by Sarah Noffke
Then she flickers again and to my relief she lands on the image of Dahlia. The one I know so well. With a grace that has always stolen my focus she extends a hand to me. “I’ve learned so much since returning to the Land of the Souls. I’ve been enlightened on my purpose. And now I know something that I never thought I’d come to know,” she says.
I take her hand and press it to my mouth with a chaste kiss. “And that is?” I say, my eyes expectant on her mouth, desperate to know what she’ll say next.
“I learned that you’re my soul mate and if I’m not with you, then I’m alone,” she says, with a tender smile. “Take me wherever you go.”
I unleash a smile I feel in my heart, in my entire being. I pull the opener from my pocket so I’ll have it for when we arrive in the next location. Overhead there’s a creaking. Then a crashing sound and then something fucking tears through the roof of the mansion. I grab Dahlia’s hand and yank her to the side, away from the destruction dominating all around us. Realizing this assault on the den is only going to get worse, I yank her down the hallway and to a place that will be safe enough to give us a chance to dream travel. I’m almost dragging Dahlia through the halls when I hear her yell behind me.
Frantically I whip my head over my shoulder. “What?” I say, still running and unable to easily make out her words over the winds and rain.
“The blue light!” she says, pointing at me.
My eyes jerk down at my hand and I realize she’s pointing at the opener, which is bright blue. There’s a wormhole in our house. I halt and shield my head from the rain pouring in through the roof. Without a moment to consider my decision, I push the opener into the space before me and find that it sticks in the air at once. Then I tap the button and pull the chain in one swift movement. A bright circle illuminates immediately, showing us the door.
“Where does it go?” Dahlia yells over the shredding sounds the storm is making.
“I don’t know,” I say back. “But it’s our only chance.”
“And I can go through there with you?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say again.
Her hand is wet and warm when she slips it into mine. “Let’s go,” Dahlia says and pulls me through the passage.
Chapter Thirty-One
I stumble through the portal. Fall. Land on a hard surface. I’m coughing when I tumble through the door. Rain seems to be caught in my throat and the bright light overhead is a stark contrast to the gloomy house we just left. But I open my eyes and endure the strain to find the best sight of my life in front of me. Lying on my chest, tangled in my arms, is the love of my life. Dahlia and I lie curled up on a ground which is covered in moss and stone. She lifts her head and I recognize at once that she’s not glowing like she did in soul form. Neither am I. Dahlia and I are both lighter in appearance, the form one takes when dream traveling.
“We’re in the dreamscape,” she says, pushing up off me and to her feet. I do the same.
“The key to that statement is ‘we,’” I say, wrapping my arm around her shoulder and pulling her into me.
She’s taking in our surroundings, which I notice at once aren’t typical. We are in a walled-in garden which is rich with roses and fruit trees. Medicinal herbs line one wall and a fountain punctuates the center of the space, which isn’t small, but the walls make it feel quaint. However, there’s something not quite right about this place and my mind doesn’t at first find what it is.
“The bird,” Dahlia says, pointing at a sparrow perched on the edge of the fountain. It’s frozen and sits staring blankly ahead. I walk over and realize the coy fish in the pond are frozen too, floating in the water in mid-swim.
“It’s like this world has been paused,” I say, finding a few other animals that are unmoving. Rabbits, bugs, birds.
“So this isn’t the dreamscape?” Dahlia says.
“It is, because we’ve taken on dream travel form, but this isn’t our dreamscape. I think it’s a parallel universe,” I say, taking Dahlia’s hands and leading her through the space. “Maybe it’s a copy of our world. A backup of sorts.”
“I didn’t know that was possible,” she says.
“I didn’t know half of what’s happened recently was possible,” I say, gauging the details of our surroundings. But then Dahlia stops beside me and tugs on my hand.
I tear my focus off this strange world and regard her. Dahlia’s eyes beg for my attention. “Ren, you did it. Somehow you did it.”
I half smile at her, a mock look of offense on my face. “How could you ever have doubted me?” I say.
“It astounds me that after all this time, you continue to stun me. You are absolutely the most amazing man ever,” she says and rises up on her tiptoes and kisses me softly on the cheek. It doesn’t feel like it would in the physical realm or the Land of the Souls, but I feel it still and the fact that forever I have my Dahlia is enough. I did do it, and still the full realization of the future spreading before us hasn’t hit me yet. I have kind of been through a pretty major ordeal though.
Dahlia steps back, her hands still in mine. “You wanted to never lose me and now you have me for eternity or however long we’re granted in this place,” she says, waving at the space around us.
I push her dark brown hair away from her face, my fingers pausing on her jawline. “You’re going to grow extremely tired of me.”
“Ren Lewis, you’re the only person I have never tired of.” Then she takes my hand and leads me to an archway that’s bathed in vines and roses. Sitting on a twig is a ladybug. I reach out and pick up the insect, which is alive, but not alive. It’s like we are, in the in-between.
“What a strange place,” I say, musing on the stillness of the bug.
