Light (13 page)

The warmth came first, it caressed my skin and it felt wonderful.

“Chastity.” John shook me one last time.

“I’m awake,” I said but I didn’t open my eyes. Screw him, I was where he said I needed to be and I could sleep.

“Put her on the couch, I’ll get Elliot,” the woman said.

“Thanks Ginny,” Fox spoke and I felt the soft couch on my back and the softness just urged me to drift away again.

A light so bright shone in my eyes. I hated it and disliked whoever was disturbing my sleep pattern.

Then it disappeared slightly, as I could still see the blotch of bright behind my eyelids.

“There is no damage,” A manly voice said. “Get her upstairs, the first room on the left and leave her be. She’ll be fine.”

“Thanks, Elliot,” Fox said.

I felt myself being carried up a staircase and placed down on another couch.

“Scoot,” Fox’s voice came again. “Thanks, John.”

“Hey, you did nothing wrong. There is no other way to Clence.”

She huffed. “Yeah, I know. Still it doesn’t help with the crappy feeling about all this.”

“Fox, she’ll be fine.”

No reply came and then I felt her shaking me softly. “Come, Chas. You can sleep as long as you want to but we need to get you out of these clothes.”

“Can’t you just use your sand or something to cast a drying spell?”

Fox giggled. “Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. Now sit up, let’s get these wet clothes off you.”

I did what she said, or tried to do. Still I couldn’t open my eyes.

Shit, I’d never felt this crappy before. My stomach turned, my head spun and it felt like I was coming down with a fever.

She tugged and pulled on my hoody, then my shirt and pants were next and I hated that she pulled off my underwear too.

I was completely vulnerable and couldn’t even lift a finger to help myself.

I’d never experienced being tired like this before. Not even after Rollins’ worst ballet class, and she was a master at giving those.

When a warm garment fell softly over my body, and a bed underneath, I didn’t wait to feel the covers being pulled over me.

This was it, I couldn’t stay awake another minute longer and I drifted away faster than counting to three.

I TOOK A DEEP BREATH AND THE URGE TO STRETCH had me lifting my arms above my head.

It felt good.

Mom was probably cooking up a storm this Saturday morning….then it all came back to me at once.

There was no Mom, or home. The last thing I remembered was being carried by John, somewhere safe…the Compound, wherever that was.

“Two days, that is a record, Chastity,” a voice to my left said and I found a man, in his late forties, maybe early fifties with blonde hair sitting near me. He had soft blue eyes and a slight scar over his left eyebrow.

He sat casually in a chair with a newspaper in his hands and black framed glasses resting on his nose.

He took them off and put down the newspaper.

“Usually when your kind come to us, they sleep an entire week.”

“Wait, I slept for two days?”

He chuckled.

Yeah, I usually pondered on the not-so-intelligent questions. But I couldn’t help it. I was wired differently and the smallest, unimportant things usually come up first.

“Are you sure you don’t want to sleep some more? You’ve been through a great deal.”

“No, I’m fine. I don’t think I’ve ever slept like this before.” I pushed myself up straight.

My muscles were still sore, as if I’d just done a million different types of exercises.

I looked around. The room had a very old ambience to it. The walls were brown, the lighting was in a form of a chandelier and the bed was posted, with white embroidered linen.

“Where am I?”

“You don’t remember Fox and the rest bringing you here?”

“Vaguely.”

He smiled softly. “My name is Elliot. I am the Guardian of this Compound inside the Outer.”

My head started to ache just listening to the foreign words again.

“What is the Outer?”

He leaned forward in his chair and rested his arms on his knees. “The Outer is like a barrier between the human world or Domain like Reverians like to call it, and Revera. Lots of things happen in the Outer. We deal with many Shadow Casters and we keep the Domain safe as well as Revera. Nobody can go to Revera without going through the Outer.”

“So this is like an invisible world inside the world?”

He smiled again. “Something like that. We like to teach in the field, it will help you understand it better.”

Teach?
Nobody said anything about classes.

