Evanescent

By Carlyle Labuschagne

Her fall has just begun. Only his touch can save her from the shift that could destroy it all.
Within my blood runs a thing our kind calls the Shadowing Disease. It shadows over, and bends everything to its will. When the first blood- shift came, it tore through flesh and blood, threatening to bend me, break bone, shatter my mind and entrap my heart with its honeyed, seductive poison.
It came with vicious intent, moving my thoughts and altering me forever.
The shift has caused a rift within me. No one was safe when it entrapped me in its claws of foul lust. But I have the only antidote against the evil that becomes me - his touch alone has the power to release the spurs of sweet darkness that clung on for dear life. I knew what I had to do; the desperation pulled my mind with the deep determination of a hungry predator. By the time the revelation raised me from the dark dungeon of my bounds - it might have been too late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fire Quill Publishing
• Release date: May 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9780994653659

Carlyle Labuschagne

Carlyle is an South African award winning author, with a flair for mixing genres and adding loads of drama to every story she creates. For now she is happy to take over the world and convert non Sci-fi believers.Her goal as an author is to touch people's lives, and help others love their differences and one another by delivering strong messages of faith, love and hope within every outrageous world she writes about."I love to swim, fight for the trees, and am a food lover who is driven by my passion for life. I dream that one day my stories will change the lives of countless teenagers and have them obsess over the world literacy can offer them instead of worrying about fitting in. Never sacrifice who you are, it’s in the dark times that the light comes to life."Carlyle used writing as a healing tool and that is why she started her very own writers support event - SAIR bookfestival."To be a helping hand for those who strive to become full times writers, editors, bloggers, readers and cover artists - it’s a crazy world out there you don’t have to go it alone!"

Book preview

Your touch brought me to life. What you have given me is life, love and everything in between. You gave me, me.

~ x ~

So many to thank and not enough pages. To every reader, follower, book blogger, author and friend – whoever gave me a like, share, or tweet – you will never know how much you have given me. I joked in a recent interview that it takes a ‘village’ to raise a book. Well, it does, and because of each of you I can accomplish my dreams, dream them and not be afraid to put it out there. For that, I will forever be grateful and driven by your kindness.

To my editor, Sandra Valente, oh boy, way too much to thank you for. You are not only the best editor, the most fun and fiercest, but your attention to detail is more, and you always give more. You are my fan, my mentor, my friend, my lifeline, my graphic artist – more, always more, and may you be blessed for it. I will love you always!

To my cover designer Regina Wamba, the amazing and beautiful woman behind the pure gorgeousness that has captured Evanescent perfectly – thank you is not enough.

To my dynamic publicity team, Kathy and Allison, who believe in me and my dreams. I look forward to a long and successful relationship. To the band, Prime Circle, for the lyrical use, for giving me the light of day, and especially for treating me like a star while I hung backstage with you guys. Mariska and Franie, thank you for making that dream come true.

To my family, above all else, who have just about had enough of my writing/book obsession but still lend an ear and always tell me to never give up – you being proud of me, pushed me forward.

To the dreamers…never give up!

To my parents, none of this would have been possible without you. To my loving husband, Dirk. All of this, me – it could not be possible without you. To Kelly from ‘Exclusive Books’, because of you I can see my book on the shelf of the biggest bookstore in our country. I can never thank you enough. To my street team, every bit you do for me; expecting nothing in return, keeps me grounded. My sister, Dominique the inspiration behind the character Maya – I love you. And lastly to Erika Bester at Fire Quill Publishing, and my beautiful publicist Helen Holyoake – your belief in me raised me to new heights.

YATR best Sci-fi Novel winner 2013

Nominated for IRC best cover and best Novel for 2014

I'm addicted and need more ~ Best selling author LL Hunter

The action in Evanescent was upped ten-fold and was such that whilst reading, it played in my head like a movie. I’d give anything to see this series on the big screen, it’s that good for me. ~ Sandra Valente – Novel review Café.

My mind is blown with this amazing writing. This series should be on everyone's TBR Pile. Filled with Action, Mystery and a few twist and turns you will not be able to put this book down. Anna Dase ~RBTL reviews.

