Angel Fire (27 page)
I picked up another handful of earth with the intention of spreading it over his coffin, but the thought of saying goodbye was far too painful, and I let the dirt fall through my fingers.
“You saved my life and they took yours. I love you,” I said and meant it.
Finally, I stood before the last grave.
My empty grave.
By all rights, I should have died many times over. But I was immune from fire, and I alone had survived that catastrophic day. But it was a rebirth for me, like a phoenix from the ashes.
I wanted to blame the thing inside me for the destruction, but the truth was, I had used it as much as it had used me. We shared in the responsibility. I was a murderess, and that was something I would have to try to live with, though my heart was so heavy I didn’t know if I could stand it.
Was it a fallen angel in me? I didn’t know enough about them. I would have to do much more research. Why had they fallen? What did it want with me, with us? Neil didn’t seem to have been at odds with the one inside him. Was mine different? Angrier? Did it want to co-exist with me, or take me over?
Either way, it would be a battle of wills.
* * *
The next day, I was walking north along the highway, my thumb out. I was far enough away from Middleton that I wasn’t too worried about seeing anyone who might recognize me. A sky-blue pickup pulled over and an older man in a straw hat curled up on the sides grinned at me. He tipped his hat.
“Where you heading, Miss?” he asked through a mouth full of tobacco.
“Denver,” I said, hopeful that he was heading in that direction.
“That’s a long way to hitch, especially for a young pretty thing like you. What’s in Denver?”
“Uh, I might have a job there.”
Neil had spent years scouring newspapers and the internet looking for people like us. As far as I knew, all his research was still at his apartment in Colorado. That was as good a place as any to learn everything I could about what was happening to me.
The man nodded. “I can get you as far as Winslow, that’s a few miles east of Flagstaff. That all right by you?”
I smiled. “Perfect. Thank you.”
“All right, then. Get yourself on in.”
I had barely hopped into the passenger seat and put on my seat belt before he started chatting.
“Name’s Al. I got a ranch outside Prescott. Where you from?” The happy grin never wavered from his face.
He drove the truck ten miles under the posted limit. This was going to be a long drive.
“Phoenix,” I said without missing a beat.
“Oh, yeah? Hot there this time of year, huh?”
“Hot there any time of the year,” I said with a polite smile.
“You got that right.” He turned his head to look at me. For the first time, his smile faded and he looked troubled. “You must have come up past Middleton,” he said. “You hear about that stuff that happened there a couple days ago?”
“No,” I replied, and kept my expression neutral.
“Some kind of gas main explosion or something. Killed a bunch of folk. Such a shame.” He shook his head.
My heart was still for several moments. I turned to the window and bit my lip. “That’s terrible,” I said in a low voice.
“They say these thing come in waves. Disasters, I mean.” He hawked and spat out his window. “Just like that tornado that ripped through Seattle yesterday.”
I turned back around. “A tornado in Seattle?”
“That’s what I said. It was all over the news. Didn’t you hear? Some kind of freak storm or something. Destroyed half a city block. Can you imagine?”
Seattle? I didn’t have Neil’s gift for intuition, but something tickled my thoughts.
“Actually,” I said, “can you drop me off at the bus station in Flagstaff? Maybe there’s something for me out on the coast.”
...to be continued in
Angel’s Breath (Fallen Angels - Book 2)
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Valmore Daniels has lived on the coasts of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans, and dozens of points in between.
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Table of Contents
The Gods of Dream – Daniel Arenson
The Gods of Dream – Daniel Arenson
The Gods of Dream
By
Copyright 2011 Daniel Arenson
Discover the world
of dreams and nightmares…
What are dreams? Some think they are figments of our mind. But what if they were wisps of a distant, magical world … a world you could visit? Twins Cade and Tasha discover Dream, the land dreams come from. It is a realm of misty forests, of verdant mountains, of mysterious gods who send dreams into our sleep. Cade and Tasha seek solace there; they are refugees, scarred and haunted with memories of war. In Dream, they can forget their past, escape the world, and find joy. Phobetor, the god of Nightmare, was outcast from Dream. Now he seeks to destroy it. He sends his monsters into Dream, and Cade and Tasha find their sanctuary threatened, dying. To save it, the twins must overcome their past, journey into the heart of Nightmare, and face Phobetor himself. Here's a preview from
The Gods of Dream:
Chapter One
A Song of Sand and Salt
“Dream is the only place that’s good,” Tasha whispered. “It’s
our
place. Remember that, Cade.”
She clutched him from her hospital bed, wrists bandaged. She was his twin, only twenty-two, but her face looked so spent, so old, her eyes sunken and her skin ashen. The sheets wrapped around her like a shroud. Cade could only nod and hold her hands.
“I remember,” he whispered with a dry throat.
“If you die, Cade—”
“Tash—”
“Just listen! You never listen. If you die, Cade, let your spirit find its way to Dream. Wait for me at Sunflower Corner on top of Dandelion Hill. Remember the mulberry tree we planted there?” Cade remembered that too. He nodded. “We’re not going to die, Tasha.”