“What a beautiful place,” Dahlia says and she reaches out and touches the wings of a butterfly perched on the petal of a rose. And then there’s a flicker. An awakening. The wings of the monarch beat, pushing air away. The butterfly’s antennas twitch and then the creature that was frozen takes flight, flitting through the air and away. Dahlia steps back into me.
“Just like in the vision,” she says in a hush.
“Vision?” I say.
She turns and gives me a guilty smile. “Before I died I had a vision that I could touch things and bring them to life. I fantasized then that it was one of my Dream Traveler gifts, but then I died and…”
Her words trail away.
“I think it’s definitely your skill, because I can’t bring anything in this world to life,” I say, taking the ladybug still in my hand and placing it in Dahlia’s. It has barely touched her palm when its wings buzz and then the insect flies away through the garden.
A smile full of her amazement lights up Dahlia’s face.
“It appears you can bring this world to life, if you so desire it,” I say, regarding her with the same amazement she had shown me moments before.
“It would appear,” she says, her eyes dancing over the garden at our backs, the possibilities probably springing to her mind.
“And that means we could make this world as we want it,” I say.
“Giving life to that which is good,” she says, completing the thought in my mind.
I extend an arm to her. “Shall we go and discover what’s out there?”
She wraps her arm around mine with an excited nod.
When we come to the entrance to the garden, I realize what we couldn’t see with the trees and walls of the garden blocking the sky. And I realize how amazing this world really is. The poetry of it creates a tender ache in my chest. Below us stretches green rolling hills flecked with houses and bordered by waters of a lake. Above us the green and blue lights of the Aurora Borealis grace the sky. My thoughts from before circle back around in my brain. The first time Dahlia and I dream traveled we gazed at these lights. And then I had thought that the Aurora Borealis was proof that other worlds exist. My instinct told me they were the bleeding over of these other worlds. And to look back and see how perfect the
symmetry of this all is steals my breath. It makes me realize how incredibly complex and beautiful this world with all its realms and dimensions truly is.
I turn to Dahlia. She’s wearing an expression that perfectly explains how I feel inside. Grabbing both her hands, I pull her to me. Her fingers break from mine and she slides them around my neck.
“I love you, Ren Lewis.”
I almost laugh against her mouth as she kisses me. “I love you” doesn’t feel quite like the right thing for me to say in this moment. It doesn’t seem like enough.
I separate from her, but only an inch. “I love you, Dahlia. And I never knew what love was until we met and I lost my soul to you.”
Epilogue
When I was born, the doctors said I wouldn’t live the night through. I was born with a broken heart. And for most of my years on earth I have been certain that God shouldn’t have allowed a healer to save me. I thought I was too powerful. Too wicked. Too cursed. And God and I have battled for all of my life, sometimes finding peace and other times him checkmating me. However, I understand now the reasons he saved me. As a man who has worked to find holistic solutions to the world’s problems for the majority of my years, I understand God better than most. And now I realize why he gave me so much power. I thought he was tempting me. But that was never the case. And from my newly appointed position, I understand so much more. God wasn’t trying to scar me. He wasn’t playing a game with me. This entire time I didn’t realize that God was training me. Preparing me. Ensuring that one day I was ready when I accepted my final role.
Some don’t want to live forever in a world they view as evil. And some want to live forever in a world they know they cannot fix, but they are afraid of what comes next. However, only two will ever live forever in a world of their choosing.
I’m Ren Lewis. And I am a God who has created my own world.
The End
Want to find out what happens to Adelaide when she takes over the werewolf case? Turn the page to read a sample from the Olento Research Series. Alpha Wolf picks up right after the Ren series. Preorder it here: http://amzn.to/2lDYNPp
Sneak Peek of Alpha Wolf (Olento Research Series, #1):
Prologue
Obsidian eyes snapped open to drink in the dark. Outside the lab, everything was black but for a crescent moon that hung in the starry sky.
“No!” the man who was not quite human growled, pulling his eyes from the window. “Not again!”
And then the change began.
Rio held up his hand, and since his night vision had rapidly returned he spied it. The mutation. Sharp fibers slipped through the pores of his hands and arms. Hair as black as his eyes and cutting to the touch stopped growing after two inches. And then the claws pierced the ends of his fingers, but he looked away from them, disgusted by how his hands changed.
A scream that sounded more like a howl ripped from his mouth, and his canines suddenly tripled in size. Boiling with an anger he once only knew on the force, Rio pulled back his arm and launched it through the concrete wall that had imprisoned him for months now. Before, when he’d assaulted the wall, his only companion in this cell, it just stood untouched from his assault. Now his clawed fists rocketed through the one-foot-thick concrete until it was free on the other side. Surprised, he pulled his arm back to peer through the hole, which was the size of a soccer ball.
Staring at him with glowing green eyes was the man he’d only spoken to, never seen. For how long had they heard one another howl in misery after the treatments? But now Rio’s neighbor stared back at him, his own changed face drooling with the hunger. The change was always accompanied by the unstoppable hunger. Zephyr’s ravenous expression turned into one of awe for an instant, as though the reality before him momentarily blanketed the quenching desire.
