Dark One: One for Sorrow... (The Khiara Banning Series Book 1) (34 page)

There is no voice this time.

Usually there’s a voice telling me to choose something, or I end up in front of this man made of shadows and I am not aware that I’m dreaming. But I
know
that this is a dream. I don’t remember going to be, though…I remember sitting on the couch watching infomercials with Cael, laughing like we always do. And now I’m here. But logically I have to be dreaming

I just can’t get out of it.

Vaguely, I can hear somebody speaking to me, but I don’t understand the words. It sounds like a strange humming. I keep walking down the hall, trying to find a way out.

Time doesn’t feel like it’s passing as it should. I feel like I’ve been here for days, but logically it’s only been minutes, or maybe an hour…I don’t exactly know how long dreams last.

And then, suddenly I’m in front of an old, cracked mirror ignoring the hallway that’s still stretching out to the left of me, and…wait, is that Cael? Why is he banging on the mirror? Doesn’t he know that it’s going to shatter? What if…can I talk to him somehow?

The mirror’s reflection only shows him standing there in darkness, illuminated as if there is only a small light overhead, banging on the mirror and soundlessly yelling.

“Cael,”
I whisper, trying the idea out while reaching out and placing my palm flat against the mirror.

“Khiara?”
he stops banging and his reflection ripples under my hand like a pool of water for a moment, fading in and out of view.

“You took the keys, and I didn’t know what to do so I just followed you to the car but I couldn’t let you drive, obviously…what’s going on?”
he questions, his eyes searching my own.

“What do you mean I ‘took the keys’?”

“I mean you took the keys from my pants. They were on the floor. You just got out of the bed, grabbed my pants and-”

I cut him off.
“Wait, what? I don’t remember going to bed.”

He looks conflicted for a moment and says hoarsely, “
What do you remember?”

“Watching old Billy Mays infomercials and laughing.”

He frowns, and then swears.
“Fuck,”
he says.
“If I’d have known…”

And then something hits me.
“Cael,”
I ask, suddenly frantic, because if what I’m thinking is right, I don’t know how to feel.
“Why were we in bed?”

“We were sleeping,”
is his careful response. His face has become composed – too closed off to read.

“Your pants were on the floor,”
I say it slowly.
“And we were in the bed. You didn’t mention me getting dressed. You just said that I took the keys and started walking to the car.”

His face is bright red when he realizes what I mean.
“Oh God, no. No. We I mean, I, I mean, we uhh…didn’t…”

I’m relieved as all hell. I let out a sigh and sit down on the kind of ground.
“Take a deep breath. We didn’t have sex. That’s all I wanted to know.”

“Khiara!”
he sounds scandalized that I even brought up the idea.
“I mean we kissed and stuff, but no. No.”

“And stuff?”
Now I’m just being cruel.

“N-nothing we haven’t done before!”
he cries, stuffing his hands in his hair.
“We just made out…a lot.”
He looks as if he’s about to pass out.

“Why can’t you remember? Oh man is that considered sexual assault? I feel like I should know, but I have no experience in this kind of thing, I mean –”

I put him out of his misery.
“It isn’t sexual assault. Calm down. I just…wanted to remember if we’d…you know. Anyway, how the hell do I get out of this place?”

“The car?”
he asks, quizzically, looking around.

“Cael,”
my heart does a weird flop that makes me think I’m about to vomit it right out.
“How are we talking right now?”

He frowns.
“With our mouths?”
And then he realizes what I mean,
“Oh. Not through our minds…whoa, wait, you’re not awake?”

“No? I don’t think so…I’m in my own…head?”

“Khiara, you’re talking to me right now. We’re… in the car. You’ve been making that weird face the whole time…holy shit.”
He pauses. Then,
“You’ve been making that face the whole time!”

“What weird face?”
I ask, because despite the fact that there are mirrors all around me and I can see my reflection just fine in…well, most of them…and I haven’t been making any faces that I’d deem as weird. Terrified and confused, maybe, but not weird.
“I feel awake. I’m staring at you through a mirror…I’m in that hallway I always dream about. I can see you as if you were just standing on the other side, I can see your movements and…”

“Okay,”
he says. “
We’re communicating through our minds…but also through our bodies. Never happened before. I guess it’s our connection.”

“Guess so,”
I mumble, standing back up.

Cael is beginning to say,
“So if you’re –”
but suddenly, his image ripples again, and then disappears completely. Suddenly the hallway stretches out before me again, and I’m back where I started.

“Oh crap,”
I whisper.

“Choose which way to go,”
says the voice that I’d almost forgotten was part of this stupid dream.