I Acknowledge and Dedicate

Praise for Evanescent

PART ONE: Altered

Prologue: All of me

Chapter One: Midnight

Chapter Two: Bent

Chapter Tree: Misplaced

Chapter Four: Fire and Ice

Chapter Five: Cyclone

Chapter Six: Overflow

Chapter Seven: Sinking

PART TWO: Haltered

Chapter Eight: Gravity

Chapter Nine: Hunger

Chapter Ten: Illusion

Chapter Eleven: Undone

PART THREE: Cross to Bear

Chapter Twelve: Fallen

Chapter Thirteen: Powder

Chapter Fourteen: Linger On

PART FOUR: Usunder

Chapter Fifteen: Design

Chapter Sixteen: Darkest Hour

Chapter Seventeen: Twilight

Chapter Eighteen: Siren

Chapter Nineteen: My Blood

Chapter Twenty: In Twain

Epilogue

Bonus Chapter: Troy

About the Author

Other Novels in the Series

"Seems these days I’m terrified

by the darker side of me.

Can hear myself when I close my eyes; can feel it breaking me.

This is my Jekyll and Hyde condition,

a different person inside to see.

Keeps on coming without permission,

why can’t it let me be?

It’s getting stronger, changing me now.

I hear it screaming out I’m behind you,

don’t try to run away I will find you.

Before I was fine, didn’t bother me.

Did things my own way.

But now it’s here and I’m changing fast.

Gets stronger every day.

This is my Jekyll and Hyde condition,

a different person inside to see.

Keeps on coming without permission,

why can’t it let me be?

It’s getting stronger, changing me now.

I hear it screaming out I’m behind you,

don’t try to run away I will find you."

~ Jekyll & Hyde~ Prime Circle Lyrics

Altered

Where you are not,

there you are bound to be found.

Be all of the not, until it is enough.

Live it all, lay yourself before it.

Taste what is not you.

Purge yourself, and let that be your altar;

your cross to bear,

find the love that becomes you in that truth.

When lost,

change all that you are.

And within those moments,

you will find who you are not.

Once you let it take you,

embrace all you do not want to be,

and never let go of who you found there.

PROLOGUE

My makers would say I was created for revenge. I say, I was born to prove them wrong. I defied the Council and its Keepers. Fought back against the dark magic of our enemies, but I am afraid it had come at a cost.

Inflicted with the dark disease, I was lost in every possible way; and they were wrong – death does not bring you your true purpose. After death, I am more misplaced than ever, but only because I am immune to guidance. I relive my darkest moments over and over again, just to remind myself of who I am.

I am the destined one. The haltered. For me, there is no love and no release, only destruction; but I am on a path to be free of its burden. I do love and I will have it, absorb it and never, ever, let all its enchanting affections go. In order to be with love, there is only one path to lead me there; through this war. But nothing and no one knows what awaits on the other side, or what lies have been afflicted upon us about the after. Remorse is an infection I no longer want. I had made apocalyptic mistakes, and will probably keep on faltering forward. It has become my only direction in a reality where there is none. To him, there is no him, if there is no me. He is bound to me, and I hated it more than I will ever confess. His cross to bear is me, and to be that – to be this – is a curse I must fight.

When the first true blood-shift came, it tore through flesh and parted blood, threatening to bend me, break bone, shatter my mind and entrap my heart to become its will. It comes with vicious intent, moving my thoughts and touching me with a cutting effect from the inside. It has many ways of bleeding out, and when it releases, there is nothing I can do to stop it. No one is safe when it entraps me in its claws of foul lust. Corrupt, damnable, depraved, destructive, hideous, demonic; your kind would call it many things. I have a weapon against the profane that becomes me – his touch alone has the power to release the talons of a sweet darkness that clings on for dear life. It has one trigger – my guilt. I can change it if only I can take the leap, surrender myself utterly. I am ready with all of me, for all of him.

I know what I have to do, the desperation of it pulls my mind with the unfathomable determination of a ravenous predator. I let it sink in hard and true. I feel the swell of the fight fill me with a bitter sweetness, and with a glorious soothing pain that tears my mind from the disease which transforms me. My loss has become my fight as I watch it all wither away. But, I will never stop fighting. I am my own destiny; my destiny is to be with him. And the Truth-seekers of this prophecy will not take it lightly.

Everything else becomes Evanescent.

~ Ava.

.

CHAPTER ONE

A body is fragile; it breaks, it tears, and it bleeds. It is also tangible and real, beautiful and rare.

A soul is an ever-fighting, ever-growing entity. It has a mind of its own.

But, a mind is a curse; it can corrupt, be corrupted, thinks too much, or not enough.

