lying in a large bed with a fluffy white comforter - a far cry from the usual scratchy blanketed twin bed I was used to - in what was probably the nicest hotel room I had ever seen. And I was alone.
“Hello?” I called out vaguely remembering my savior from the night before. I looked down and cringed when I realized that I was dressed only in my bra and panties, and again I wished I could remember what had transpired the evening before.
Sighing, I brought my knees to my chest and took deep breaths as a wave of nausea washed over me. I tried to recall who had helped me last night and what I had done. I knew that I had gone to a party with my friend Janelle and her boyfriend Rex, and had then proceeded to drink away my sorrow and fears.
It was a crazy party with a lot of drugs, a lot of alcohol and a lot of guys groping the goods. I racked my brain as I tried to recall who I had hooked up with, which would have led to me being in a hotel room partially undressed. The situation was not something that was ‘par for the course’ for me. Typically I just drank myself into oblivion and then ended up back at the house, courtesy of Janelle and Rex. Hookups were not my thing; that took at least a small amount of trust, and trust was just something I didn’t do.
Looking around again, my mind took in my surroundings. I surmised that I must have been in one of the nicer hotels in the uptown area. It was certainly not a ‘by the hour’ type of establishment.
“Nope,” I told myself, “this was not a random hookup with any of the normal losers. No one I know could afford this place.”
Feeling somewhat better on that front, I sank back into the comfy blankets and closed my eyes again. As exhausted as I was, I couldn’t fall back asleep. My mind kept playing one thing from the previous night back to me, much like a scratched CD that skipped over and over.
“I promise you, I am safe.” I contemplated those six words as a tear slid down my cheek.
At seventeen years old, I couldn’t remember a time when I did feel safe. As I lay snuggled up in bed, I allowed the thoughts that I usually tucked away to invade my head.
Sometime right before my eighth birthday, my family was killed and I was placed into protective care. When the police found me hiding in the bushes at a park a few streets away from my childhood home, I had no memory of the event. Although I had been almost eight when it happened, I couldn’t recall my relationship with my parents, or even what they looked like. The psychiatrists I met with chalked it up to post traumatic stress disorder. As the years went on, still nothing came back to me, and I had no one around to remind me of what I had lost. There were no pictures, no friends; it was as if they had never existed. As if I had come from nowhere.
Through the years I was told that nobody wanted to adopt me because the events of my parents’ deaths had been so gruesome. It was as if everyone was scared of me, as if I were cursed. . So I ended up living in group homes and the occasional psych ward for the next eight years. These homes ranged from somewhat pleasant to downright horrifying depending on who was running it, and I learned quickly to keep my head down and do what I was told.
As a young child I never understood why other kids were adopted out and nobody wanted me. The police who found me the night of my parent's deaths would visit me occasionally and tell me to stay strong and that one day I would live a normal life. They were sweet to check up on me so often but they would never give me any information about that night. So I was a good girl and did what I was told to do. I stayed strong and waited for the day when I would have a new life.
I made very few friends throughout the years in my group homes, because most kids who came in were either quickly picked up for fostering or were claimed by unknown relatives eager to raise their loved one’s child. I met Janelle two years ago when her single mother had died of an OD, and she had been placed into care because nobody wanted to claim her. Janelle said that she had relatives who lived across the country, but that her mother had run away as a teen and cut ties with them. She told me that she was all too happy to spend the next year in a group home, because it was a much cleaner environment than what she had been used to growing up.
Janelle was good at being tough. With her stick straight, dirty blonde hair and waifish-thin figure she already looked like a street urchin, and at seventeen she was the only other teen in the home. We were put on yard duty together when she had first arrived, and after raking leaves together in silence for an hour she finally started to ask me questions about myself and the home. We raked and bagged leaves the entire afternoon and discussed school and boys, friends and enemies and plans for our futures. She was the first friend I could ever recall having, and I was in awe of her. Although only a little more than a year older than me, she was worlds ahead of me in street knowledge. Before Janelle, I had always kept myself wrapped in a tight ball, never speaking to others and only coming and going from the home to school and back.
Janelle snuck me out to my first party, gave me my first drink, and introduced me to her friends - most of whom were several years older and wiser than she was. If she was sad about losing her mom, she never really mentioned it. She did stay away from drugs, and was very angry the one time I took a hit off of some stoner’s weed. That night was the first time I had seen the red glowing eyes, so I was all too happy to steer clear of drugs after that little episode.
When Janelle turned 18 a year ago, she was released into the “free” world to live her life. She started shacking up with Rex, her much older and somewhat-sketchy boyfriend. She stopped by a couple times a week to visit me, and kept asking me to come live with them…so one day a few weeks after my 17th birthday, I walked out of the group home and didn’t go back. Nobody even looked for me. I’m pretty sure that if I were to be picked up by the police they would run a check and send me back, but typically the cops ignored me. That was six months ago.
When I first left I tried to keep up with school, but late nights of partying with Janelle quickly led to indisposed mornings leaned over a toilet or sleeping off a hangover.
Lying in that hotel room, shame began to wash over me with thoughts of w
hat I had become: a virtually homeless, high school dropout who had a pretty severe addiction to drinking.
That was the reality of my life.
I rolled onto my stomach and pulled a soft plump pillow over my head, as more tears began to stream down my face.
Xander
I was amazed that I could actually hear her crying before I made it back to the room. The night before, after she had collapsed into my arms in the shower, I had held her until the water turned too cold to bear. She had been pretty much unaware of anything by that point, so I wrapped her in a towel and carried her to the bed.
It took all of my self-discipline to strip the sexy jeans from her body and put her under the covers. She had grown up to be so beautiful – a porcelain doll, with flowing locks of chestnut hair and pale skin just like her parents. She had been a beautiful child too.
I could remember her sweet laugh on the days when we would run around and play tag, and she would yell at me to give her piggy back rides. I had been watching her for almost two years from afar. It was all I was allowed to do; watch from afar. No speaking, no touching… nothing but just watching. She wasn’t allowed to know about me until it was time.
I watched silently as she found herself tumbling deeper and deeper into the party scene that her friends so enjoyed. At first it seemed like typical teen fun, but more and more she seemed to be on a mission to see how quickly she could find oblivion.
When she first left the group home to live with her friend I was concerned, and tried to talk Rioden into picking her up and bringing her home. He wouldn’t hear of it. He said she would be safer away from us until her eighteenth birthday, when any magic that covered her would be washed away. He refused to see the danger she was to herself, so I stepped up my surveillance of her; sometimes only sleeping a few hours during the day so I wouldn’t miss her movements.
Never Let You Fall (The Prophecy of Tyalbrook) Page 1
