Legacy of the Defender (The Defender Series Book 1) (29 page)

Laughter
.  

Yet another pearl of wisdom out of the multiverse came to me from my first real debate, and I felt saner than I had ever felt in my life.  Feelings aside for Eryn, one thought returned to me like a sledgehammer striking the bell in my tower harder than before.  The residual gong resonated through my inner self.

The church tried to kill me, or one sanctioned by them, which means they knew something.  But what?

One conclusion remained.  Anything that happens is supposed to happen; this means that I was to be in a coma and supposed to awaken at this time.  It also hit me that survival for something bigger had to play a part.  Whatever that may be….and that priest would fail in his attempt to kill me.  My guard would never to drop again, not matter the cost or reason.

How was I supposed to sleep?

Too many thoughts at once made my brain hurt.  There was, of course, no sort of timeframe for me to figure out my role now.  Silently my thoughts turned to God or the universe for guidance.  There was something special about this situation.  It was impossible to ignore now.  I suddenly felt alone.  Everyone around me was a stranger.  The hospital called my parents; they were on vacation out of state.  It would take time to drive back…Even though I felt ignored as a child; I knew my mother would arrive eventually.

I felt my eyes getting heavy.  Images started to trickle into my head.  In the distant sounds rolled over hills that now formed in front of me as if my mind simply brought them into existence.  A ringing sound coming from a far off place echoed all around.  It sounded like a battle was in progress.  The chaotic sounds, like cries of pain, rage, and fear intermixed with the sounds of clashing steel.  I found myself able to look around at my surroundings.  It was a valley, very tight walls on either side and I was somehow moving through it.

I came to a small cliff.  My hands reached holds and there was a sense of rising up as I scaled the wall.  Strange armor adorned my body.  It was not like anything I had seen and felt like cloth.  With a certain amount of speed, I reached the top and snuck along near some rocks.  My body felt very close to the earth, and it was very dark.  I felt myself peek around a large stone to see a large army on the other side and down a mountainside.  The army assembled in front of a great wall.  By its shadow was some sort of castle or keep.  Creatures shouted in a language I could not understand. 

I looked at my hands again.  This time I held twin swords covered in some sort of blood like ichor.  The blades curved but not like blades I had ever seen.  They were neither scimitars nor oriental blades; but something altogether different.  The viscous ichor dripped from the leading edge and fell to the ground.  The smell of it suddenly caught my nose and it intoxicated me by its odor.  Brine like scent that had foulness to it whose origin escaped me assaulted my nostrils and right up to my brain.  The feeling or need to attack anything that stepped near me came on strong.  Suddenly, my blades passed through a monster leaving dark cuts.  It fell and began to disappear.  I looked closer. 

The smell got stronger.  Nudging it with a blade, I made the body rolled over.  It appeared to be a small monster.  I felt myself jump back in my mind, but my body did not move.  It stood there prodding once at the creature as if to ensure it was dead.  I

I shook my head.  The image exploded leaving me with a smell in my nose that gave me that euphoric punch drunk feeling.  The desire to fight, stab, and kill my opponents dominated me.  I wanted to sunder shields and wreck armor.  Yet no enemy stood near me to enact upon with my primal thoughts.

What the hell was happening?  These are not my thoughts, yet they feel familiar.

Panic arose inside me as a surge of energy hit me that must have been adrenaline and I got out of bed and walked over to the room.  Grabbing the doors, I tore the hinges away, ripping the door frame off completely.  A roar came from my lips that shook the room.  Orderlies fled down the hall and nurses ducking behind counters.  There was no control. 

A doctor ran by me and my hand grabbed him, lifting him high into the air.  My actions did not belong to me anymore and the feeling of freedom saturated my mind.  I could see him kicking and squirming as his eyes met mine.  His face looked exactly like the priest.  My hand cocked back to hit him.  Rage washed over me uncontrolled as I felt energy release within me and saw a flash of light.  Darkness followed and the idea came that maybe someone had hit me with some sort of strobe weapon to blind me.  My senses reeled as the room came to focus.

I was sitting in bed covered in sweat.  Fading light gave way to the clock on the wall whose gentle illumination did not light the room.  It was ticking as if it were inside of my head pounding like water onto my forehead, creating echoes in my mind.  Two thirty five barely showed on its stationary face.  I had fallen asleep again. 

