“You done?” a raspy female voice demanded from behind the one hundred watt light blinding me. In my effort to understand what was happening, the allotted time for my answer apparently ran out. “I said…you done?” she repeated with teeming annoyance.
“With what?” I asked from behind my hand, squinting around the brightness. Suddenly a strong hand encircled my arm, yanked me onto my knees, and dragged me out a door. After the metal edge of the storage building slashed my left thigh, sending a sharp pain down my leg, I landed face-down in a patch of mud and weeds. I made an effort to lift myself up and wipe the hardened mud from my skin, but the same hand slammed into my shoulder; spinning my small frame around and landing me right back in the mud, this time on my back. I glared up into the bitter face belonging to a woman in her mid- forties. Her brown hair rested limp against her round face and neck. Her bloodshot brown eyes matched the mud I was currently splayed in, and were emphasized by the dark circles hanging beneath. The wooden spoon clutched in her hand and the radiating pain from both hands reminded me what had prompted this unfounded punishment. Accidentally grabbing a pot with bare hands, I scorched the skin across my palms and spilled the pot’s contents onto the kitchen floor.
Although the floor was already stained from years of disregard, she supervised as I cleaned up the mess with Clorox and water; sending seething pain into my fresh burns. When the tears had started flowing, I was thrown into the shed. Crying was not allowed in our house. It would upset him. And neither I nor the angry woman glaring down at me wanted to upset him. The severe repercussions would make the singed skin of my hands feel like a loving hug.
“Get up!” his booming voice exploded from the right of us. He stumbled down the brick steps and seized the fabric of my sweatshirt, lifting me to my feet in a split second. “You think that burn feels bad?! You’ll wish you just had a burn when I get done with you!” He swayed closer and I flinched, twisting my head to the side and anticipating the pain. Instead of hitting me, he secured my arm in his much larger hand and contorted it at an odd angle. One more twist of his wrist and I heard a loud pop followed by an immense pressure. The pain that shot up my arm made my knees buckle and I collapsed back in the mud. I felt the cool wetness against my cheek right before I blacked out.
I heard a scream and I shot straight up; eyes wide open with alarm. Suddenly aware that the earsplitting scream was coming from my own mouth, I put my head in my hands. In an instant sturdy, protective arms enveloped my body.
“Stasia! What’s wrong? What happened?” Finn. I shut my eyes and allowed my body with its severely frayed nerves to fall into his stable one. He brushed several unruly strands of aquamarine and blonde hair back from my tear stained face.
“I just…I had a reverie-” I breathed, forcing down the sobs I could feel pulsing in my throat and demanding to be released.
“Pasha your eye!”
“If you tell me they’ve changed colors again, I’m going to scream,” I threatened; my tone deadpan. Finn just chuckled lightly, sat up, and inclined my head to the right as he examined me closer. He smiled, but remained quiet.
“Lemme guess. Pink? Orange?” I joked with him as he continued to inspect my face.
“It’s not your eyes, it’s your eye.” His own blue eyes watched me adoringly as I wondered how I was going to explain one aqua eye and one…purple or yellow. “You’ve acquired another trace.”
“Another…trace?” I stared at him; utterly confused. “On my eye?”
“It’s under your eye, Pasha,” he laughed at me and touched a finger to the skin at the outer corner of my eye. “It’s right here.” Relief that my eye color hadn’t changed was trumped by the mystery of the unknown addition to my features. Nothing says ‘freak’ like a glaring trace on one’s face.
“Are you sure it’s a trace? Aren’t I only supposed to have one?” I asked him; hopeful. His sly smile told me he was more than sure.
“It’s rare but not unusual,” he explained with pride. “The most powerful descendents - direct, Chosen, or both can have multiple traces.”
“So what does it look like?” The suspense was now literally killing me. I was close to running back up to the house in search of a mirror, when he started to dig in the canvas bag.
“Hold on…” He pulled out his IPhone and handed it to me. I held it up like I would a mirror and thankfully the moonlight was bright enough to create a slight reflection on its dark surface.
Below the outside corner of my left eye was a small shape that was hard to make out in the IPhone’s semi-reflective surface. I inclined my head towards the moon so that the light would shine more on my face.
“Oh, wow,” I murmured as my new trace became visible. Just like my hair, this was going to take some getting used to. It was the same blue as my triskellion trace and greatly resembled the infinity symbol; the number eight turned on its side.
“It’s absolutely beautiful.” Finn exalted. He furrowed his brow, “Didn’t you say your hair changed color after a reverie you had too?”
I thought for a minute, “You know, you’re right. It did...” I paused as I realized both reveries had occurred in the same place; the crescent shaped beach. With the same older gentleman picking up shells. I launched into an explanation of the two reveries and the older man I had seen.
“You must have a connection with the old man,” he speculated. “I would guess he’s an ancestor.”
My heart skipped a beat, “Like….like a grandfather?”
“It’s possible,” he told me. I looked out over the waves to the dark horizon. An ancestor. I hadn’t thought about it before, but it would only make sense. My father wasn’t immortal, so he would have had a family. A family that didn’t know about me. My growing hope withered at that gloomy possibility. Either way I knew that if my soul found its way back to that place, I would be compelled to find out.
“So if the reverie wasn’t upsetting, what was?” Finn eyed me curiously and rubbed my back.
I had completely forgotten about the dream my reverie had morphed into.
“Just a bad dream,” I muttered.
“What was it about?” he asked gently.
“Just stuff from the past…” I trailed off. A sigh laced with a whimper made its escape, “Why can’t I just get a good night’s rest like normal people?”
“Because you are far from normal,” Finn smiled down at me; the depths of his blue eyes alleviating my suffering.
“Lucky me.”
He chuckled and readjusted the blankets to shield us from the cool wind that flowed off the waves. The sky was only beginning to lighten, so I curled up in his reassuring embrace.
“I’m the lucky one, Pasha.”
Chapter 15
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“Are you sure you didn’t murder somebody?”
“I’m definitely about to murder somebody,” I threatened; leering at Carmen. My newest trace had become the talk of the trip back to Bald Head as we hung out on the second level watching more movies. As was to be expected, everyone was throwing out guesses as to what my trace could mean; murder being the most recent hypothesis. My trace wasn’t teardrop, which apparently signified how many people a gang member had killed, but that didn’t stop them from running with it.