by M. S. Parker
“One girl for one month,” Bruce had told me once. “That’s all the energy I have.”
I'd hated that about him, how he made me feel special while at the same time assuring me that he had no intentions of making something long-term work.
Then he'd made it official on my sixteenth birthday, moving us from a casual friendship to an exclusive couple.
Except now I wondered how much of his original attitude had always been beneath the surface, hovering in the background. How much of it was still there.
The teenagers disappeared, disintegrating in the same cloud of smoke that had taken him before, and for a few minutes, I was surrounded by nothing but darkness. I floated about uneasily, my eyes waiting for the next set of images, memories to fill in the blankness about me. I felt pressure on my shoulders again, as if someone was trying to shake me awake, and I shook it off. In the distance, I heard gunfire, loud and threatening, and a shiver ran through me. Something exploded farther away, and suddenly I felt hands grab me by the arms, pulling at me, my body moving through the empty space around me as if on their own.
“We need to find shelter,” I heard a man's voice say, and I quickly looked about to locate the source of the voice.
To my right, something flickered into view, hazy at first, a figure I couldn’t recognize. A man. I squinted for a better look, but he quickly disappeared as the hands on my arms loosened.
I was floating again.
“Go slow.”
My voice this time.
I watched as my bedroom assembled itself around me. I watched the teenager in my bed, under the covers, with Bruce on top of me. I remembered that night clearly, the first time we'd slept together, a week before senior prom. My parents had been visiting my aunt in Connecticut, and Bruce had come over to spend the night.
Despite the awkwardness, despite the initial pain, it had been a good night. Many of my friends told me that the first time was never good, but my first time had been okay. The touch of his hand, the heat between us, the way his lips had caressed me. For the first time since we'd become a couple, I felt a true connection between the two of us. It made the wrong between us better.
“Marry me.”
He'd proposed the next morning, two high school kids sitting at the kitchen table in our underwear, sipping coffee as we smiled at each other. It had been a strange proposal, sudden, out of the blue, and we'd laughed it off as us being too young, but Bruce had continued to make comments about our future as if it'd been set. When he proposed for real a little over a year later, I'd accepted without a second thought.
My father had been against it, voicing his opinion about Bruce loud and clear – sometimes in front of Bruce – but eventually, I'd made him come around enough to at least be civil to my fiancé.
Not that I would've changed my mind. I could be stubborn when it suited me.
The scene from my past disintegrated, and I was left alone again with my thoughts, floating in my endless nothingness, wondering when it would end. There was more gunfire, another explosion, but this time, no hands pulled me.
Without warning, the darkness around me begin to dissipate, replaced with bright colors of white and blue and yellow. I saw images I couldn’t make out, flashing quickly, randomly, appearing and disappearing just as fast.
An old woman with grandchildren sitting in a circle around her as they smiled at her.
A man walked into a hospital room, and my heart fluttered.
Bruce standing by my side, his smile sad, his face aged.
The images became sensations. Sounds.
Someone held my hand and squeezed.
A sweet and gentle kiss.
A soft and loving touch.
A hug.
A scream.
A baby’s cry.
A child’s laugh.
It was all so sudden, so overwhelming that I could barely breathe.
The hands were on my shoulders again, pulling, this time, more desperately, and I lashed out. Hands grabbed my wrists and pinned my arms down. Someone hissed at me to calm down. I tried to move again, and the hands tightened.
I was being shoved, as if a force had taken my entire body and was pushing it toward something. I felt the friction of the air against my body as the force picked up speed, and then suddenly, it was like I was being catapulted through the darkness, unable to stop myself. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Then, just as quickly as it started, it stopped.
I opened my eyes.
4
There’s this place between sleep and fully awake where, as a child, I'd often found myself lost, my mind trying to decide whether it should come into focus or just slip back into slumber. I hadn’t felt that feeling in a long time. Morning in the military didn't allow for that sort of reflection.
I felt it now though.
It took me a few minutes, long minutes that I relished in, but soon my mind made its decision and decided waking up was the best option. A part of me felt cheated out of some much needed rest, but I opened my eyes regardless.
When the world finally came into focus, the first thing I registered were the stars. There were millions of them shining in the sky above me, a tapestry of little lights that looked like a large connect-the-dots picture that was begging to be drawn. I'd never seen this many before, not even in the desert.
I remembered a time when my father had taken me and Ennis stargazing, something about being able to find our way if we ever got lost. I hadn’t paid much attention then, being more concerned with the upcoming junior dance than I was with stars. I found myself wishing I'd paid better attention, because what I was seeing not only amazed me but brought back childhood memories that seemed a little incomplete.
“One day, Honor,” my father had said, “these little dots in the sky might be your salvation.”
He was always saying things like that, my father, and I had always scoffed at it. He was a philosophical man, a part about his personality I'd never understood, especially with the military background. My mother said it was that part of him that had helped her see past the chiseled personality and no-bullshit attitude he usually carried around.
