Dark Reality 7-Book Boxed Set

by Jennifer and Christopher Martucci

  Chapter 11

  Arianna remained at the center of the charred circle of grass, sweat covering her from head to toe and breathing unevenly. To Luke, she imagined she looked like a lunatic. After all, she’d just told him she’d seen what had happened to Lily; that she had felt what Lily had felt and that people were coming for her, too. She sounded like a delusional, paranoid maniac, but had blurted the words out suddenly. She hadn’t bothered to filter what she’d said.

  “What?” Luke asked Arianna incredulously. “You can’t possibly know that. I mean, you can have a feeling, like a gut feeling or something, but you can’t know for sure.”

  Luke was looking at her as if she were insane and she couldn’t help but feel resentment creep into the panic-stricken state she was in. She understood how he most likely felt, seeing her wild-eyed, hearing her scream as she’d experienced the burning heat of flames licking at her body, the same flames that had claimed Lily. He hadn’t seen what she’d seen. He hadn’t felt what she’d felt. He had no idea what she was.

  He approached her slowly, timidly, with his palms facing her at chest height. In a soothing voice he said, “Everything is all right, Arianna. I’m not sure what you think you saw, but you’ve had a lot of stress lately: new school, new trailer, the attack at the club and worrying about your friend. It’s been hard for you, hasn’t it?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. Instead, he continued. “I think it’s best if we get out of here.”

  “I saw it happen! I felt it! It happened!” she screamed. “Why don’t you believe me?”

  She knew she could not reveal herself to him, could not tell him she was a witch, and not just any witch, but the Sola. He was already treating her like a mental patient. Her screaming at him, pleading with him to believe her, would not help her cause. The rational part of her knew he was reacting the way any normal person would, that he thought she was having some sort of breakdown. But she had seen everything, had experienced it as though it had been happening to her.

  “What? C’mon Arianna, it doesn’t make sense,” he started to argue, but was silenced when something whizzed past his ear and shattered the window of the detached garage to their left.

  “What the hell?” he said and immediately ducked with his hands over his head.

  “Gunshot!” she cried. “That was a gunshot! Run!”

  More shots followed, their distinct popping sound pierced the quiet of the morning and echoed as they hit the garage. Arianna had known they were the intended target, had sensed it before it had started.

  Crouched low, she grabbed Luke’s hand and pulled him toward the garage. Taking cover behind the garage was not the best option, but she figured at the very least, they were safer there than standing out in the open in the middle of the backyard.

  With the small structure between them and whoever hunted them, Arianna paused to catch her breath. “What the fuck?” Luke wheezed. “What the hell is happening? Why would anybody be shooting at us?” His skin had paled to the color of his white shirt and his chest rose and fell quickly as he struggled to catch his breath.

  She did not try to answer him. She did not have time to explain.

  “We need to get out of here,” he said and held her gaze. “You run. I’ll distract them,” he surprised her by saying.

  “What? No! I’m not leaving you!” she protested.

  “Go!” he yelled, and with his cry, he gave up their flimsy hiding place.

  Her feet moved beneath her, though she had not willed them to do so. She ducked and stayed close to the siding of the garage. But rather than running toward the woods or making a dash for the front of the house where she would be visible to neighbors and passersby, she darted to the front of the garage, determined to catch a glimpse of the shooter. She was the one being hunted. She was the one they wanted dead. The phantom “they” that pursued her knew who she was, but existed as a nameless, faceless entity. Howard Kane was the single name she’d heard. But she needed more. She needed faces. She inched around a drainage pipe and peeked around the side of the garage. Her head pounded and kept time with her thundering heartbeat. Luke had announced their exact whereabouts, but no one had approached, yet.

  Arianna’s insides began to quiver and she focused on the man, or men, who had shot at her and Luke. In an instant, the world around her began to fade. The sound of chirping birds hushed. The buzz of crickets and katydids silenced. All she could hear was the decelerating beat of her heart, and that began to fade as well. She immediately recognized that her senses had heightened. Earlier, she had struggled to see through the dense fog that clung to every surface around her. Now, however, she could see clearly as if her surroundings had been scrubbed clean of the mist and haze. She could plainly see a man inching cautiously toward the garage gripping his pistol expertly. Clearly, he believed himself to be cloaked by the milky miasma for he sought no other form of concealment. He had been wrong. He had underestimated her powers.