Since there is only one way to go, I start walking forward, down the long corridor. I catch glimpses of myself in some of the mirrors that I pass, and I realize with a start that I’m only in one of Cael’s shirts and my underwear. I fleetingly wonder why I’m not cold, but then remember that I’m still technically sitting in the car with Cael, and right now I’m just seeing things inside my own head.

Still, this is too strange.

The hallway is a lot longer than usual, and suddenly I come to the end of one hallway and the beginning of two- one goes right and one goes left. They both look equally as foreboding.

The voice purrs from all around me.
“Choose, child.”

“And if I don’t?”
I ask, suddenly feeling a sense of dread.
“Or what if I choose wrong?”

“Little Dark One,”
says the voice.
“You have to choose. And if you chose wrong, I cannot help you. That is all I will say.”

“Who are you?”
My voice cracks on the last word.

Her voice is soft an almost musical when she says,
“You know who I am, child.”

I go down the left corridor. Something inside of me makes the choice without my brain’s permission, and suddenly I’m at another corridor exactly like the one I just left. I go right, this time. The voice has disappeared.

I go down three more of these strange hallway branches, following my gut each time, until finally I’m back in front of the mirror I was talking to Cael through, and the voice whispers,
“Good. Child, death is inevitable. But if you continue down the right path, so is life.”

And suddenly, I’m gasping for air, choking on it at the same time I’m desperately trying to fill my lungs with it and I am so, so cold. My lungs feel as if I’d been submerged in water for far too long, and I’d begun to drown, my body having given up, when suddenly I’ve been pulled to safety.

“Death is inevitable,”
are the last words I hear before blacking out.

Twenty-Nine

I wake to the sound of Cael’s terrified voice. “Khiara for crying out loud what is going on?”

I get the sense that he’s been trying to wake me up for quite some time now because though fear is lacing his voice, so is exasperation.

I open my eyes, slowly but surely, and see that we’re still in the car, but it’s too dark outside, like there was a power failure and all of the streetlights went out. But then my eyes begin to focus on the surroundings outside, and I realize that we’re not in front of Cael’s building.

We’re pulled over on a dirt road somewhere in the middle of the woods.

“What the hell?” I ask. “Where are we?”

Cael’s covered me up in the sweater he keeps in the backseat of his car, and though the air vents are blowing warm air into the car I’m still freezing seeing as I’m in nothing but his shirt and my underwear.

“You told me where to go,” he says, baffled. “You kept saying ‘left, right,’ like you knew where you were going…we’re only twenty minutes from town.”

I stare at him for a second and it comes out harsher than intended when I say, “And you just listened to me? You just followed your practically comatose girlfriend’s directions.”

Cael furrows his brows and sucks his bottom lip. “You weren’t comatose. You looked like you’d come out of whatever it was that…was up before, with the talking with our bodies and minds and the creepy face –”

In an effort to calm him down, I lean over and kiss his cheek. “You’re starting to talk like a mixture of me and Cara, you know, all rambling and awkwardness. Not very angelic or old.
Also
, I said practically.”

Cael grumbles a bit until I kiss his cheek again, and then sighs. “Okay then. So, I’m assuming you don’t know why we’re here do you?”

I explain what happened inside of my head, and he listens with equal parts curiosity and apparent fear. The whole time, he absently runs his hands through his hair every so often, and when he catches himself doing it the third time, he smiles sheepishly at me.

When I’m done my explanation, he simply whispers, “Morrigan.”

My nose crinkles, and I think back to the voice. “I guess it is her. She called me ‘Dark One’ but I have no idea what that means exactly.”

Cael shrugs. “I guess it’s to do with the curse.”

“Must be,” I breathe, sitting back in my seat and stifling yet another shiver.

But then something distracts me. I catch a movement just outside the window, and upon closer inspection it’s just a crow that has stayed behind somehow, and is drifting lazily upon the icy wind, darting through the trees. I follow it with my eyes for a second longer, before suddenly opening the door without my brain’s permission.

“What are you doing now?”

“I need to follow that bird.” The words sound strange, just tumbling out of my mouth, but there it is. I have to follow it.

Not of my own accord, I end up walking through the snow and down this dirt road, past Cael as he swears and grabs at me to stop me (I know he’s afraid to hurt me because he has the strength to simply pick me up and carry me back to the car). It’s weird. I’m not in a daze, exactly, but I’m certainly walking down a dark dirt road in my underwear, an oversized shirt and a flimsy sweater around my shoulders, and with my sockless feet in boots that are quickly becoming soaked, so I must be in some sort of odd state.