Rage of Vendetta (The Vendetta Series #2)

Chapter 43

Author's Note: Well, I resisted the urge to cry wrapping up the last chapter and writing the epilogue. (Not because it's tragic or anything, I'm just very attached to these fictional people.) I was considering uploading this late tomorrow so I could mull over it a few times, but then I forced myself to edit it so I could get it up today. We've officially come full circle. The epilogue is mostly definitely going to be up by tomorrow, Monday, at the latest (I give you permission to spam me if it isn't), and then an Author's Note to a) thank you guys, and b) information about some bonus stories I'll write and release over time! So anyway, here it is: the final full chapter. Enjoy, and I'd appreciate votes + comments! :)

Chapter 43

There's a phenomenon everyone has felt at least once: that jerking start right as you are on the verge of falling asleep. 

Phantom free-falling. That's what hits me, just a thousand times worse.

I gasp, and keep gasping, inhaling, inhaling, inhaling, as my arms fly out, my eyes fly open.

"She's awake, she's awake!" 

"Get the oxygen. Start chest compressions."

"No, look, she's breathing fine."

The first thing that occurs to me as I lay on my back in the damp grass is that the sun is rising, the dark sky lightened barely with the first rays of brilliant orange and pink. 

The second thing is that I'm very much alive.

I jerk again, my middle moving up involuntarily like there's a string around my waist pulling me up. 

My senses are starting to return: vision clearing, ears sharpening. I exhale in a long breath, my hips lowering back onto the ground. 

"Ariel? Princess, can you hear me?" 

"I can hear you fine." Startled, my hand slowly goes to touch my throat. I'd expected my voice to be croaky, dehydrated. "I seem to be able to talk fine too."

Sasha's face (and hair) is floating in the left of my line of sight, while Jesse's concerned face takes up the entire right. In between them are Eric, Courtney, Vee, Valencia, and a green-streaked Asian woman I've never seen before with a stethoscope hanging around her neck.

A few seconds tick by, conversational yelling in the background being all I can hear as the morning creeps higher. 

Then I become the bottom layer in a dog pile.

Well, really, Jesse, Sasha, and Eric are only trying to hug me, but weight piles on, and strangely, it tickles.

"I thought you were dead!" Sasha yells in my ear. "You were dead when I got back into the room."

I laugh slightly, both from the tickling pressure on my sides and thankful that I can see, hear, feel again. 

"Okay, get off her," the unfamiliar woman says, demanding but kindly. "I need to check her vitals."

"So can someone explain what just happened?" Courtney says as I sit up carefully. She holds up a palm. "Not that, I'm not, you know, overjoyed you're alive, but how?"

"That's what I'm wondering too," the woman says as she presses the cold metal to my skin. I flinch, then relax. Despite my clothes being torn up, shredded, and ripped in every visible place, my skin underneath has sealed up and healed completely. 

"I walk into a room to find a dead body with no pulse, not breathing," she says, "and the next thing I know, this boy here—" she jerks a thumb at Jesse, "—is yelling that we can't move her body with the rest of the dead because she's going to come back."