“Did you just do that?” the man who appeared more like a wolf said. Zephyr’s hair was prematurely silver, his face long and covered in stubble.
Rio’s way of answering was through proving. Proving that he hadn’t lost his mind. And he needed to know for certain that the wall hadn’t just given way due to his repeated attempts at battering it. He needed to know that it was the strength within him that had created the damage to the wall. Again, he pulled his arm back, like a slingshot about to be unleashed. And then he sped it forward into the wall and through the dense rock. With his hand on the other side he towed it up, tearing the concrete above it in two, making a huge hole with the single movement.
Howls echoed from the other cells. A result of the change. A result of hearing the destruction happening nearby. With a quick glance over his shoulder, Rio realized that the staff on duty had been alerted to this disturbance. Approaching footsteps echoed off the slab floors.
“Hurry,” he said, backing up and making way for Zephyr to get through. Since he was smaller in build than Rio, he was easily able to negotiate through the almost man-made hole. His extra speed while in this state assisted him in the task.
“Can you?” Zephyr said, nodding at the row of bars in front of them. The locked gate, which had imprisoned Rio for so long, stood challenging him like always.
“I can damn near try,” he said, his Spanish accent flaring in his words. As a werewolf, or whatever they’d made him, he was stronger, had better vision, smell, and hearing. He could jump higher and with greater endurance. However, he hadn’t been strong enough before to break through concrete. Something was changing in him. Looking out the metal bars, he saw the hungry, irate eyes of his imprisoned companions of the last few months. Something was changing in all of them, but not the same thing. They were growing in different ways, like a pack with unique capabilities.
His hands, now covered in fur, wrapped around the bars. Then he made the intention and his muscles followed suit. Rio ripped both his arms toward his chest and the metal squeaked as it bent. The cage door cried its complaints as it was pulled from its hinges. Then it burst completely off and Rio threw it at the poor excuse of a bed he’d been forced to lie in for all these months.
***
Zephyr was the first through the open doorway, always the one talking about getting free. And now they were, but the eyes of so many stared back at them, behind their own imprisoned doors.
“You free them with whatever it is you can now do,” Zephyr yelled. “I’ll find keys.”
The footsteps of the security or scientists or whoever had been approaching had faded. Maybe they were grabbing reinforcements. These men didn’t have a chance to worry about that. Zephyr knew that they had to get out while they had a chance. And he wouldn’t leave anyone behind.
Rattling metal and loud explosions of relief were the soundtrack in the background as Zephyr yanked drawer after drawer out of the cabinets lining the far wall. This was where the scientists always went first before going to release one of the prisoners. And then a clanging sound he’d come to associate with the moment before the treatments met his ears, which were pinned up higher than usual on his head. He grabbed the keys and turned to greet a rough assault. A rent-a-cop stood in front of him, and, almost like he’d been waiting for him to turn around, he rammed the butt of his gun into Zephyr’s face just as he spun for the cages. His jaw split open at once, but that didn’t stop the beast inside of him from tearing forward. He leapt across the short distance, his open mouth seeking the clear exposed skin of the security agent’s throat. And when his teeth sunk through the flesh and tasted the warm blood inside he let out a soft growl. Above him he was conscious that other agents stood, were watching, unaware how to respond. They had been told not to harm the “experiments” and were obviously unprepared for an emergency like this.
Around them, men changed by drugs and science were springing from their cages. All of them hungry, but their inhibitions sequestered for the night.
Then overhead the alarm sounded. The one that would bring more security. More problems.
“Come on,” Rio yelled through the chaos. “We’ve got to go!”
Zephyr pulled up
from his feast to spy the sight around him. He’d momentarily forgotten where he was, so drunk from the experience his body craved. Warm flesh.
“Come on,” Rio screamed again, waving Zephyr away from where he was perched, closest to the main doors. Then the man he didn’t know well, the one who had freed him, slammed both fists through a concrete wall until the night on the other side made its presence known. The men, all changed by the wolf blood they’d had spliced into their DNA, spilled out into the open air, into the outside where freedom was a real possibility. Zephyr pulled his sleeve across his blood-drenched mouth and sprang forward, making it across the space and out into the night in less time than humanly possible.
Sirens rang overhead, making the already deranged pack crazy with dread. They couldn’t be captured. They couldn’t go back to that lab.
“Move,” Zephyr yelled, and it was that one command that sent the pack scurrying in different directions. Each wolf took his own route toward safety. Some scaled the nearby buildings. Some escaped through the adjacent alley. And some ran straight for the streets. All were too fast for the approaching security and none of them would be caught tonight.
But in the lab, a prisoner stirred from his sleep that felt too real to be a dream. He’d heard commotion, but it made itself a part of the nightmare playing in his head. Now he stared out at the locked gate in front of him and at the empty lab, devoid of the other eleven men he was used to having around him. Like a lone wolf, separated from the pack, Connor had been abandoned.
