AllFreeNovel
Share Us
On the floor, along the wall, there were a lot of stacks of books. I should have gotten book shelves for my bedroom years ago, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had never been allowed to have much in my room as a child, and I had never been given much, so I hadn’t had things to clog up my space with. As I looked around the room I’d occupied for years now, I knew it was something that would always stick with me. The rest of the house could be stuffed to the gills with furniture, large televisions and whatever the rest of them wanted, but this room,my room, would always be the bare minimum.
Ariel and I had more in common than she knew, and the knowledge made me incredibly sad. I didn’t want that for her. I wanted her to be surrounded by nice things, and to have everything she’d wanted.
The problem with this was she wasn’t the type of person to come out and say something when she wanted anything. The guys and I had agreed to just buy her things whenever we felt like it and she would simply have to suck it up. I had never met a person harder to give things to than Ariel. She was a nut, and always so damn stubborn. I mean, weren’t girls supposed to like it when their boyfriends bought them shit? At least, I thought they were. The rest of the guys had agreed with me on it, except for the twins, they’d told me to back off, and were firm believers that when she wanted something or needed something she would have no problem speaking up about it. Part of me wanted to agree with them. The girl had a serious mouth on her that she had no problem popping off whenever the mood struck her (and it struck her often enough), but being mouthy and unafraid to speak your mind were a whole lot different. She had never before been allowed to have wants and needs; she’d been conditionednotto have them. It would take time, I knew, before she got comfortable enough to ask for things, if she ever did. The twins did not share my belief. They were wrong. I knew her better than that, better than they did. I would never say such a thing to them, but that didn’t make it any less true, I simply didn’t want to hurt their feelings.
The one thing I knew she hadn’t put up much of a fuss over receiving had been the tarot card paintings Ty and I had put up in her room at Dash’s house. I would have given her all of mine if I thought she’d have accepted them. It’s not like I was doing much with them, they were in my closet collecting dust. I had offered them to Ty, but he’d outright refused to take them, and had been offended by the offer. I should just put them in the damn storage unit with the rest of my family’s bullshit, but for some damned reason I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I got a sick feeling in my gut every time I’d tried. So, I left them in the closet with the dust bunnies.
I rubbed a hand across my tired eyes as I lay back on the bed. I didn’t have to look at myself in the mirror to know my eyes were bloodshot, or that I had unattractive dark smudges. I hadn’t been sleeping well for months now. One thing kept piling on top of the fucked-up disaster that had come before it and, for the first time in my life, I was getting close to hitting my breaking point. In all honesty, I had never thought I’d had a breaking point. I didn’t like knowing I had one now, it made me feel weak and vulnerable. Two things I very much did not enjoy feeling; they reminded me too much of the person my mother had been. Dear Old Mom, the ghost of her wasn’t something I ever wanted to think about. It wasn’t anything against her, I just felt the past was best left dead and buried; it did no good to anyone to be remembered. Cold, but true.
I forced my body to relax, to go limp on top of the soft blanket that covered my bed. I wanted to sleep for the sake of being able to close my eyes and to give my brain a long overdue break, but I had something more important to do.
I had been trying at different times throughout the daylight hours and the night time hours. No such luck so far. Either he was shielding like a motherfucker or the man never slept. Had to be the first, everyone eventually had to sleep whether we wanted to or not; our bodies demanded it of us. I refused to think it had anything to do with me being out of practice. Since Ariel had come into my life, I’d been slacking on a lot of things, but it wasn’t like dream walking was something I’d likely forget how to do with lack of use. Truth be told, it was a skill you learned through practice, and most people were incapable of doing it. Tyson and I weren’t most people, it would seem, and neither was Ariel. I hadn’t tested her yet, but I’d bet my life she could walk through dreams that didn’t belong to her. Unheard of with someone who’d never had any training before, but there she was. I had a feeling she was going to be capable of doing a whole lot of things she shouldn’t be able to do.
Just another reason the Council was going to want her. I would have to do everything in my power to make sure she stayed with us and didn’t get lured away by the Council. Adrian was trying to hook her deep, and I didn’t appreciate it, or him, for that matter. What a fucking douche.
A big part of getting her to stay would be finding her bio dad before the Council did, if they were really looking for him at all. Adrian had Ariel doing his dirty work for him. As far as I could remember, the Council never encouraged people to use Blood Magic, because things could go wrong so fast with it. And now here Adrian was, a member of said Council, and not only was he encouraging Ariel to use Blood Magic, but the asshole had actually showed her how it was done. Something about the whole thing didn’t sit right with me, and I still thought they knew something about Rain, and they were hiding it from us.
Ariel was bound to get hurt, and the best way to avoid it was to find Rain before they did. And then I would have to worry about her getting hurt in a different way.
I sighed as I shoved that thought firmly to the back of my mind where it belonged, there’d be plenty of time to worry about it later.
With little effort on my part, I closed my eyes and blanked my mind. Years of practice meant I was able to concentrate on nothing but the darkness behind my closed eyelids.
There was a time when my mind would have fought and rebelled against this, and it would have taken me hours to relax enough to be about to fall asleep. My father hadn’t been a very patient man, and the only time he ever wanted to pay attention to me was when he had been teaching me how to practice our craft. He’d been a creative bastard, and I was no lover of pain, so it hadn’t taken me long to master the art of blanking my mind and drifting off to sleep.
Today, it took longer than it usually would have, and it didn’t help matters, because I had to work even harder not to get frustrated with myself, because it would have taken even longer if I’d gotten upset with myself.
Failure was never an option.
Finally, my subconscious faded away, leaving me fast asleep.
Everything was gray with fog as I struggled with the heavy weight of my body as it tried to keep me anchored when I didn’t want to be. Something wanted to hold me back, keep me tied to my physical form. I pulled away from it, breaking free of the ties that bound me to that form. My essence moved through the thick gray fog, searching… Seeking.
What had I come here looking for? I hadn’t been thinking of anything specific when I’d drifted away, and it’s the reason I had almost remained grounded and unable to slip away.
I was here for a reason, I just needed to remember what that reason was…
Not a what, but a whom.
Who was I here looking for? To what purpose had I come here to seek out another being?
Ariel’s face flashed in my mind. Her green eyes were darker than usual, almost colder, if her eyes were ever capable of being outright cold.
No, not her. I knew where she was, and I no longer needed to seek her out in her dreams to find her.
A different pair of green eyes flashed, and my heart skipped a beat at the sight of them because they were so similar to Ariel’s, only these eyes were cold. A darkness lurked in their depths, one that set my mind to unease.
Rain, the name whispered through my mind.
These were the eyes of the man who’d sired Ariel. The eyes of her biological father. Only they weren’t the eyes of the young man from the pictures I’d seen of him. These eyes were different, off, darker, if you will. These were the eyes of who he was now, the man he’d become long after those photos had captured his image.
They were real because he was real.
Fear shot down my spine, making my entire body tingle with unease and anticipation.
This was new, and it had never happened to me before.
Dream walking, which had always been revered for the rare talent the Council had claimed it to be, suddenly no longer seemed rare in the slightest.