  She was about to step from the inadequate protection of the garage when the faint scent of sweat caught her attention. Bitter and pungent, an acrid odor assaulted her nasal passages and was followed by the sound of walking. Blades of grass crashed noisily against one another under heavy footing that approached from behind her. She spun around to greet the person who intended to surprise her.

  A dark hulking figure stood before her and clutched a gun between his hands. The gun was aimed at her chest.

  “It’s you,” he spat with disgust. “The Sola. I’m going to be the man who kills the Sola.”

  “No, please,” she begged him not to kill her. His obvious but baseless disdain for her was palpable. He wanted her dead, intended to kill her where she stood. She froze temporarily, her arms reduced to useless, leaden appendages at her sides, unable to summon powers she knew she possessed.

  “Die witch!” he screamed. But as he squeezed the trigger, a sickening thud echoed through the air, and a stunned looked screwed up his features. The shots he’d fired zipped past her and missed her completely. The man dropped his pistol and fell forward to the ground, a pickax lodged in the back of his skull. Behind him, Luke stood with a look of utter horror on his face.

  “H-he, he was going to kill you,” Luke stammered, his bottom lip quivering. He ambled toward the man’s fallen body; his eyes pinned on the pickax. “What have I done?” he asked and began to breathe unusually rapidly.

  Arianna paused for a moment, her mind struggling to process what had just happened. A man she’d never seen before had attempted to kill her, had revealed her to be a witch, but her boyfriend had killed him first. Her visions, her newfound powers, her title, the fact that she was being hunted, all of it closed in on her. Death surrounded her at every turn, and all were deaths that she was responsible for in some way, shape or form. She wanted to drop to the ground, squeeze her eyes shut and cover her ears with her hands and will all of it away. But Arianna knew that was not an option. She needed to stay in control of herself. She needed to protect Luke and survive. She needed to find the other gunman.

  Refusing to succumb to the hysteria that hounded her, she closed the distance between her and Luke and gripped both of his arms. His skin felt cool and clammy and his eyes refused to focus on her. “You had no choice but to kill him, Luke. You saved my life,” she told him.

  “I-I didn’t need to kill him, though,” Luke replied dazedly. “I killed him. He was alive just a second ago and now he’s dead…because of me!” He pulled away from her and raked both hands through his hair before covering his face with his hands and squatting near the dead man’s feet. “Oh my God!” he cried.

  She knelt beside him, all too aware of the fact that the other shooter remained, lurking in the early morning shadows. “Luke, look at me,” she said and cupped the sides of his face. “You had no choice,” she repeated firmly. “He was going to kill me, kill us.”

  As the words fell from he
r lips, a man emerged from the mistiness. Both of them spun to find the muzzled of a gun pointed at them.

  “I have you now, witch,” the man said and did not hesitate to fire.

  Arianna saw the instantaneous flash of the shots being fired and screamed, “No!”

  A bolt of energy rushed through her body to her fingertips and branched like electricity. She felt the heated streak flare from her fingertips and leave her body in a burst of blue light like lightning and lurch outward toward the man. His bullets halted and fell to the dew-covered ground and the man pitched backward, stunned. His gun fell as well. The man did not venture toward her. He remained where he was, immobilized, his face a mask of shock.

  Arianna entire body trembled, humming and buzzing with energy she could barely harness. “Why are you trying to kill us?” she demanded of him, her voice shrill and frantic.

  “I’m trying to kill you,” the man said and pointed a meaty finger at her. “Not him.”

  “What? Why?” she asked, but in the dark recesses of her mind, she knew why he wanted to kill her.

  “You are a soldier of evil,” he spat. “Killing you is the Lord’s work. I am doing the Lord’s work.”

  “You are the one who’s evil!” she screamed at him.

  “No!” he shouted back. “I am a servant of God!”