Starting to get mad at myself did not help matters.  Defense while asleep was already an issue…and now this.  My hand began to itch.  Scratching it made the feeling more intense.  The wall was my focus.  As long as the stir crazy feelings preoccupied me, there was no relief from the sensation.  Soon, both hands felt it.  I felt depressions in my palms, and I held up my hands.

There was a pattern here, which looked symmetrical in both hands.  It appeared imbedded in my hand.  It was as if I had been holding something for a very long time.  My hands hurt from being in a seized state, like they had gripped something for dear life.  I opened and closed them, trying to loosen them up.  However, the feeling that something belonged there remained.  The metal bars on the side of the bed seemed to be calling to me.  Both hands grabbed onto the bed frame.  A satisfying feeling of cold steel rolled up my arms and made me smile.  The coolness not only felt at home, but also gave me a sense that something belonged there.  Had there been someone watching, they would likely have thought I was a lunatic.

My recent dreams popped into my head. 
Swords
.  I was holding them loosely yet maintained a grip.  I relaxed my hands and felt a shiver roll up my spine.  It felt so good.

Huh?

I heard a noise and looked up.  The door opened, and I was looking at Eryn, who was smiling as she walked in. 

“You’re early,” I said, not being able to wait until she was near me.

She looked at me puzzled.  “Its 8:05, Dietz” I glanced at the clock.  It had just been half past two.  I must have shown my surprise as the clock face indeed reflected her statement.

“Good morning.  I see you are still alive.  It is good to see you,” she said.

I smiled, almost a little embarrassed. 

“I have something to share with you,” she said.

XXI

Taking Chances

Fear takes hold at the strangest times. 

Something innocent sounds fine before you say it aloud, but to hear it spoken aloud changes the dynamic.  Eryn sat down on the bed and smiled at me.  I know that it was strange for her to do so, because a certain amount of professionalism needed to discourage the staff from forming attachments to patients.  I could see the slight unease in her eyes as she did so, but it was almost as if she sensed something within me had changed.  Or perhaps something within her was changing.

Her level of warmth was there, yet there seemed something new to it, a sort of tingling as she brushed my arm.  Whether or not that was intentional, my face must have glowed as radiant as the sun.  Childlike emotions became a lump in my throat.  My speech failed and panic rose over me like a ghost, freezing my muscles and making it impossible to speak.  This was not what I had envisioned at this moment as I was going to tell this woman I fancied her.  Cruelty was a word that came to mind.  There is no training you can learn that gives a man the courage to share his feelings with a woman.  My only comfort was I knew I was not the only man to feel this way in such situations.

I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and smiled with the confidence hoping for the confidence felt in my own mind.  A dry throat was the killer of good conversation, especially when I just gotten the nerve up to say something special to her.  Never in my life had I ever truly cared about someone so soon. Only a few days had gone by since I awoke.  Something in me drew me to the tenderness this
woman had for me and left me defenseless.  Words had to come out as if my very soul was bubbling up and the space inside of me had already expanded to make room.  It was about to bubble forth.  I was losing control.  My hand found hers.

She smiled and looked intently at me.  I took another slow breath and spoke.  “
A glorious thing I have seen today, when beauty so fair has touched me this way, when she enters the room there is a glow, I want to share this tenderness so.”

Silence took the room.  The sounds of the machines, the staff, or the birds that chirped playfully outside the window as they flew from tree to tree went quiet as if they knew what had just transpired.  Eryn stared at me with a shocked look that changed to a blank stare.  I knew this feeling for I was experiencing it now, yet mine was more like terror because this was one of those defining moments for a man.

She gasped. 

Seconds passed as the tension grew.  My senses tingled.  She suddenly stood and the warmth left as her hand pulled away.  I resisted it just enough to create a slight friction, but not to make it seem needy.

She rushed towards the door.  The moment felt like a failure.  Embarrassment flooded over me.  Then she stopped.  There was a long pause...her back was to me.

"Have I misspoken?"  I asked.

She trembled...still facing away.

“That was beautiful,” she said, her words flowed through my mind like the dawn reaching the mountains.  A sigh escaped my lips as the anxiety of not knowing her response released.  The feeling of weightless let go of me as gravity released me from its grasp for just a moment until reality gave me a painful slap.  “I think there is something very special about you…”

“
Here it comes
…”  I thought, getting ready to eat my own liver.  My insides tensed up.  She gazed at me with an intensity that could have made a wild animal take pause.  It made me feel slightly uncomfortable for a second until she smiled again and the room truly brightened, or perhaps it was my heart beaming.

