by Shelly Crane
“Huh?” I mumbled, disoriented.
“We need to go.”
I forced my eyes open after blinking several times against the brightness of daylight. Dressed in jeans and a silk tank, Mom knelt on the floor next to me, where I was wrapped in a blanket, a pillow under my head. How did I get here? The last thing I remembered was the word “disco” whispered in my ear . . . but it had nothing to do with funky music, mirrored balls, or dancing.
As an image of a dark street and strange people filled my mind instead, the fear returned, and I sat up with a gasp. Pain shot from the base of my skull to the backs of my eyelids, nearly knocking me back down. I pressed my fingers to my temples. Had that been real? Or a dream? I examined my hands. No scrapes. I touched my head. No bump or cut. That meant little, though. The injuries would have been healed by now anyway.
“What happened last night?” My voice came out as a rasp.
“Hmm?”
I started to tell her, and her brows pressed together as I began with the boys and the knife.
“I can’t believe how mean kids can be,” she interrupted, but then she frowned. “And I can’t believe you taunted them. We should have moved after the burn.”
I shook my head, just once. It hurt too much to move more than that. She misinterpreted the movement, though, thinking I still protested her offer to move to avoid my humiliation. I hadn’t wanted to leave and change schools so close to graduation, but that had been months ago. It didn’t matter anymore.
“I know,” she said. “We’re moving now, and you can have a fresh start. You’re starting a new chapter, college—”
“No, that’s not it. There was this couple in the street, too. And the man . . . he changed into a . . . a werewolf. And the woman—I swear she was a witch and put a spell on me!”
Mom’s eyebrows arched. “Honey, do you realize what you’re saying?”
I did. And it sounded ludicrous. In fact, in the morning light, I knew the memory was more than ludicrous—it was absolutely impossible. But it had felt so real.
Confused, I squinted at her face. We had similar features—chestnut hair, almond-shaped, mahogany eyes, smooth, light-olive skin—but hers were inhumanly perfect. Not that I was ugly, but nobody in this world could compare to Mom. Her beauty was on a completely different plane than the rest of us. So while she looked like an angel, I looked like her very human daughter. Well, sister. Because she also looked, impossibly, twenty-six years old. Mom didn’t age. One of her quirks. By the time I was fifteen, we had to tell people she was Sophia my sister because she looked too young to pass as my mother. Since I rarely needed parental control anymore, we pretty much behaved like sisters, too. In a she-was-the-older-and-bossier-one kind of way.
“You have the wildest dreams,” she teased with a smile while nodding and patting my arm.
“But—” I pulled my arm from her, knowing she used one of her other quirks, what I called her power of persuasion. She had an uncanny way of convincing people to see and do things her way.
“It was a dream, Alexis. We don’t have time to discuss it.” An edge had come to her voice.
Right. A dream. It has to be. Something deep inside, past the throbbing in my head, denied that theory, but there was no other explanation. Witches and werewolves . . . people appearing and disappearing . . . How can that be real? Logic told me it couldn’t but . . . my intuition knew something had happened. Right?
I broke my gaze from hers to hide my denial, not in the mood to challenge her now. My head raged, feeling like someone had jabbed knives around my brain while I slept. Also, I’d seen that stony expression on her face before: Drop it, the look said.
I glanced around the living room and noticed the emptiness for the first time—no furniture, no boxes stacked against the walls, nothing. “Where is everything?”
“Packed in the moving truck.” She sounded nonchalant, as if it made perfect sense.
“What?”
It didn’t make sense at all. That wasn’t the plan. Mom was supposed to break up with her boyfriend last night, and we would pack the truck today and leave for Florida tomorrow. Why the sudden rush? She didn’t believe my story, so that couldn’t be it. It had to be the boyfriend. It was almost always the boyfriends.
“We need to get out of here,” she said. “Now.”
I knew the tone and moved as quickly as my aching head allowed. Our moves always felt like forced escapes. Sometimes we moved because of an accident, but most often because of the boyfriends. Though this move had actually been planned, it now had the familiar feeling we were once again making an escape. At least this time I knew where we headed and why.
My head still felt sluggish as we traveled south on I-95, but once the drugged feeling lifted and I could think clearly, I analyzed last night. People had tried to hurt me and possibly wanted to kill me. I think. Maybe the werewolf and the witch and the other bizarre parts weren’t real. Maybe I hit my head harder than I realized and imagined those aspects. Or maybe the real events of . . . something . . . mashed up with an actual dream, and I had everything confused. But I was certain I was attacked. Fairly certain, anyway. And the way the white-blonde said I was “hers” told me it wasn’t the last time I’d see her. If she’s even real.
