Whispered Kiss

Blood Witch

Amelia. The name vibrated in my veins and echoed through my being to the extent that I could've been a fourteen-year-old girl in some century long forgotten.

However, the sensation didn't last long. Pain overcame me. Fierce and strong, it jolted through my bones and made me cry out. Rustic and metallic, the taste of blood sat on my tongue as I bit into a piece of my mouth by accident. A croak, almost unrecognisable as such, broke over my lips and stole away into the silence. A hungry silence which wrapped its hands around me and magnified the pain. The agony was like a red harvester ant, bold with merciless shards of unrelenting and continuously drilling.

Just short of the crown in my hair, the pain continued to throb and with every miniscule movement of my head, I could feel my hair sticking to my scalp in a drying, irritating, clump. The pain, combined with the lingering confusion of my dream made my head spin.

In an attempt to try and anchor myself, instead of falling down an abyss of agony and confusion, I tried to refocus my mind on one thing. I chose the dream rather than the pain. The flashes I could remember made little sense to me. They were vivid, realistic and brief interpretations of a sickly girl with higher prospects for her future and an unexpected love. The only undeniable fact I had was her name. A name so unfamiliar yet recognisable. In the haze of my mind, I also remember seeing another figure- a man. A splitting headache prevented me from saying with surety it was the same figure who always haunted me but my heart screamed truth. I couldn't understand or comprehend why the dream and the previous dreams I experienced, continued to replay in my mind. Their realism, their true emotions, and their vibrancy made it difficult to ignore. I wanted to know why they happened, and why they only happened after my incident.

My stomach did a flip and I leaned forward, another groan falling from my dry throat. My attempt at distracting myself didn't help. Swirls of nausea hit me, driving me closer and closer to tossing my cookies. I swallowed down the bile and tried to wet my parched lips, however in vain the action. The chilled surface I sat on, brought some measure of relief, acting as an ice pack to my tense and sore muscles. My eyes were heavy complaining teenagers refusing to bend to my will and stayed closed, but I remained insistent, trying to force them open and gauge my surroundings.

A flash of what happened before the dream, and my current situation snapped behind my eyelids. The illegitimacy, irregularity and questionability of it wasn't an easy task for my mind to process.

How could it be possible? How could a man, so wicked and so ecstatic over his wickedness, emerge from a simple puddle of sand? A puddle of sand with a will and life of its own. It was nothing short of supernatural witchery, an unexplainable superstition come true without scientific facts or truth to back it up. Could I be too blind to see the true reality of my situation? Too naive in my ways and too set in the world to believe people could wield any sort of power other than their own humanity. Could I fall back on the idea of this simply being a hoax? Like with the incident a few months ago, this too held a form of realism. Still, I struggled to commit to what I saw but I understood one undeniable fact: I got taken hostage and hit over the head.

Would anyone notice? Would Bladen Black or Vivian notice I didn't show up for our business trip or would they simply assume I didn't want to go?

What did I do to help myself? I didn't have survival skills. Everyday people, living everyday lives never experienced magical kidnappings, if you could categorise it as such. The worst thing in my repertoire was stealing candy at the age of five and skipping school as a teenager. I kept my life relatively safe and free of anything which endangered, imprisoned or implemented me in a negative way. Like any other person, I thought of the possibilities of handling a situation such as this but they were mere fantasy. Fantasy I lived out through the pages of books and my wild imagination. The closest I came to violence and pure danger in life had been the night I got attacked and lip raped. That alone messed me up.