A Shade Darker ✔️

{Chapter Twenty Nine}

Home

June 29th, 2017

Ashley

I wake with a pounding head and a muffled groan. I felt like someone had thrown a brick at me and knocked me cold. Everything felt fuzzy and stiff and crowded.

I hear a gasp and I force myself to open my eyes. My vision is blurry, but one thing I could tell was:

I wasn't in the colony anymore.

I blink, stretch and sigh, trying to figure out if this was all a dream.

I look down at myself, finding a black tank top and jeans on my body. Flip flops at the foot of my bed and a red flannel hanging on my bed post.

No shells, dresses, or robes and camisoles. No vampires. No Lucile. No maids and no colony.

No Mike.

"Aaaaand she lives. God, we thought you were never going to wake up" My mom stands in front of me, placing a hand on my forehead as if nothing drastic had just happened.

I try and recall my last memories, but everything still felt a bit blurry.

My Grandma sits with a smile in a chair, adjacent from me bed as she's silent and stirring her cup of tea.

Her eyes are fixed on her cup, not anything else.

I lean away from my mom's cold fingers.

"What's going on? Why am I home?" Mom scrunched her eyebrows together, smiles the smile at me that I thought used to make everything better.

The smile that used to kiss me goodnight. The smile that watched me graduate. The smile that used to kiss my boo boo's and blow bubbles with me.

But it didn't feel the same.

"I know the medicine is making you a little woozy, Ashley, but come on. Where else could you possibly be than right here? With everyone who loves you?" I start to swing a leg out of my bed, another thing that felt uncomfortable.

"Medicine? What are you talking about? What happened to the colony?" My Grandma offers a laugh from her chair, still stirring that cup of tea.

I glance down at my right hand. No ring.

"What colony? Mom, I think we should reduce the prescription to one pill every four hours. Ashley, honey, do you really not remembered a thing?" I push her away, standing on my own with my throbbing head.

"I remember everything well. I've been away from home for weeks. Living in a vampire colony with a man I was forced to marry! And you never came looking for me. Now all of a sudden I'm home and you're pretending I'm crazy?" Hurt filled my chest, along with a lot of confusion.

Mom laughs, right in my face like I was some kind of joke of a person.

"Yes, you have been away from home for weeks. But in the hospital. You were hanging out with that friend of yours on graduation night and he dared you to run into the forest, in which you shouldn't have gone, and you did. Five minutes later He found you passed out cold only a few feet away from where you had started walking. The doctors told us it was some kind of panic induced coma" I shake my head, backing away.

"That's not what happened" I state confidently. But as my mother and grandmother both look at me with worry in their eyes, my confidence begins to diminish.

Had everything really just been a series of dreams?

My eyes well up with tears and my mom sighs, kindness in her eyes as she wraps her arms around me and hugs me tightly.