Dark Reality 7-Book Boxed Set

by Jennifer and Christopher Martucci

Chapter 1

  Arianna found herself standing on unsure legs, surrounded by lush fields of green speckled with blossoms in vibrant shades of pink and purple. The dimness and haze of the nightclub she’d stood in seconds earlier had disappeared, replaced instead with golden light that kissed and caressed the vivid landscape. The incessant rumble and thump of bass in music that had blared had been silenced, swapped with a faint whisper of a breeze stirring tall grass and the distant sound of birds chirping. The entire world she’d existed in moments ago had vanished, she had vanished. Stephanie, Luke, and the group they’d been with, along with the rest of the club-goers, had gone, faded into an oblivion beyond her reach. She was no longer with them. She had been transported, impossibly, to a picturesque meadow. And she wasn’t alone. A substantial hand gripped hers, a hand attached to an equally substantial arm and body.

  The man that held her hand, the same one she’d seen watching her on the side of the road on two occasions, the one she’d noticed in the nightclub, remained with her, and towered over her, as glorious and golden as the sunshine touching the earth they stood upon. She looked up at him and he smiled a kind, almost affectionate smile, and she noticed that her hand, the one he held, tingled. The slight tingle moved up her arm to her shoulder, warm and pleasant, and spread. It thrummed through her in time with her heartbeat for several seconds, a calming sensation that radiated from him in waves of energy so strong she swore they were tangible.

  She released his hand and felt the calm come to an abrupt end. Everything that had happened rushed at her. Suddenly, the sun felt strong overhead. Her body heated and flushed with warmth.

  “What the hell?” she shrieked. “What the hell? What just happened? Where am I? Where are my friends?”

  Panic began to sweep through her like fire through dried brush, racing and torching everything in its wake. She wondered whether she were dead, and the field she stood Elysium, the fabled home of the blessed after death. After all, the man before her could easily have been an angel. Then she remembered what she’d done in the alleyway before staggering back into the club and realized no paradise would await her after death; she was very much alive. Anxiety filled her, burning and corroding any sense of reason she’d ever possessed.

  “Shh, calm down, Arianna,” the man said and searched her eyes with his. The brilliant blue of his irises was a shade she’d never seen and matched the hue of the sky above, only more crystalline in their clarity.

  “Calm down? Are you kidding me? What the hell is happening? Am I dead, or drugged? What is going on?” she shouted.

  “You’re not dead, Arianna,” he said calmly. “And you haven’t been drugged, though drugs were offered to you before you went into the Blue Ivy tonight, were they not?”

  “Well, yeah,” she fumbled before realizing there was no possible way he could have known about Stephanie’s offer unless he had been standing right beside her when it had happened. She and Stephanie had been alone. “How do you know about that? And how do you know my name?” she asked and felt another flash of fright blaze within her.

  “I was with you.”

  She stared at him incredulously, becoming more and more convinced by the moment that a hallucinogenic drug had been slipped into one of her beers, that levitating and thrashing one man into a building and setting ablaze another would all be part of a horrific, drug-addled memory in the near future. And this beautiful man who spouted utter nonsense was a figment of her imagination, little more than brain garbage tangled in the effects of the drugs.

  “Yeah, right,” she said laughing in a crazed way that was foreign to her own ears.

  “I was. I’m always with you, in a sense.”

  “Okay, whatever you say,” she pacified going along with what she supposed was a delusion.

  “I hear your mocking tone,” he said levelly. “And whatever you think this is, a dream or hallucination, you’re wrong. This is happening.”

  Arianna did not know what to say or how to react. If she were experiencing drug related delirium, nothing she said or did would matter. She remained silent.

  “Are you telling me I don’t look familiar to you?” he persisted in his serene tone.

  “Of course you look familiar to me,” she replied. I saw you just the other day when I crashed my bike, and the day before that.”

  “And you saw me in the club,” he added.