I loved the man, but to me, he would always be Peter Daviot, ex-army, the man who still scared the shit out of Bruce. After what Bruce had just pulled, maybe he deserved to be scared.
I blinked a few times as my eyes watered, the soft breeze around me picking up, brushing some hair into my eyes. My neck clench when I tried to move it, the sharp pain shooting upwards and giving me an instant headache that made me groan. I felt the back of my head, my hand pressing softly on a bump there that pulsated at my touch. I winced, hoping the nasty thing didn’t mean I had a concussion.
In an instant, it all came back to me. The drive down the highway, the sound of the Chelsea River, the accident, the skidding, the crashing. Images of it all flashed through my mind, and for several seconds, I panicked. I felt around me, my hands touching soft grass, wet with the night’s dew...and then I wondered where everyone was.
There were no sirens nearby, no screaming or shouting, no hands on my head or under my body, trying to carry me to safety. It was like I’d been thrown out of the car and had landed where no one was looking. Was I thrown out of the car? I couldn’t remember.
I tried to push myself up, but the headache mixed with dizziness and the world around me spun out of control. I closed my eyes and tried desperately to fight the vertigo as I laid back down, wondering just how much damage the accident had done. The bump on my head was definitely enough to make me think twice about immediately inspecting the rest of my body.
My mind went back to the accident, how the truck had slammed into my car, how I'd felt my car do somersaults before stopping dead. It was a miracle I was alive, really, but it still bothered me that I was lying out in the open with no help. I didn't remember being thrown, but it was the only thing that made sense. Except I couldn’t hear any sirens or anything else for that matter. It was like the world had forgotten
about me.
A muffled gunshot made my eyes snap open, and I was back in Iraq. I sat up immediately, ready for the worst. My entire body screamed in protest. My head, angered at the sudden movement, felt like I'd taken a jackhammer to my skull. No matter what happened with the car, my body was warning me that I was in no way ready to face whatever it was I was getting ready to face. But, the adrenaline had kicked in, and the pain was slowly fading into the more manageable background.
I got up slowly, pushing first onto my knees before I attempted to stand straight. Severe pain shot through my leg, and I quickly found myself on the ground again, the fire in my ankle scorching as I shut my eyes in frustration.
Dammit!
“I am quite surprised you are able to stand.”
My head snapped around as I realized for the first time that I wasn’t alone.
I couldn’t see him clearly, and it was definitely a him. The voice was masculine, with a hint of some sort of accent I didn't recognize. It was dark despite the starlight, and the corner he sat in threw shadows across him that made it impossible for me to discern any features.
He shifted, one leg moving over the other as the coat he wore seemed to flutter about him. A hat covered his head, broad-brimmed and rolled up on one side. What looked like a cane protruded from under his coat, and I could see the tops of a pair of strange-looking boots.
He looked like he had been on his way to a costume party.
I rolled over so that I sat up in front of him, my eyes squinting as I tried to get a good look at him. He cocked his head and pointed at me.
“Quite an unusual choice of attire,” he said. “Where are you from?”
The accent was some kind of British and would have been exotically appealing if I hadn't started to feel the adrenaline ebb and the pain return.
“Are you the one on guard duty?” I asked, my voice so raspy I barely recognized myself. I wondered if he had volunteered to stay with me until the medics arrived. Maybe they hadn't wanted to move me just yet. Maybe I'd rolled down an embankment. My brain was still trying to make sense of it all.
“No,” he said, sounding amused. “I am simply waiting until morning.”
I frowned and coughed, my throat burning as I tried to speak. “Out here?”
“The safest place for now.”
Great, I thought. They left me with a complete lunatic.
I tried to get up again and groaned in pain, my ankle letting me know that moving about was not a good idea. I winced as I dragged myself to a nearby tree and leaned my head against the bark. I looked about, trying to discern which way the highway was but couldn’t see anything in the dark. Where were the lights?
“You seem lost.”
I fought the urge to say something snarky in response.
“Do you need anything to drink?” he asked.
I hadn’t thought about it until he mentioned it, and I suddenly noticed that I was parched. I nodded, not trusting my voice again.
He stood slowly, then walked out into the dim light of the stars, allowing me to get a better look at him. Damn, he was good-looking. Pale curls brushed his shoulders as he handed me his flask, and I found myself staring into a pair of intelligent eyes whose color was undetectable in the darkness. He frowned at me, a look that was less than friendly, and I wondered how long he had been sitting there, waiting for me to wake up.
The man was definitely dressed for some sort of event, his overcoat falling well below the knees, two rows of buttons down the front, the lapels lying loose and barely hiding the breast coat labels below. He wore a pair of breeches over stockings that went up to his knees, the side buckles the loudest sound in the darkness.
I took a drink from the flask, instantly spitting it out when the strong taste hit my tongue. I'd never tasted anything like it.