Her eyes were moist. Nurses walked outside the room, wheeling carts, but here they were alone. The curtains were closed, shielding them from the other beds, leaving them in a cocoon of sheets, bandages, white walls and green tiles.
“Someday we all die,” Tasha said. “But Dream lives forever. Our place.” She shut her eyes.
Cade sighed, looking down upon her. She was so pale, her black hair wispy, purple sacks under her eyes. How many times had it been now? Three? Four? His sister had been trying to kill herself since that day … that day of blood and fire, that day that left them alone in the world, scarred. The shrapnel had broken his body; it had broken Tasha’s soul.
“Meet me in Dream tonight,” she said, eyes red, crusty, as if she would cry but had no tears left. “Tonight we meet at Seashell Shore. Okay, Talon?”
Talon.
He nodded, hands in his pockets. “Okay, Sunflower.”
Her eyes closed and she slept. Her chest rose and fell as the ceiling fan creaked, as nurses walked by, as the city outside bustled with five million souls flowing through gray streets. Cade turned away.
He marched down the hallways, scarred hands hidden in his pockets, head bent down, staring at the hospital floor. Green tiles stared up at him. He hated those green tiles. He hated his twin sister sometimes. He had to pause, drink from a water cooler, breathe, calm himself.
Keep breathing.
He remembered the country they had fled. He remembered the day that had torn open his hands, taken their parents, taken Tasha’s joy and made her this shell of pain and memories.
“She wasn’t even there that day,” he whispered, jaw tight.
His fists clenched in his pockets.
She wasn’t even there when the bombs roared, when the fire burned, when the blood and guts and limbs flew across the street.
No. She had been at home that day, painting her landscapes, while he was burned and cut and—
Cade pushed the thought down, took deep breaths, and bit his lip so hard that it hurt. No, she hadn’t been there, but the shrapnel that filled him, that had ripped apart their parents, dug through Tasha nonetheless. When she cut her wrists, time and again, it wasn’t her razor blades that drew her blood. It was that old, jagged shrapnel.
Cade pulled his hands from his pockets, looked at their scars, and shoved them back in. He kept walking. Soon he was outside. He headed home.
Meet me in Dream tonight,
she had said.
The only place that’s good.
She would sleep at the hospital, where she spent so much of her time … after slicing her wrists … for visiting those doctors who loved big terms like “post traumatic stress disorder” or “clinical depression” … sometimes just to visit her friends.
Dream. Where no pain or memories of distant wars can dwell.
Cade got on the subway, a rusty old train coated with graffiti, the floor a field of fluttering flyers and newspapers. The commuters crowded around him, jostling against him as the train swayed. Tracks screamed and the driver announced the stops in a voice so muffled, it was impossible to understand.
At his subway stop, beggars reached for coins and youths huddled smoking in corners. Cade avoided the main street and walked home through the cemetery. He moved past tombstones coated with ivy and flowers, and under maples and elms shedding their leaves for autumn. Squirrels drank from stone fountains and mausoleums of marble columns frowned. He always took this route, searching for the hawk Windwhisper, remembering. This was the place where they had first discovered Dream.
“Our place,” Tasha said to him every time, clutching him desperately, clinging as if he could save her from the abyss that forever gaped beneath her. “Where everything is good.”
He met Tasha there that night, as they had planned. He lay in bed, alone, his apartment silent and hot around him. The only sound was his pet hamster scurrying in his cage, racing through paper towel rolls. It took Cade an hour to drift off to sleep, but finally he was
there
again, their place. Seashell Shore. She awaited him.
And they were no longer Cade and Tasha, the refugees, the orphan twins. In Dream they were Talon and Sunflower, and she was happy, and he was unscarred and whole, no shrapnel inside him. Talon and Sunflower, prince and princess of the wilderness.
“
Yalene
, Talon!” Sunflower called to him in the language of dreams. She stood atop a mossy boulder that rose from the sea. Waves sprayed her feet and sunlight glowed around her. Feathers adorned her lustrous black hair, and she wore raiment of silk and gold. A silver helm topped her head, topaz bracelets encircled her wrists instead of bandages, and light danced in her eyes. Around her, green waves whispered over seashells and sparkling stones.
“
Yalene
, Sunflower,” he replied. He walked toward her, the sand caressing his feet. A band held his hair back from his forehead, and he wore a necklace with a stone talisman shaped as a talon, the stone that gave him his Dreamname. He carried a lyre over his back, and paintbrushes hung from his belt; here in Dream, they could make music and art as they pleased, for they lived in muse.
“I’m glad I chose Seashell Shore for tonight,” she said, the sun in her smile. Whales leapt in the distance behind her, and birds of paradise soared overhead. “I was considering Tropical Canopy, or maybe Fruit Forest, but you know what? I think Seashell Shore is my favorite among the places we’ve discovered so far in Dream.”
Cade helped her off the boulder, and they walked through the shallow water. Smooth stones glowed beneath their feet like jewels alight. “I like Seashell Shore too,” Cade said. “Someday I’d like to visit the birch forest in the west, where the faeries live. We’ll walk for as long as we can, and see what new places we find.”