Naturesse (book 1 of the (supposed) Evealutions trilogy)

chapter 9

Chapter Nine:

Her Ending

Damian

Her nightmare was horrible.

Like one of my own, yet worse.

How was that possible? How could her dreams be worse than mine?

I couldn't take much more of seeing what she had seen.

I had to get out of this tube, out of her! The fear was eating me from my inside out, worse than an acid, worse than decades of compressed fear and anger made solid.

And yes, the fear and anger belonged to the Naturesse.

***I sat up like I had been electrocuted in my bed. Beads of sweat clung to my skin like sticky pearls. A scream was half forming in my throat, bubbling right at the edges to be let out and tear a rip in the fabric of quiet.

I didn't dream that.

I couldn't have dreamt that.

Guilt swarmed inside of me as I looked over to where Caroline was sleeping, a long lump underneath the covers of her bed. She should be the one having nightmares, not me.

I turned away and tried to slow my heart rate to a more normal pace. I felt like I had just run a marathon twice.

'I'm sorry,' I whispered to the thin air around me. I don't know what I was apologising for, but I did anyway. It made me feel better.

After an amount of time that lost all meaning through my brain, I felt relaxed

enough to lay back down on the bed, my sweat had cooled off and on the whole I had recovered a bit from that horrible dream. I shuddered.

'Tomorrow it will be better,' I promised myself. School, with its safety in numbers of friends and familiarity would be a haven.

'Tomorrow...'

I slumped back down on the pillows and closed my eyes.

I didn't fall asleep, and before I knew it, the dawn chorus of birds was underway.

'Yah look like shite.'

That was the first thing said to me at school the next day. Cheers, Macey.

She was sitting opposite me in a clear patch of lawn, the fresh morning sunlight bouncing off her hair, up in two high ponytails with the rest floating about with a fringe today. I made a small noise, vaguely translated from the language of the half asleep Thalia, meaning 'yeah, I know, please don't remind me...'

There was a rustle in a tree nearby. At first thought, it may have been a bird, or perhaps the wind. But no other trees were moving, so the wind was crossed off the list. No bird calls were heard either, so what was it that was causing the rustling?

Macey answered the question without even knowing what I had been thinking.

Silently she rose to her feet, then walked over to the now frantically rustling tree.

She made a few soft kissing noises, coaxingly, quietly.

The rustling stopped for a moment before a grey furry grenade shot down the trunk, scampered across the ground and leapt, with surprising length for its tiny size, right onto Maceys shoulder.

'Hello there baby,' she cooed at the grey lump nestled on her shoulder. 'Where were yah before, yah left me all lonely!'

She walked back to where I was sitting, stroking her tiny friend.