"That’s not the first time you’ve said those words to me,” she said.

It took a moment for her words to sink in.

Wait...what?

“I have watched over you for so long.  I have witnessed you get wounded while you lay there helpless and no one had any explanations as to why.  I have seen parts of your insides as you lay wide open, bleeding out and about to die.  I have pulled my hand back from your wounds to swap out bandages only to find the wounds closed and you whiter than the sheets.  I have seen tears form in your eyes out of the blue when I checked your vitals as if you knew my presence.” 

I was stunned.  She continued.

"Then it happened.  You spoke to me.  I was the only one in the room.  At first I thought you were just mumbling, so I ignored it.  Then it happened again a week later.  You said something else.  I was right next to you when it happened and heard you plain as day," she said.

"Are you serious?”  I asked.

"Yes," she answered.

"It has happened on and off for several years.  I felt the messages were for me.  The poems...were so tender.  I could not bring myself to tell the doctor.  There were times when you spoke for several minutes, as if you felt my presence.  As if you knew me!  Once you spoke about Jason.  You wondered if he was okay.  That was three weeks ago."  She stopped, looking to see if I was processing her words. 

She walked back to the bed and sat down again.

Her hand took mine as my gaze lowered.  Perhaps being too close to a situation makes you miss too many things.  I was dazed as the poem escaped my lips.  In the movies, reactions in these moments always seem too exaggerated.  She did not throw herself in my arms or kiss me.  We sat in silence for a moment looking at each other.  I was amazed at the strange calmness that descended upon me, telling me it would be okay.

“Now here you are awake, alive, smiling, and laughing with such a sense of humor and wit that I did not ever imagined existed in that boy who has become a man right in front of me.  I was but twenty-two, straight out of college when I started my internship here.  You were my first assignment.  After my internship was over, I requested to stay here to see this through, no matter how it ended.  Now here you sit, quoting me poetry.”  She paused for several seconds while her breathing trembled.  “I know this is a lot to process.  I thought it was just your body sensing my presence.  But now I know the connection is real.”  She rose and walked away at a rushed pace.  “I have to go.”

I blinked and sat there frozen.  The warmth left the room as if someone opened the window.  It might have been the door closing that stirred the air in the room, but the temperature dropped sharply and solitude followed.  My hand found the remote, lowered the bed down so my body reclined, and began to play the situation over that had just unfolded.  My mind did not fall into chaos as predicted, but instead, serenity flowed forth.  I was happy at the outcome, but my lack of experience in the matter gave me no measuring stick to gage it.  Contemplation occupied my thoughts.

In my coma, I spoke to her.  What are the odds?

It was not hard to feel the elation that I did amidst these crushing walls with their white paint and long hallways that smelled of bleach water.  My perception that hospitals were clean and had to be was still accurate, but it seemed a little excessive to me that this stench of bleach was there at every intake of breath.  Sadly when it comes to the human condition and sickness, there was a reason for that sanitized smell to be so prevalent to cover up the death and disease that was rampant in hospitals.  How I knew so much about that baffled me.  It did not make those white walls any cleaner or father away from me.  It felt insane, for the clarity of which I viewed my surroundings was quite clear.  I was not going to get out of there anytime soon until they had their look from a medical stand point.

Add to that equation a crazy Catholic priest who tried to send me to the afterlife prematurely.  I did not fully understand the concept of religion and faith from the Catholic standpoint.  To learn they put so much emphasis on the mother of Christ being important, but the need to worship this icon did not make sense, although you have to admire the logic.  One should always respect those that have the power to bring life into the world.  I was okay with it from that view, save the fact that they might have supported the priests trying to end my life.  Further research on this topic would have to wait.  I had other things on my mind.

Sounds from the hallway snapped me out of my current thoughts.  I could hear running in the distance.  Code alerts came over the intercom.  They were normally barely audible, but for some reason these were exceptionally loud.  The codes were unknown but most likely meant that someone on my wing was about the buy the farm.  Whoever it was most likely would not have the strange ability to heal that had experienced for the last six years.  Numerous things in life had tried to kill me and my power had kept me alive.  I added surviving a cyanide capsule to that list of oddities.  What was next?