  “I thought I saw you in the club. But that could have been the onset of whatever drug some asshole popped in my beer, the beginning of the freaking delusion I’m having right now.”

  “You did see me in the club. I was there, and you were not drugged. No drug would affect you, not that I would have allowed anyone to drug you in the first place.”

  “No drugs affect me?” she asked indignantly. “I’ve smoke pot before and,” she said and her voice trailed off. She did not complete her sentence, could not.

  “And what, Arianna?” he probed.

  She searched her memory for one time, any time, she had become high from marijuana she’d smoked, but came up empty. She could not recall a single instance when she had succumbed to the influence of marijuana or any other substance she’d abused. She couldn’t recall ever being drunk and had long since assumed her father, whoever he was, had an unusually high tolerance for alcohol he’d imparted to her.

  “Nothing,” she lied.

  “You’ve never gotten high from the pot you’ve smoked, have you?”

  His words were more of a statement than a question.

  “And you’ve never been drunk either, though you’ve tried.”

  “No,” she answered begrudgingly.

  “Did you ever think that was strange?”

  She had thought it strange. Many things in her life had been strange.

  “I’ve been with you your whole life, watching you, waiting,” he said not pausing for her answer. “I know your life has been far from ordinary.”

  The way he looked at her, his tone of voice combined with how he’d practically read her mind and anticipated what she’d say next, all of it was as compelling as it was disturbing. Still, all of it had to be a dream of some sort. He spoke so sincerely, so openly, it would have been easy for her to give in to his words, to believe them. Of course, if he’d shown the slightest shred of sanity, he would have furthered his cause. What he was saying was completely preposterous.

  “Been with me my whole life?” she echoed his absurd claim.

  “Yes. It is my mission to ensure your safety and guide you as you mature, as your powers strengthen.”

  “All right, enough! This crap has to stop. Even if this is some kind of hallucination, it’s got to stop. I can’t listen to this crazy shit anymore!”

  “You’re saying all of this is crazy, but deep down, you know it’s true. The moment you saw me on the side of the road, you knew. You recognized me.”

  She wanted to deny it, wanted to tell him he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but he was right. Something had clicked when she’d seen him, something hidden deep within her had sprung forth like a sudden recollection from a vague dream or a missing puzzle piece appearing unexpectedly after days of looking for it. He had appeared like the missing puzzle piece or muddled face from a long-forgotten dream.

  “I don’t even know your name,” she said and decided not to refute his claim.

  “My name is Desmond.”

  “Desmond what?” she asked and expected a last name.

  “Desmond, and nothing more,” he replied cryptically.

  “What, so you’re like Cher or Madonna? No last name?” she joked.

  He did not laugh or smile, just stared at her with his crystal-blue eyes.

  “Okay, this is awkward. Don’t you know who those women are?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “It was a joke. I was joking. You know, trying to be funny.”

  “I know what you were trying to be, that you were t
rying to defuse a situation you cannot control with humor. You do that a lot.”

  The lack of emotion coming from his benevolent face seemed wrong. Arianna felt heat prickle up her neck, anger partnering with it.

  “Please save your armchair assessment of me, Desmond. I was trying to be funny, that’s all. No deeper meaning behind it,” she said and hated that she sounded so defensive.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you,” he said earnestly and she felt frustrated anew. “But I think we’re getting off topic here.”

  “Off topic? Are you kidding me?” she railed. “I didn’t even know there was a topic to be off of.”

  “Yes you do. We were talking about you, why I’ve been watching you, what you are,” he said evenly.

  His calm demeanor was grating on her nerves, how he spoke so offhandedly alleging she had powers and what, as opposed to whom, she was. She was Arianna Rose, just as she’d always been, and he was a crackpot figment of her drugged imagination.

  “Stop it! Just stop talking about watching me and what I am. I’m going to wake from this soon, so don’t bother trying to sell me your brand of crazy.”

  “You set a man on fire back at the club, you, with your powers.”