I blew out a sigh as I stared at the passing landscape. My memory felt like a ripped-up photo taped back together but missing vital pieces. Some details, like the wolf’s terrifying eyes, were clear, while others, like everyone else’s faces, remained blank. This made me question the reality of it all, but I couldn’t so easily dismiss the fear that was deeply embedded into my memory. If that had been a dream, it’d been one hell of a night terror.
On the other hand, if someone had truly attacked me, Mom would know, and she wouldn’t have dismissed me so easily. She’d never been the hovering type, but because of our history, she was protective in her own way. Even now, as I moved south for college, she followed, giving up her job in corporate sales because, she’d said, she was ready for a change. She’d been in sales for as long as I could remember and was quite successful at it. With that power-of-persuasion quirk she had going on, she could sell a truckload of beef to a vegan. But she had always wanted to own a bookstore, and there happened to be one for sale just ten miles from the university I’d chosen. Most people my age would be aghast at their mother following them, but I was actually okay with it. She was my best friend, after all. My only friend for years. That had been her reasoning, too—she’d even joked about taking classes with me—but now I questioned her true motivations.
Hundreds of miles passed under the truck’s wheels before I built the courage to ask. “Are there people who want to hurt us? I mean, because of who we are?”
She gave me a sideways glance. “I would not let anything happen to you.”
“I know, but if there are people out there, shouldn’t I know? Don’t you think it’s time I knew things about us?” I braced myself for her reaction.
She opened her mouth, paused, then closed it again. The corner of her lips turned down in a frown. “I can’t tell you, honey. You know that. Not until the Ang’dora.”
Right. The Ang’dora. The enigmatic “change” that was somehow connected with our quirks and everything that made us weird. I knew little about it. I knew little about us.
“Are you asking because of your dream last night?” she asked. “Because you know it’s—”
I cut her off. “Yeah, I know. Not real.”
I wanted to believe her. That was the easy and safe explanation. But was there more to it?
Mom held our secrets tightly, even from me, and I’d given up pleading for information a few years ago. She had told me many times she was bound to a promise made when I was an infant: I couldn’t know our secrets until I went through the Ang’dora and became more like her. Whatever that meant. I couldn’t even know what kind of changes there would be. This had been the one sore subject between us for years—the only time we ever argued throughout middle and much o
f high school. Then she finally told me her own mother had abandoned her when she was a teen to protect those same secrets, and if I didn’t leave her alone about it, she’d be forced to do the same.
I supposed that meant they were important ones, but when other families’ skeletons included domestic violence, sexual abuse, or various addictions, ours seemed rather innocuous. After all, we simply had some weird quirks. Nothing dangerous to ourselves or others. Most of the time anyway. Not knowing what more there was, if anything, could be annoying and frustrating, but if I tucked the thought of our oddities into a locked drawer in my mind and pretended we were normal, I forgot to be annoyed and frustrated. And I much preferred to live behind the façade of normalcy than fight with my mother and best friend. Or worse, never see her again and be left completely alone in the world.
Besides, in all honesty, I liked living behind that smokescreen. More than anything, even more than knowing, I ached for a normal, stable life—a career as an author, true love, and a big family with a home of our own, picket fence and all.
Even so, the renewed curiosity lingered.
I hated snooping behind Mom’s back, but her refusal to explain left no other options, and the move presented an easy opportunity for poking around. The new house was more like a cottage, but the attached garage in back had been converted into a room large enough for a bed, my desk, and a small living area, along with its own bathroom and a separate entrance. Mom thought it a perfect layout to give me privacy and independence without having to worry about on-campus housing costs or rent and utilities. After setting my place up, I volunteered to unpack the rest of the house while Mom prepared to open the bookstore. When she took me up on the offer to do her room, I knew I wouldn’t discover anything she didn’t want me to. So by the time the first day of classes came around, I knew nothing more, but I had a new plan.
That was the day the dreams stopped. Until then, I’d repeatedly dreamt of that strange night—a recurring nightmare, I supposed. But it always ended on a good note, with one of my heroes standing over me. Not the lanky one, but the other one. I still never saw his face, just a shadowy figure, but I knew it was him. Who are you? my dream-self asked every time. I never received an answer, and he stopped visiting my dreams the first day of classes.
Perhaps because a very real guy entered my dreams . . . and my life.
A Demon’s Promise, Book 1 in the Soul Savers series, is free to download at all eBook retailers.
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
