Melody

2:21

Melody awoke with the most unwelcome deja vu. The particular heavy and slow feeling of waking up after having been knocked unconscious. Judging by the rhythmic pounding and pain radiating from the back of her head, it had been physical this time instead of chemical. She didn't know if that was better or worse, she still felt sick and nauseated, and the headache was worse, but her body didn't feel as clumsy.

The overwhelming wrong feeling had diminished, but things were certainly not right. But at least she was able to think now. She looked around, lovely another cement room from floor to ceiling, a single caged in bulb in the ceiling for light, and a clean, if uncomfortable pallet underneath her. Things smelled clean, which at least wasn't offensive and an improvement on the first kidnapping. Melody wasn't scared this time, she was boiling under the surface like a secret lake of lava.

Yup, she had been kidnapped again. Ansley! Where was her daughter? Who had taken her. Melody knew she had to be smart. It wasn't just her own life, but that of her daughter at risk now. She probed her heart. Alexander was there, a flood of reassurance now that she was awake. But he was stressed, and worried. Far more so than he had been the first time she had been taken. That worried her. She wondered if he knew something she didn't. Clearly the Hyena threat had turned out to be more true than they were prepared for. But it felt like this was part of something bigger.

Melody settled in. Her room was a comfortable temperature and she decided that if something had happened to her daughter she would know. Certainly the wrong feeling she had felt, the one that had led her to realising her daughter had been taken had been some kind of link to Ansley. Right now she didn't feel the earth shattering wrong feeling, so things were not good. But not disastrous. She needed to stay smart, and focused. She had survived this once, she would do it again. Her and Ansley would be walking out of wherever the flying fuck this was soon.

Melody would have looked calm and serene to anyone who looked in on her prison. She sat in her jeans and sweater, barefoot, legs crossed, hands resting on her lap with her eyes closed. But if they could feel the storm inside her, they would have feared what was to come. What they had unleashed.

Far away, in a much colder place where winter hadn't yet quite let go of her hold on the land. An old and wise grizzly bear stirred from her winter den. Thin and hungry, waking before her peers. She had felt something new on the wind. Something that was stirring her soul in a way she did not understand. But she was filled with a certainty of what she had to do.

Melody had centered herself, and then set herself to search the entire room. She checked every inch of the meagre straw filled mattress, and blankets for anything that could maybe be a weapon, before checking the walls, and floors for a crack or break or anything at all. But at the end of her effort she didn't even have so much as a bobby pin to her name. She was in her socks, so she couldn't even use her shoe laces as a garot in an emergency.

Not that she had ever actually attacked anyone. But Alexander had insisted she learn a few self defense skills as part of her training and general physical activity. She wasn't the same scared teenager she had been. She was a mother fucking warrior now and whomever had dared to try and harm her, harm her child, they were going to bleed on the ground at Melody's feet before this was over. She vowed it to the sky.

Every

Single

One

Of

Them

Alexander didn't know if he should be relieved by the slow boiling rage he felt from Melody, or even more worried. She was a bomb waiting to be set off, he could feel it. It was an improvement over the horrible wrong feeling, or abject fear. But it still worried him, her emotions were so dark, so unlike herself. Melody had always had a fire burning just under the surface of her sunny disposition, ready to explode out like an erupting volcano when she was provoked hard enough. The feeling from her now was different, it was the roaring fire, but held under tight, cold control. The darkness he felt from her scared him, he wondered how many times she could survive something awful happening to her before she broke.