  She felt a fine sheen of perspiration collect and cover her brow. Her palms slickened with sweat as she remembered the pure rage that had coursed through her veins before the man had burst into flames. The man that had slammed Stephanie against the wall and drew blood from her head, the one who’d torn Stephanie’s underwear from her body and lifted her skirt like an animal before trying to rape her, appeared in her mind’s eye. She had wanted him to burn for what he had been about to do, for what he’d done. He had placed a blade to Stephanie’s throat and had threatened to kill her. Arianna had felt fury flood her core so fully, it had drowned her. Even still, the thought of him made her insides tremble with wrath. His screams, his pleas for help, had meant nothing to her then. But now, her wrath was tinged with another emotion, one she struggled to name.

  “Yes, you are very powerful,” Desmond said staring at her unwaveringly, as if seeing the vision her memory produced as easily as she did. “That’s the reason I’m here, the reason I’ve always been here with you. You are the chosen one, the one we call the Sola.”

  “The what?” she managed, her voice a strangled whisper.

  “The Sola, you are the Sola. You are the lone one, the most powerful one among us, who will unite us all.”

  “Us? Who’s us?”

  “Some would call you a witch and me a warlock, but those are such ugly, hollow terms, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I’m a witch?” she gasped.

  “I prefer to call you a seer. Your powers are not of this world.”

  “So I’m Arianna the Seer?”

  “No, you’re Arianna Rose, the Sola,” he corrected.

  Her head began to swim, reeling and whirling with conflicting emotions. She had always been aware of her differences from others, peripherally at least, but had always attributed those differences to her mother’s lifestyle choices, as well as her own. The fact that she’d escaped injury unscathed time after time and had avoided the effects of both drink and drugs further supported that she was unlike most people. She found herself awash with confusion. She wondered whether she was lucid, whether what was happening was real. Desmond’s words had struck a chord. They’d touched upon a yawning stretch of her being that had always ached for identification, for validation. And now she finally had a name for it: witch.

  “Okay,” she murmured. “So I’m a witch, I mean, the Sola. I am supposed to unite all the witches and warlocks of where, and for what?”

  “You will unite the witches of the world. They will know of your coming of age, of the dawn of your true powers. They will sense the shift in their own powers and they will know.”

  Arianna was speechless. What he was saying, as insane as it sounded, resonated within her. All of her life, she had never felt as though she’d belonged. She’d never felt as if she’d found her place among any of her peers, among anyone. Lily Andrews, a girl two years younger than her who had been the closest thing to a best friend she’d ever had, had been the only person she’d felt remotely at ease around. But her friendship with Lily had been brief, as brief as her mother’s relationship with Carl, and she’d been relegated to her usual station: feeling like a square peg being forced into a round opening; until now. Desmond’s words resounded deep inside of her.

  “And why do they, uh we, need to be united?” she asked and felt an instinctive sense of warning wash over her.

  “Because we are being hunted,” he said and trained his sky-blue eyes on her.

  “Hunted? Why? By who?”

  “We are being hunted as part of a search.”

  “A search for what?”

  “For you.”

  “For me?”

  “There are many people who want you dead,” he said solemnly. “They are killing off witches, one at a time, in search of you.”

  Her mind began to spin again as the rational part of her brain attempted to deny what her heart, what her entirety, knew to be true.

  “People are dying, for me?” she asked weakly.

  “I will not let you die, I assure you,” he said and misinterpreted her quiet revulsion at people dying because of her as worry for her own welfare.

  “I’m not worried about dying, Desmond,” she said more forcefully. “I just can’t wrap my mind around the fact that people are actually dying because of me, because someone out there wants me dead.”

  “Do not feel guilty, Arianna,” he said soothingly. “They would have been hunted no matter what. The people who hunt you want all witches dead. The real witches that died knew they were dying for a greater good. They did so without prolonged pain or suffering. Their spirits were returned to the earth, wind, fire and water.”

