“Jeremy!” I called out, hurrying toward him with excitement.
He looked up at me, and a smile spread across his face slowly. “I’m so glad you’re back.” He came to me and wrapped me in a bear hug, swinging me around, causing me to giggle despite myself. Yep . . . I’d missed Jeremy too. Even though he had started out as just another guy trying to play tonsil hockey with me, since his feelings for Jenna had developed, we’d been able to relax into a real friendship, at least I felt that way. “Have you figured out a way to fix Jenna?” he asked with hope filling his caramel colored eyes as he set me back down on my feet.
All feelings of elation instantaneously drained out of me. “Not yet.” I paused to study the ground before gathering the courage to meet his eyes and the disappointment that shone out at me from them. “But I know I will. My birth mother said I could, and she’s never wrong apparently.”
He nodded, letting some hope settle into his tense features. “Okay. So what’s the plan then?”
“I wanna see her Jeremy. I know you’re probably gonna say it’s a bad idea but I just miss her so much, and I just—”
“Yeah. Okay,” Jeremy interjected, thoroughly shutting me up. I’d been prepared to argue with him to get him to tell me where she was. I was shocked at how easily he agreed. He must have read it on my face. “She can’t hurt you, and she knows she has a Rider inside of her. It’s almost like she has a split personality or something. Jenna—the real Jenna—there aren’t even words to explain how awful she feels about—”
“Trying to kill me,” I said dryly.
“Yeah,” Jeremy said softly, like he was partly to blame or something.
I reached up and touched his arm. “But she’s okay besides that? I mean no one is mistreating her, right? Khol promised he’d protect her.” And yet another instance of me turning to Khol for aid. But then again he was the Red Dragon Lord, and I was the Dragon Queen. Technically, I could ask any dragon for assistance and expect them to give to me.
“She’s safe but . . .” Jeremy’s voice trailed off and his brow furrowed with concern. “She’s not doing well. The animals . . . well, they won’t talk to her and she’s just—”
I gasped, cutting him off. “Oh God, no. I never thought about that part—either way.” A Rider with the ability to talk to and in a minor manner control animals—we could have all been so screwed. “I’m sure once the Rider’s gone, they’ll talk to her again.”
“That’s what I keep telling her,” Jeremy mumbled while studying the floor. He then suddenly looked up at me, as if he forgot for a moment he wasn’t alone and gave me a weak smile. “Come on, we’ll go see her now before anyone else . . .” He raised his fist up to his mouth and forced a cough. “Khol,” he said with a smirk, and he turned and started walking back down the wall in the direction I had seen him coming from, “tries to stop you.”
I couldn’t help but laugh as I fell into step beside him. “He is a bit controlling, isn’t he?”
Jeremy stopped in his tracks and raised his eyebrows up to practically his hairline. “A bit?”
I rolled my eyes at him. “You know what I mean.”
Neither one of us said anything else for over the few hundred feet it took to travel until we paused in front of a huge wooden door. As Jeremy pulled it open, I only hesitated for a second before following him in. Inside, much to my surprise, looked like a bedroom with prison bars in front of it. Like someone had just installed bars as an afterthought. And I suppose, that’s probably exactly what happened. Talk about a whole new definition to being sent to your room.
I trailed along behind Jeremy and scanned the room for Jenna. Only when we were standing right up next to the bars, did I notice her sprawled out on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. She looked so tiny, lost, and forlorn, laying there with black messy hair and light brown roots. I was overcome by the urge to run to her and hug her, but of course, I couldn’t for obvious reasons.
“Jenna,” Jeremy said in a soft tone. “Someone’s here to see you.”
I heard Jenna heave a huge sigh. “I told you, I don’t want any visitors. Please just go away.” Her voice was so flat and utterly hopeless sounding, lacking all of the usual life that Jenna always seemed to have in her, it was if someone had sucked out her very essence. My stomach knotted immediately, and I felt bile rise up in my throat.
“Jenna,” I said. “I wanted to see you. Please won’t you talk to me?”
She sat up suddenly and came running toward the bars with a huge smile on her face, and she was still, in that moment, my best girlfriend I’d known forever. But as she got closer and the duel imagery of the Rider inside of her shined out from behind her pixie face, I involuntarily took a step back and let out a strangled scream. My reaction halted her dead in her tracks and her face went ashen. She blinked back tears that were gathering in her deep brown eyes as she looked at me.
“I’m sorry!” I blurted out wanting desperately a do over. “I knew what to expect, it’s just that . . .” What could I say? Seeing an alien living inside of you kind of freaked me out? Well of course—duh. “I—I’m sorry.” Maybe I shouldn’t have come to see her after all. I thought I could handle it, but maybe I was wrong.
Jenna’s eyes finally filled to the brim and the tears spilled out and rolled down her face, her lower lip trembling. “You know I would never try to kill you. I mean—I would never try to kill you. And the animals—they won’t talk to me anymore. I know it’s in there—I can feel it but I can’t see it! Can’t control it when it starts implanting things in my head!” She wailed the last part and dropped to her knees.
Tears of my own began to flow freely down my face and I desperately tried to think of something to say to comfort her. “I’m going to find a way to get it out of you—I promise.”
“What if you can’t? Or what if even when it’s gone it leaves some kind of—I don’t know—darkness behind?” Her whole body began to shake as she sobbed. “I tried to kill you. It made sense at the time. It convinced me that you were to blame for all of my problems . . . losing my family . . . being here . . . just everything.” More huge sobs wracked her body. “It made total sense—to kill you—my best friend.”
“Jenna—I . . .” I looked at her beseeching eyes and began to wonder if it was so easy to convince her I was to blame . . . because I was. I swallowed to try and combat the sudden dryness of my throat, the bile that had risen up had left a burning sensation in its wake. I then turned to Jeremy with wide eyes and shook my head in panic. “I’m sorry—I thought I could—but I can’t.” Those were the only words of explanation I managed to get out before I turned and ran from the room—ran from Jenna, my best female friend who had an alien inside of her.
Once outside of the room I continued to run, not really sure where I was going, letting my feet lead me blindly. Where could I go? Not to Khol. I knew I could find comfort in his arms, but that would be the easy fix, and short lived at that. Not to Bryn either. I wasn’t sure how he would receive me at the moment, and I didn’t think I could handle being turned away from him in the state I was in. So I continued to blindly run, my tears smearing the world into bright water colors before my eyes, until I found myself outside in one of the many gardens surrounding the compound and I collapsed under a huge tree.
As I brought my knees up to my chest and hugged them to me, I realized that I’d never been so utterly alone in my life. Sure I might have felt this alone in the past, but I was just being overly dramatic—a truth that I felt down to my core in that moment. Now—now I actually was alone. I had no one to turn to—no one who understood me the way that I needed to be understood. Because that’s what I really wanted . . . understanding. Isn’t that what everyone wants on some level? That’s why sometimes love just isn’t enough, because if there’s no understanding, then a lack in communication will drag the relationship down. Look at what had happened between Bryn and me. I just couldn’t make him understand that it’s not his job to protect me, that I only want him to love me.