He got up and took a couple of steps toward the door. “You are safe here, Chastity. I’ll send Stacey up with a fresh pair of clothes.”

“Thank you,” I whispered still dumbfounded about the whole teaching thing and what he’d meant by
teaching in the field
. I watched him leave.

Oh crap, crappy, crap, I hope he wasn’t speaking about facing Shadow Hounds and their Casters.

My mind only thought about that for a long time. If I had to face Shadow Casters, would my sand turn dark? Mom never mentioned anything like that and I hated not knowing what it was I should do.

A girl with dark brown hair and the brightest pink hair piece I’d ever seen walked into the room. She was all leather, leather pants, with a leather vest over a pink t-shirt.

“Hi, I’m Stacey, I bet you have plenty of questions huh? It’s not like we get a lot of Diddles. No, Casters are usually born in Revera and we chose the crazy of it all,” she spoke extremely fast.

I shook my head. “Diddles?” It sounded like someone that was extremely shallow.

She giggled. “A word I came up with for someone like you.”

I raised my one eyebrow.

“You know, that had no idea what they are until they are told.”

She wss clearly a huge morning person which I wasn’t, and seemed to babble a lot.

“Here, Elliot asked me to bring these up for you. We’re more or less the same build, they might be slightly long. It’s a mission to find something that fits my length.”

“Thanks,” I took the clothes that she handed over to me.

“So, Fox told us that you were kidnapped by a Shadow Caster, and not just any Shadow Caster. You get that she’s one of the deadliest out there, right? I wonder what kept her away for so long, we always thought she’d died the night Graig did.”

Graig. Was that my father’s name?
I could’ve sworn Mom mentioned someone like that before. It slipped out once, a long time ago. It had to be.

The girl was still babbling. “That must have been horrible. Do you know what she wanted with you?”

I shook my head. I didn’t want to speak about my mom again, to lie to all of them.

“It’s so weird. We all thought Vinicola was dead,” she babbled on and I wondered if she ever stopped. “And then she made her appearance just like that. You can be so glad Tom and Fox found you. Vinicola is not someone to mess with. Shadow Casters can do serious damage to a new Caster, for some reason they think you guys can be persuaded to turn dark, which is actually silly…” she stopped in mid-sentence and looked at me who just gawked at her. “I’m sorry. I know I can be overwhelming. Believe me, it’s a curse.” She giggled at her own little joke.

I smiled, not knowing what to say and knowing
it’s okay
, would just give her the right to carry on, and it was the last thing I wanted her to do.

“I’ll leave you be. When you’re ready, just follow the steps, through the hall on your left and last door is the kitchen.”

A sarcastic
wow
was all I could think when she left the room. I did not want to know what she was like on a mission. How did they keep her mouth shut for more than five seconds?

I got dressed and followed the steps down like she said.

Three hallways were right in front of me.

For some reason I couldn’t remember which one she said I should take and no sound came from any of them, so I took the one that was right in front of me.

It was slightly dark, and had plenty of portraits of people wearing clothing from different eras.

There was even one of Marie-Antoinette. I knew it was her because we’d done an entire history lesson about the woman during the French Revolution who wanted to give her starving people cake instead of bread.

Benjamin Franklin also made his appearance.

What was royalty and a Founding Father doing amongst them?

I opened the door that was at the end of the hallway and found a huge library with plenty of books open on one of the tables.

I started to page through the first one.

It had an old smell to it, and when I lifted it up to see it’s cover, the title was barely legible.

“It’s the Book of Nightmares,” a voice said from behind me.

It didn’t belong to Elliot, but to another blonde guy that could easily be his son. He was wearing a jeans with a Metallica t-shirt and his hair was as messy as it could get.

I stopped looking through the book and folded my arms in front of me.

“Name is Max, you must be Chastity.”

“Chas is fine,” I replied. “I couldn’t remember which hallway to take, sorry.”

He chuckled. “I don’t blame you, Stacey has that ability to make you so confused that you don’t know whether you should go up or down.”