When body meets soul, it’s perfect. It knows the truth, but it cannot live without a mind.

The mind activates the power from the soul to the body.

The balance is never perfect. This is the curse of being broken.

One exasperating breath at a time my haunting memories came swamping back, threatening to choke me with their horrid reality. When I opened my eyes on the day that changed me forever – my day of reckoning – my mind was assaulted with knowledge that was not my own. Had I been pushed? Was it even real? Yet, as every flash and every thought of those false memories reeled through me, there was a message there. Sometimes I wonder, if not for the false state of existence, the knowledge I had gained in those fabricated moments…would I ever have known?

What matters now is that I do know, and I want what is rightfully mine.

I wanted it all. I wanted revenge. And as I opened my eyes, a dark world swirled above me, and then the fuzzy outlines of geometric shapes came in to view. I had been captured. I didn’t want to get up and carry on, wanted to close my eyes and wish it all away. I let the guilt slide away. But like a spider, it crawled its way back in, and slowly the doubt and the disappointment spun its web. And suddenly I remembered how it all took place how my hate and anger of my past had become my poison, and so I gave in to the blood-shift. After shifting I can’t recall.

My world became black once more, as I closed my eyes trying to decipher why I have memories of a time I had not lived yet. I lay there, suspended in my thoughts.. I knew the battle of my mind and soul all too well, the familiarity nipped at my veins so that the feeling of remorse was lost on me.

You know what you have to do. Get up and do it!

The voice came again. It was my own, but my body would not move. I didn’t care that the girl in my memories was not me laying in his arms, and that his touch and his tender kisses had not found my hands or my lips. Even if losing him was entirely of my own doing, I would fight.

More memories hit, the powerful kind that break your breath, steal your mind, and eclipse your heart. And when you think you can’t take it anymore, it all slowly flutters back to the horrid truth. I had lost him. I had lost all that was me. That’s when I felt it, the dark magic that lingered on the air around me. I have come to know his brand quite well.

I know you are there. I can feel you, I groaned through the darkness.

Silence filled the gloomy room, expanded through the cracks, pushed through thick, gray stone walls, and penetrated the blackness outside.

You are wasting your time, my words escaped in a whisper, my throat so dry it seared. I felt bruised, inside and out. I tried to lift my body, which seemed to be glued by gravity itself to a cold, hard surface. My wrist stung as I pulled against what felt like barbed wire restraints laced with a poison that left me dizzy. I lay my head back down, trying to catch my breath, sweat clinging to my entire body. A stifling heat choking my vision, my thoughts. The throbbing in my head exploded and rippled through my entire frame. I clenched my teeth, but the pain was too insane to contain. I screamed, and the aching that echoed through my bones left me icy and shivering. My back lifted and slammed back onto the surface of a metal bed as my breath hit me again. I swore.

It gets easier with time. His words filtered through the nothingness inside of me as my heart slowly came back to life.

I swallowed against coals trapped in my throat.

It happened again. The shift was taking me, it ripped and raked over my body, and I choked on its blackness.

Oh, the sin of guilt is an unpleasant thing, he said from right beside me.

I turned my head toward where his voice was coming from, a tear escaped me. My emotions confined in my esophagus.

He is going to kill you, is all I got out, before my eyes closed and I fell into its beckoning midnight.

CHAPTER TWO

I awakened with what felt like a bolt of lightning to my chest. There was nothing before that and for a moment, there was nothing after. A tingling sensation engulfed my entire body, then fazed into my brain.

Slowly, I opened my eyes to darkness, dry and hot darkness crushing down on my body, into my mind. The memories came crashing back, one wave over the next, pushing my breath from my lungs. Memories become a tangled mess; I did not know what the last thing I had done was, or how I had gotten to be in a state of mental suspension. The only thing familiar was him, and the darkness exuding from his being was not a familiarity I wanted, nor needed.

The Shadowing disease had come back for me. I choked on the air filling my lungs, like I was breathing for the first time. Something strange was happening to me as my life came pouring back, one cruel flash at a time. I started to remember. I had fallen in a trap, the consequences coiling around me, and I suddenly remembered how I had gotten there.

His presence had me shifting dark-side; the poison that ran through my blood, ran through his, and it drew me near. He summoned me that way, and it all made sense. I was reliving it all. Enoch’s kiss, and the push of his poison had become my own. The night we were kidnapped played back in my mind, and my awareness transported all of me into the physical state of the memory. That was the mind-shift’s way of imprinting on me, its sick way of reminding me of who I was.