Childhood parenting does not exactly prepare you for the weirdness of the world, especially when it is so beyond what is normal in life.  Going to school for twelve years, graduating, and going to college.  It was so normal, but not for me.  Find the career that you hope will make you a lot of money so you can find and support a wife, have children, and then watch them repeat the cycle.  As exciting as the potential of all of that was, I realized that none of it would compare to the last few days of my life.  The desire to have real blood pumping excitement had never been my aspiration, but someone targeted my life, the allurement to dangerous situations that I have heard people develop was now a curiosity.  Danger was never something to chase, but a small exhilaration that had started to grow in the pit of my stomach.  I wanted a piece of that priest.  I wanted to hit him in the face.  I wanted to watch blood spray from his broken nose as I hit him repeatedly.

I felt my heart beating in my chest like it was going to leap from it at any moment.  My breathing turned into coughing as I fought for more air.  Pain tore at my lungs.  It was hard to believe how strong my feelings were.  The desire to right the injustice delivered to me by the church over wrote logic.  I laughed knowing I was not the first, nor the last to have that thought roll into their mind like a steel ball, knocking down walls made of inhibition.  The coughing subsided after a few minutes with thoughts of being a vigilante teasing my sensibilities.  I was not strong enough and probably would never be.  It was a nice thought. 

This amazing image of a very large man with my features, came to mind.  He had broad shoulders and muscles that bulged much like that of a bodybuilder, just not quite as toned.  I could see the definition under a thin shirt as he moved.  The size of his biceps kind of made me laugh a bit when I looked at my own.  This mental image of me was something that everyone does when there is a bully needing a lesson and it was foolish that this conjuration I had come up with was such a monstrosity.  How my mind came up with this as a solution to my problem was rather intriguing.  Muscle mass aside; this image had to be so large that it towered over even the largest football player ever seen on television.  I tried to shrink the image to a more muscular version of me but could not. 

“I guess you cannot visualize all that we can imagine, after all,” I heard myself say.  It was disturbing to me that phrases came out verbally with no control.  

The door opened.  Hoping it was she, my eyes shot towards the sound.  Another nurse came in and grabbed my chart, her pen scrawling furiously on it.  The clock caught my attention and it was a lot later than expected.  Minutes turned to hours with me in deep contemplation.  That thought rolled around in my head for a moment as she took my vitals.  How was it that I was getting so engrossed in my thoughts that minutes were flying by?  It was as though my mind had some serious holes in the memory portion of it and when falling into my thoughts I got stuck in these holes, until managing to claw my way free.  These gaps in my mind did not allow for rational thinking.  There were missing pieces of the puzzle.  My so called daydreams were turning into waking dreams; they had now evolved into what seemed to be visions or memories.  I knew I must be hallucinating, however.  I would certainly remember being so tall.  I was not a massive hulk of a man.  My mind played tricks on me.

Thoughts changed.  I was seeing Eryn’s face now.  She was smiling at me, like the first time my eyes opened and saw her.  A shudder ran down my spine, and I wondered was it possible to fall in love so quickly with someone you barely knew.  Was it a real emotion, or just a fantasy, that gave what someone needed, at that moment?  Would it ultimately be fleeting in the end? 

“The doctor will be in to see you in a few minutes.”

Where the hell did that voice come from? 
I thought.

I realized my mind had drifted again.  The nurse had finished her once over of me and was already walking out the door.  I had hardly even paid attention when she came in, let alone when she was there touching me.  This made me very nervous.  I need to have my wits about me in case the “crazy cleric” comes back.  It had a nice ring to it, but I was mad at myself now for letting my mind wander so much.  Focusing on my surroundings was proving difficult.  I blinked to moisten my eyes.  They dried out from the long pause to wake myself out of this haze.

To my dismay, my view had changed and I was not looking at the ceiling.  My mouth was dry.  Terror tried to run through my mind, making me think that something had just happened again when papers rustled follow by the scrawling sound of someone writing or taking notes.  I raised my head and tried to focus through the light that was hitting me in the eyes from the blinds.  It was a lot higher than earlier.  The rays cut through the air as if a slow reaching laser were extending its death towards me.  Sleep had taken me again.