“I don’t have a lot of that,” he said, sitting down again. “I would prefer to save a bit for the remainder of the night.”
I took another drink, winced as I swallowed, and then closed the flask again. I looked down as I felt something rough against the pads of my fingers. The initials carved into it were easy to read, even in the dim light.
“GL?” I rasped out.
“Gracen Lightwood,” he explained.
I wondered if the accent was real. I knew there were nuances to British accents that specified where people were from, but I'd never been able to tell the difference.
“And you?” he asked.
“Daviot,” I replied and began to cough again. My throat hurt like a bitch.
“That sounds French,” Gracen said.
I shrugged. “American, born and raised.”
“Born and raised?” He repeated the phrase back to me like he'd never heard it before.
Okay, maybe he wasn't as smart as I first thought.
“I was a military brat for the first few years of my life, so I was all over before my father decided to move us out to the suburbs after he retired,” I managed to say. “What about you?”
He was quiet for a minute, then leaned forward, his elbows resting near his breeches buckles as he tipped his hat up a bit.
“Is this how all natural born colonists speak?”
Wow, he was really going all out for this role.
I looked around me again, my eyes adjusting to the dark, the terrain unfamiliar to me. In the distance, I heard more gunfire, a few shots that echoed across the night sky, but there was something strange about them I couldn't quite place. I squinted and tried to make out where the highway was, but couldn’t see anything.
“Where are we?” I asked, starting to get nervous.
“We are outside Boston,” he said. “I found you lying a bit off that way,” he pointed East, “in a most peculiar fashion, I might add. You took me quite by surprise.”
I frowned. So he wasn’t babysitting me after all. Apparently, no one even knew I was here. A flash of fear went through me. I could handle myself, and I wasn't a small woman, but I estimated him to be at least six-four. And I was injured.
“Where’s the highway?” I asked, perking my ears, hoping to hear the sounds of distant vehicles, something to give me an idea of where I was and how I could get away from the man sitting across from me.
“The highway?”
“Yes, the highway,” I said, my tone sharpening before another coughing fit silenced me for a moment. “I was in an accident, and I was probably thrown out of my car. I need to get back there.”
He was staring at me now like I was the one with a few screws loose.
“Oh, come on, drop the gimmick already, would you,” I rasped. “I’m beat up pretty bad, and I probably need medical attention.”
“I did not see any blood, nor did any limbs appear broken,” he said. “Aside from your ankle, I am sure you are in fine health.”
“Really?” I didn't bother to hide my skepticism.
“Before I pulled you here, I ensured nothing was broken.”
“You pulled me here?”
“I could not leave you out in the field like that, could I?”
“What field?”
“For God’s sake, man, calm down,” he snapped. “Keep your voice down.”
That was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs. No matter how friendly he appeared to be, something was off here. The hairs on the back of my neck, on my arms, were standing up. Electricity zinged across my nerves, crackled in the air.
“I appreciate your help, but if you'll just point me to the EMTs, they'll take care of me from here.”
“I can barely make sense of anything you are saying.” His voice was tinged with annoyance. “And quite honestly, your level of gratefulness borders on rudeness.”
I was being rude?
“Like I said, thanks for what you did, but I need to get home. My father’s probably worried sick, and I don’t even have my phone on me to call him. So, if you don’t mind, just point me in the right direction, and I’ll find a way to wobble over.”
Gracen chuckled softly, and I wondered if I'd run into some sort of serial killer.
“You are a quite amusing, young man,” he said. “I am quite unfamiliar to the linguistics of what you are saying, but I assure you, if your father is worried about you, being outside Boston right now is probably best.”
I hesitated, briefly wondering if I should be insulted that he was mistaking me for a man. My hair was down to my chin, but Gracen's hair was about the same length. While his was some light shade of blond, mine was the color of ebony. I'd been told I had unique eyes, an almost silvery gray color, and I'd always thought of myself as relatively attractive. Him mistaking me for a man put a bit of a hole in that belief, though, I supposed, my features were more androgynous than feminine, especially with all the dirt and sweat on my face. And my hoarse voice. I decided I'd take it. If this guy was some sort of serial killer, I didn't want to give him any new ideas.
A soft breeze picked up and blew into my clothes, causing me to shiver. I pulled up my legs and pressed my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around them as I tried to stop the cold from doing more. He stood up and walked over, taking off his overcoat and handing it to me.
“It’s quite a surprise you hadn’t frozen to death out there,” he said, “what with the clothes you’re wearing. The fashion is new to me.”
“How about you help me up, and we find somewhere warmer?” I asked.
“I told you, we’re safer here,” he said.
The hair on my neck prickled again. “From what?”
“I could light a fire, but that would draw attention to us, and we don’t want that kind of attention.” He ignored my question. Sort of. “Not now. Not here.”
“What does that even mean?” I asked, incredibly annoyed.
“When was the last time you were in Boston?” he asked, frowning at me like I was from another planet.
“Six months ago,” I whispered.