The blow to the head that had sent me crashing into the cold, wet mud; the pain that echoed through me; my fingers clawing up the dark, muddy, river bank on that fateful night of my seventeenth birthday; fighting consciousness out of desperation to get to Troy’s sword as I watched helplessly from the wet, cold, stuck-in-the-mud ground. Fireworks in the dark, windy night echoed and ebbed out. The fight to the death between Enoch and Troy shook my insides once more, as if it was happening all over again. The moment that altered my former forever. Then, awakening with a cold, hard thrust of the canoe into my ribs, hands bound, body bleeding. Troy’s sunrise smile from across the wooden vessel as I came to; his warmth filling in around me as I sat on his lap while he slipped the dagger from my boot. His fingers working delicately and swiftly, sending my pulse racing as we fell face first into the ice-cold river, attempting escape from Enoch and the Zulus. Spears rained down, piercing the water, slicing between Troy and me. I couldn’t get to him, could not swim fast enough, his blood clouding the water around me; the pure, rich, virginal color of it violated my heart.

In shock, I swallowed huge gulps of water. Enoch dragged me screaming from the river. I watched in sheer dismay as the Zulu warriors lifted Troy’s dying body from the water. The annihilating sadness breaking me, sending my world into twisted chaos. Little did I know how much that event changed us – forever.

I tore my mind from the evocative memories. Catching my breath, I felt the push of the former memories, the mind-shift was real, it was brutal, and it wanted something from me. Horrified, calling Troy’s name over and over, and over again, it felt like an eternity had passed before I heard something.

Troy? I called out.

He’s gone, a cold voice bounced back.

What did you do? I swallowed glass, knowing the man was behind it.

Oh no, it’s what you did, he replied, his smug tone sickening.

I tried to lift myself from the hard floor.

I said, where is Troy?

I told you, but for some reason you don’t believe me. He knows what you are and he is hesitating, wondering if it’s all worth it. His words, like stone, grated the inside of my brain to mush.

Liar! I yelled, pulling against chains.

You give me way too much credit…Ava. A slight pause before he said my name. And by the way he said it, there was no doubt in my mind who was responsible for the state I now found myself in.

Enoch… I said in a low, repulsed growl; the sheer name was like poison dripping down my throat.

That is one of my names, yes.

How are you alive? I shot back, ignoring his smart-ass comment.

The same way you are, he simply said.

Where are they? Where is my sister, and Arriana?

He never answered.

What do you want? I bit back.

Only what is owed to me. This was said matter-of-factly.

I could not bring myself to think of what he was possibly on about. I lifted myself in or1der to stand, one slow, dragging limb at a time. I heard the unmistakable clang, the dull, cold chime of metal chains scraping on the hard, stone floor as I moved.

What could possibly be owed to you? I asked hesitantly.

Everything! he shouted, suddenly before me. His swift movement, release of breath and a rush of warm air on my face, forced me to stumble backward.

You don’t scare me! I tried to convince him, but my high-pitched tone must have given it away.

His mocking chuckle vibrated into my bones. Through the darkness, we stared each other down. He was inches away from me. I could feel the space between us shatter, and suddenly he was at my throat.

What is… I choked out, but just as suddenly as the iron grip came crushing into my windpipe, it released me.

I staggered on my feet with one hand resting on my knee, the other stroking the life back to my esophagus. I coughed.

Show… yourself, I squeezed out.

The sound of metal on wall screeched through the air from behind me. I laughed.

You’ve changed, I whispered.

I tried to focus my eyes, tried to penetrate the darkness.

But, his intention was to show himself quicker than it would take my eyes to draw on my powers, enabling me to see through the dark. I gasped as the black wall gave way to the soft glow of the entire room. I was in some sort of dungeon, chained to a wall by my hips and wrists. I pulled against them hard as my eyes fell on the disaster before me. Enoch, only it wasn’t. I closed my eyes, I was no fool to his games anymore. His magic had no effect on me, as long as I was aware that he was able to thrust things into my mind. I knew his tricks, and that knowledge made it easier to resist the push of his controlling venom.

This is not real. I smirked, behind closed lids.

The minute I said it, I knew it was indeed real. I could smell it all. The burn of energy in the room. The metal, the icky, blue substance holding the shells of bodies inside giant, glass cylinders lining the walls.