  She wondered whether he actually thought she would be appeased by others accepting their death and only suffering a little as opposed to a lot. And he had made reference to real witches. Had there been fake witches?

  Arianna raked her hand through her hair then rubbed the back of her neck. The muscles near her collar complained, bunching and tensing. “That’s all well and good that their spirits went back to nature, but they are dead! And all because of me! How the hell am I supposed to feel about that?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he began but she cut him off.

  “And what did you mean when you said real witches who died? Were there witch impostors who died, too?”

  Desmond glared at her, aiming his ethereal cerulean eyes at her as though he sought to bore a hole in her head. “No, Arianna, there were no witch impostors, just innocent people who had been curious about witchcraft,” he spat.

  His words stung. He had not spoken them with an accusatory tone, but guilt weighed upon her with leaden heaviness, nonetheless. And how could it not? She felt horrified at the notion of witches dying in her stead, but innocent, powerless people dying was more than she could bear.

  Tears burned behind her lids. She fluttered her lashes, trying in vain to blink them away, but more came and streamed down her cheeks.

  Seeing her cry, Desmond’s demeanor softened visibly.

  “It is a tragedy, Sola. I know. But we mustn’t focus on the past now. We need to prepare for what is to come.”

  “I can’t imagine it’s worse than this,” she said.

  “It’s much worse. I will not lie to you about that. There is a man who has made it his sole purpose in life to find and kill witches, or anyone who stands in his way. And he is getting close.”

  “Close? Close to us?”

  “Yes, too close. He was just outside of Rockdale when your situation there changed.”

  “What? He was in Rockdale?” she asked unable to mask the alarm in her voice.

  “Yes, but I was able to get you out of there in time.”

>   “Wait, what? You didn’t do anything in Rockdale. I never saw you there.”

  “I did do something,” Desmond confessed.

  “What did you do, Desmond?”

  “I nudged Carl to come home, influenced him if you will, so that he would come home that night and find your mother with his cousin.”

  Arianna had found it strange that Carl had returned the night he’d found her mother with his cousin. Generally, when Carl had set up shop on a barstool, he had been very reluctant to leave. When her mother had begun her affair with his cousin, Carl would go to their local haunt without her and nothing short of a fire in the bar would have given him cause to leave it. Desmond’s involvement in that scenario made sense.

  “It did shock me when Carl came home before the bartender kicked him out,” she admitted. “You must have some serious powers to have gotten him out of there before closing time.”

  Desmond smiled; a wide, warm smile that lit up his entire face. “It did sap a tremendous amount of my strength to move him off that barstool.”

  Arianna laughed. Laughing felt good considering the gravity of her predicament, that lives had been claimed because of her. Desmond laughed, as well. The sound was pleasant and buoyed her spirits somewhat.

  “What do we do now?” Arianna asked and shifted their interaction away from its lightheartedness.

  “I think it’s time to get back to the club,” Desmond replied.

  “Oh no! The club, I forgot about the club! My friends are going to freak out that I left, especially after what happened right before I left,” she worried.

  “No need to worry. They won’t even know you were gone,” he said in his tranquil tone.

  “What, I mean, how is that possible?” she asked, but he did not answer. He took her hand in his instead, and she felt a tingle begin in her hand and travel up her arm as softly as a breath blowing across her skin, warm and welcoming. Within seconds, she felt his energy flowing through her, thrumming in time with her heartbeat, whispering through every part of her. The scenic paradise around her began to melt, evaporating into obscurity. All that remained was Desmond’s face, beautiful and serene, perfectly sculpted as if it had been carved from marble, staring at her, through her. He pulled her close to him, wrapped his arms around her, and she felt her breath catch in her chest. Light filled her field of vision, brilliant white light. Desmond and his warmth surrounded her, covering her body with wisps of awareness, light and feathery. Her entire body quivered pleasantly. Her worries and fears ebbed as if they were froth. And she was gone again.