I giggled.

“You rest well?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Good. I promise you, you’re going to need all of your strength.”

He walked toward the door and the vibe he gave told me that I should follow him.

He took me straight to the kitchen and disappeared again.

Fox looked up from her plate of eggs and gave me a huge smile. “Two days, that must be a record.”

A woman with shoulder length, red hair giggled. She was slightly older than Fox and really pretty and friendly too.

“Welcome to the Compound, Chastity. I’m Ginny, come sit and have breakfast.”

I smiled at her. No need to introduce myself it seemed all of them already knew who I was.

I took the space right across from Fox.

“What happened? I told you to take a deep breath.”

“Something hit me on the head, and that was when the breath disappeared too.”

“I’m so sorry about what happened, Chas. I…”

“It’s not your fault, Fox.” Elliot had just walked into the kitchen.

“Still, she could’ve died and it would’ve been on me.”

“No, it would’ve been on Tom. They aren’t your team anymore. You need to let that go.”

She huffed and smiled. “They will always be my team Elliot, no matter what Selene says or does to punish me.”

I didn’t like the vibe that was starting to form.

“She’s just worried about you, this is not a punishment, Fox.”

“Then why does it feel like that?”

He smiled. “Maybe it’s something you can take up with her when you return to Revera.”

She sighed. “Yes, sure.” She dug into her scrambled eggs again just as Ginny put a plate of toast, eggs and bacon in front of me.

“Where is everybody?” I asked.

“Tom and Henry are training with John and Margot. Max, well he is always doing his own thing, and Stacey…” Fox shook her head which made everyone laugh including me.

“You need to get used to Stacey, Chas. She has the tendency to get extremely excited over the smallest things,” Ginny said, putting it lightly.

“She’s nice,” I replied and put a fork full of egg into my mouth.

“So how long before Chastity can go to Revera?”

“What, I have to stay here?” It slipped out and Fox gave me another guilty look.

“The Compound is also a training facility, Chas. Remember what I told you in the room.”

I nodded and kept quiet. I didn’t know who knew what and if this was going to be my new home, I didn’t want to make trouble for anybody.

To be honest, I felt like an orphan, being chucked from one foster home to the next, but I kept my mouth shut, thoughts to myself and ate my freak’n eggs.

“As long as it takes, Fox. Chas need to be ready on all levels before she can join others her age inside Revera. Otherwise…”

“Yeah, I know. She won’t make it.”

I didn’t like that at all.

Nobody but myself will decide whether I’m going to make it or not.

THE REST OF THE DAY I WANDERED AROUND THE
like a lost cat. I found the training room, if you could call it a room. It was more like a hall, where Tom, John, Henry and the girl named Margot were training.

It was hardcore stuff.

To see John and Tom in action with Henry attacking Tom’s attackers with his beak was brutal. It made me think twice about moving to Revera and I wondered if it wouldn’t be better just to off on my own.

Believe me, that thought had come up a couple of times, but when Shadow Hounds and Dark Casters entered my thoughts, not to mention the Oblivion, it disappeared.

I wasn’t ready to take all of this on by myself, and guessed I needed the help of these people if I wanted to get better with trusting my sand and developing my skills.

I watched star-struck at how Henry’s owl figure got bigger and bigger after Margot found a way to get him off her.

She turned around and got such a fright of the oversized bird that was almost her size that she stumbled backwards.

All of them laughed and Tom helped her up. “Don’t ever turn your back on an Anitule, Mar.”

“Got that,” she said without taking her gaze from Henry.

Tom blew his golden sand in Henry’s face and the owl shrunk to its normal size again, hooted once and landed on Tom’s arm.

After that, I got pretty bored. Nobody even noticed I was there so I walked through another passage and found the entrance. I looked at the couch and remembered the first night they’d brought me here. I knew it must be the couch that Ginny had ordered them to lay me down on.

The door of the Compound opened suddenly and three boys about two years younger than me walked in and started to spray graffiti on the walls.