But how did I know he wasn’t pushing me? There was no pull. Not like the times we stood in Arriana’s cottage alone, when he had thrust thoughts and doubt about Troy and the others into my mind. The times he had pushed my own thoughts to make me believe I wanted him. As much as there is a push, you can always feel the pull the pusher needs to inhibit your thoughts.

Opening my eyes, I stared at the beings in the pods, their skin almost transparent, organs red, purple and black, not beating beneath the surface of their tissue-thin skins. Enoch stalked closer with loud thumps resonating on the ground, his blistering, blue gaze cutting into me. I kept my gaze on his, eyes I once admired, adored even, eyes that held me captive with lies and deceit. My heart thumped. The rest of him had changed. Surgically gutted into his tanned, robust chest, his right arm a solid, golden metal and a mechanical shiny plate covered one side of his chest, right into where his heart should have been. With his metal fingers he held my face, staring into my eyes. The hatred spilled through them – a pure, blue inferno. This is how he was alive; he was no longer just flesh and bone. He was mechanical on the outside, as much as he was on the inside.

Are you ready for this Enoch? I smirked, cheeks burning beneath his grip.

Suddenly, as he released my aching jaw, a brutal force pulled against my restraints and I was shoved into the wall behind me. I did not feel the crush of bones, in fact, I had taken the attack on my body very well, withstood it even. I rubbed the life back into my cheeks where his claws had cut me. I laughed while standing. Enoch chuckled and swayed to a twisted tune inside of his own head.

Are you having fun trying to beat up a girl? I grimaced.

You are strong.

Ready to find out how strong?

His dark eyebrow lifted.

I gritted my teeth.

Is that a promise?

The malice on his face was almost enough, but the mind-shift apparently needed more, something pure, over-powering as a trigger, and he knew it. He wanted me to shift. In fact, he was forcing it.

I gasped, You wouldn’t!

Wouldn’t I? he retaliated, grinning.

Why? I swallowed back tears.

There is no why. The smirk on his face dropped like he meant what I knew he was thinking, that he would hurt them just for fun, for kicks, to feel something other than whatever he was going through. No, I shook my head, I would not empathize with a monster.

There is always a why! I spat back. What did I do to you, and why are you going after the ones I care for?

Oh, it’s not just them, he said, his face unmoved from his personal sinister bliss.

You can’t kill Troy, I said forcefully.

"I know that, and I don’t need to. Because you will." His smile twisted his face into something all-knowing; something dark.

That was enough. I felt the mind-shift, like a match that’s been struck, hovering over the point of ignition.

Why are you holding back? he asked, narrowing his eyes. "These will be the last words you will hear from me. I will take everything from you!" He bared white teeth, electric-blue eyes running through my very soul from only a few feet away.

His words sent me plunging into darkness. The force of the mind-shift was an easy one, and it triggered the blood-shift. My mind was not my own, the sweet, intoxicating cloud of its instinct poured into my awareness, twirling around every nerve inside my body. Ever so slowly, my skin glowed a purple, electric blaze.

And this will be the last time I see you die. My face emotionless, as I spoke.

You are beautiful, he added, straightening and moving in for the kill. In his eyes, my radiance reflected back. Tears streamed down my face looking at myself like that, through his eyes. I almost doubled over with the revelation that I was the furthest thing from human, and it was repulsing; he had made me the monster he was.

Yes. He smiled. Your existence is why any of this is happening.

My flame hummed around me, my fear threatening to dampen my shift.

He came at me, and his palm struck me right between the eyes. I yelled as I took to the air. Instinct was crippled by fear, blinded by sorrow, and the mind-shift drained completely as I hit the wall – the blood-shift faded away. Totally submerged in the darkness of the dungeon once more, I inhaled intensely. The blue glow from the tubes ebbed out. I bit back the hate, and shook off the grief I was feeling for the beings in those tubes. To ruin him, I had to be less human.

Closing my mind off from Enoch’s threats, the anger came blazing back into one solid, purple, flame erupting through my core; so hard, fierce, and so eternally bright, my restraints melted from my wrists and burned away from my hips. My chest rose and fell rapidly with deep breaths as I tried to steady my pulse, keep my instincts focused, hone in on my mind-shift so it did not take me down with it, hoping I had what it took to stop it before it triggered the blood-shift.