  Arianna took a step toward the man, wanted to look upon his face for a feature or characteristic familiar to her. He wore glasses; that much she could see. But perhaps he had a birthmark or freckle, something that would set him apart from others. As she approached, however, his face faded temporarily, replaced instead with the orange-red glow of flames. Heat swathed her once again and flames crept up her body. Her arms and legs were bound and she suffered. But through the thick smoke that billowed all around her, a face appeared, and it did not belong to man with the charred and scarred flesh. This man’s head was cloaked in a heavy, dark fabric that edged his pasty skin. Beady, black irises gaped at her from behind wire-rimmed glasses. The flames snaked up her body and began to melt away her skin. She wanted to cry out, desperately needed to, but under the watchful, maleficent gaze of the beady eyed man, she could not. When finally, the flames engulfed her fully and she felt life begin to escape her, she saw that the man smiled, a satisfied, self-righteous smile.

  Blackness teased at the edges of Arianna’s vision as she relived her friend’s final moments.

  “You were there when she was murdered,” she said through her teeth recognizing the beady bespectacled gaze of the man before her. “You watched her die. You watched a sixteen year-old girl burn to death, and you enjoyed it!” she hissed and felt ire roil and swell inside of her.

  “She was evil!” he countered.

  His words set off a firestorm of reactions within her. Every cell in her body began to teem with anger, anger unlike she’d ever felt before. It rose like molten lava, pressing and surging, brimming so closely to the surface of her flesh, her skin felt heated. She struggled to suppress the urge that raged inside of her, the powerful need to punish the man who’d tortured and murdered her friend.

  “She was the devil’s minion!” he offered a final charge. And with his words, she erupted.

  “She was my friend!” Arianna screamed in a voice that sounded foreign to her own ears.

  “Arianna, no!” she heard Luke cry out from a distant remote place. His voice called to her, weak and muddled as if she were submerged in a vast ocean and he ashore. She was gone. Her vision was awash in crimson, her body adrift on a blood-red tide. She felt her arms shoot out in front of her and she watched through a scarlet veil as the man who’d brutalized her friend levitated several inches off the ground. He shrieked in terror, seemed to sense his fate, but she did not care. She felt a charge rush through her arms to her fingertips before leaving her body, then saw the man’s head and neck twist sharply, violently, to one side. She heard a sickly snap and witnessed his head flop and loll to his chest. His lifeless body dropped to the grass, motionless. Arianna dropped her hands to her sides and felt drained. Color slowly returned to the world around her, driving out the crimson. A voice called to her, a panicked voice; Luke’s voice.

  “Why did you do that?” Luke cried. “How did you do that?”

  “H-h-he killed her. I saw him, he enjoyed it,” she replied in a trembling voice.

  Luke took a tentative step back, away from her, away from the two dead bodies that littered the backyard of the Andrews house.

  “I don’t understand,” he said in horror. “I just don’t understand what happened here. It just, it’s just, all so unbelievable.” He raked his hands through his hair and rested them at the nape of his neck. “Y-y-you killed him, without even touching him. What the fuck are you?”

  His words stung. She had not intended to tell him of her powers, much less example them for him, but had used them twice in his presence, nevertheless. The first time had been to rescue his sister, and herself, from a brutal attack, and this time, she’d had avenged her friend’s murder and had prevented them from being exterminated in the process. Of course, he had no knowledge of the truth of what had happened at the nightclub with Stephanie. But he had witnessed everything that had occurred moments earlier. Arianna swallowed hard against the lump that had formed in her throat. Her heart clenched and felt unnaturally heavy in her chest. He saw her for what she was: a monster.

  Luke looked at her and held her gaze for the briefest of seconds. Usually, his eyes nearly sparkled, their silvery hue shimmering and dancing with delight, with warmth. But when he looked upon her now, his eyes had hardened, their silvery shade replaced with steel, cold and mirthless. In the fleeting second that he looked at her, Arianna knew that nothing between them would ever be the same again.

  Tears burned her eyes, and the lump in her throat grew so large she worried words would not escape her lips.

  “We have to leave now, Luke,” Arianna managed, her voice a hoarse whisper. “We have to get out of here.”

  He nodded mechanically and his eyes refused to meet hers again. She turned and walked toward the front of the house, toward Luke’s pickup truck. The only way she knew he followed, was the soft shuffle of his feet echoing behind her.