His metallic arm penetrated through my flames quickly and he grabbed me by my throat once again, his tight grip threatening to break my windpipe. He chuckled, and a light flickered on behind him. The tubed beings were illuminated by yellow lights, melding with the liquid’s blue haze, and I was drowning in a green hole of bodies. His laughter grew until it sounded like a single shrill tearing me apart. He knew the sight of those beings would affect me; he was in my mind once more. I pushed him out. I searched for a guard against his tricks within, changing my thoughts into my native language once again. I locked him out, and was able to think clearly.

But, he smiled. I don’t need your thoughts, Ava, I can feel your intentions, I can feel… you. We are the same now.

I narrowed my eyes, my flames slowly subsiding once again, heavy emotion crippling my powers, fear, doubt. Get a grip, Ava, I willed myself. He is manipulating you, testing your boundaries, learning how to work you.

Perhaps I should thank you for killing me, he said with tangible cruelty.

I dangled from his grip as it tightened around my throat, feeling him holding on to my life. I tried to numb myself against him, his touch, because him being near me would always affect me in some way. He would always represent my fall. He pulled my face to his, our lips almost touching. I drew him in with my stare. I waited until his lips were so close, his smell repulsing me, our breaths melting into one. I went in for the kill. Thankful for my petite body and gymnastic abilities, I was able to raise my legs between the tiny gap of his chest and mine, and kicked into his metal plate as hard as I ever imagined I could, using all the confusion and anger he was inflicting upon me to propel myself the other way.

I screamed as his grip around my throat almost ripped it right out. But my instinct was quick, and a shockwave exploded throughout my entire body, temporarily stunning both him and me. A low buzz, and then he was at me again. His golden chest plate crushed me into the wall, and for a moment I lost all strength. I regained myself, stuck between the cold stone and Enoch’s unrecognizable face. His body threatened to drive me right through the wall. Once again, instinct was quick. My flame raged out alongside a huge, electrical, shockwave – bigger, brighter and with more wrath than before. I had to get away from him. He couldn’t know that he still had an effect on me, and I couldn’t allow it; he was a threat to my entire being.

The shockwave penetrated everything in the room. I hit the floor, watching his body slide across the room with a scream of metal against sand and stone. My body adjusted quickly, healing the fine tears in my veins after the bolt had ripped through my flesh. The room spun before me, and then it was only me and those creatures in that chamber. Their pods cracked and slowly leaked from my released shockwave. I imagined those things coming for me. Slowly, it all faded; my flame, my pulse, my fire dying out with a soft sizzle to my skin. I smelled it, my burned hair and singed skin. I knew the smell of scorched flesh.

One single memory flashed with recognition: Human bodies dressed in rags, burning in the black ash of a dozen previously sacrificed bodies of the evil Zulu king, lay before me. The day I was taken to the Zulu kingdom by Enoch and his guard. The day I found out he was the son of the evil king and witchdoctor. I swallowed the crushing sadness as the memory faded. Eternally, there would always be something I associated with the past. I pulled from my memories, and I was back in that sickening room bearing suspended, ghostly, white bodies staring back at me.

I spat blood to the floor. Enoch, unconscious to my left, his huge body spread across the floor like a lost boy. It brought back a feeling of déjà vu, seeing him so still, expressionless. I had found him like that before, the night after we…I almost gagged at the thought. Not so much the thought of us sleeping together, but the thought of why I had done it – I was power hungry. I had done it to gain abilities.

The Shadow-shift seeks redemption in all the wrong places. I have two kinds of shifts. The mind-shift is what I call my instinct, it acts to protect me, all of me; mind, body and spirit. The blood-shift was from bloodline, how it came to be. I just didn’t understand it yet, but I knew that on the day of my resurrection, I was the permanent vessel for its disease. The moment my soul snapped back into my body it was there, and it was getting stronger with every passing heartbeat. I was on all fours staring at the room around me, my stare like poisoned darts on Enoch as he continued to lay unmoved just inches away.

I turned my eyes away, he was not the man I once knew. I laughed at myself, loudly. He had never been the man I thought I knew! I listened to the low hum of his pulse as I crept to my feet. I needed to get out of here, desperately needed to find my sister and Arriana while I still had the chance to. I stepped around him, now free from my metal chains, purging everything I might have ever felt for him. I wanted to kick him real hard in the face, like he had once kicked me on that canoe when he’d kidnapped Troy and me.

I turned one last time, staring at Enoch, his huge chest hardly moving, sweat rolling down his gorgeous face. Then I stared up at the glass-tubed beings, bubbling beneath the surface of disgusting, saliva-looking fluid. I shook my head – he was an idiot, his metal extremities made him weak against my abilities to penetrate them with an electrical shock. A crooked smile crept across my face, my instinct was clever in every possible way. I kept my mind true to my native language, just in case he was listening in, and took off. I would never underestimate him in any way, ever again.

I turned into a dimly-lit corridor made of stone and dirt, and practically flew up a flight of dark, gray stone stairs. And then, pins and needles tingled throughout my entire being. There was an unmistakable voice inside my head, telling me that I was bound to the place I was kept prisoner in. I sensed it, witnessed it as I stumbled into a huge room finding rows upon rows of those tubed beasts. The blue, fluorescent liquid holding the bodies upright, lit the way into another room holding the same doom. An army of…I raised my palm to the cold surface of the glass and looked up at the horrific sight of a pale skeleton coated with a vile, translucent, white coat of skin, dark holes for eyes, and a slit for a mouth.

Whatever it was, I was somehow part of it. The pull was unmistakable, the pins and needles that prevailed over my entire body were trying to tell my something. But my instinct tuned them out – this time, it would work against me. My eyes got stuck on the veins running from the thing’s heart, over its chest, shoulder, and into its neck. It had no gender – it just was. Enoch had found a way, he had somehow completed the broken recipe, and with my capture he’d taken what he needed in order to do so – my blood was the missing link. The thing had a distinctive smell, and the unmistakable tainted color beneath the veins glowed. I was bent by the sadness, my actions had once again led to death.

But more so, I was bent on revenge and it was staring at me through dark, hollow, twisted black eyes.

CHAPTER THREE

Misplaced grief gripped me, threatening to boll me over. Who did he think he was? He was no better than the people hiding behind the Council, creating beings he could control. I never believed that the Council were our saviors from the facility back on Earth. All of what I had seen proved that to me. This was too much like the horrors written in my mom’s journals.

The more I thought about the situation, the angrier and darker things were turning inside me. But, I used human emotion to keep my shifts at bay. I pulled up shame, and relied on it to settle my anger – it was a feeling I had grown accustomed to. What I had seen in that room – the creatures – they were no different from me. And it was no different from what my mother had described in her journals, either. Her nightmares had been real, or they were becoming so.

I had to get out and return with help, save those beings from a fate no one deserved. Then it hit me. Letters and symbols from my mom’s journals swirled before me, as if I was projecting them through my very eyes onto the stone wall beside me. I stood in the dark while my fingers quickly pulled the broken puzzle pieces together. Shadow army. I gasped. A nervous twitch animated my hand. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew the army could not be released.

Turning back, I felt as if I had left something behind. Does he have any idea what he has done? The thought ripped and racked through me.

I turned back in the direction I was heading and took off, willing myself to leave it all behind, guided only by the blue glow of the tubes lining the walls. My mind raced in a million different directions at once, and I could not turn it off. It was like a plug within me had been pulled and everything I had ever seen, heard or experienced started to file itself inside my head, turning and twisting the very information constantly moving, and shifting it into place, trying to make sense of everything that was and everything that is, so I could know what was to come.

Whatever was transpiring, was certain to be a dark place. Taking every single motive behind Enoch’s actions into consideration, I wanted to know why. That seemed to be the number one question throughout my life – why? I came up with nothing more, other than the fact that he was a twisted freak. I would not give him a second thought.

My feet catapulted me forward, through one dimly-lit, stone tunnel into the next. My hands grasping stone to hold my body upright, to keep moving forward, to not kill myself over the whys: to get to Maya and Arriana, to come back and destroy the Shadow army my mother wrote about. I drilled it into my head that no matter how many times my body wanted to turn back, I had to move forward. Something, or someone, was pulling me the other way, telling me to go and kill the army, now, but I kept at it, trusting my gut instead.

At some point, I became aware that I had gone down a very steep, narrow tunnel, lit by the tube of a single, indigo light high above my head. First, I had smelled it; blood, my blood. I stopped, hardly able to move as the tunnel tapered in. I looked down at my clothes. No blood stains.

I frowned, pulling the strange white, cotton dress this way and that. What the…? I whispered to myself, on finding that I had been disrobed of my gravity suit. My voice carried a small distance ahead. It was then I discovered I had walked so far down the narrow corridor that I had scraped the very skin from my shoulders – and I had not, and did not feel a single thing. I