A Touch Of Lightning (COMPLETED!)

Chapter 51 The Teeth Of Memories

Chapter 51 The Teeth Of Memories

Carmen found herself in the midst of a waking dream, her thoughts so fuzzy and spun that she wasn't sure if she was surrounded by reality, or if she was looking at the constructs of her own hyperactive imagination.

The night air was cool against her feverish skin, one of the few welcoming aspects that surrounded her. Everywhere she looked she saw death and destruction. The gentle breeze was tainted by a scent so foul, so dark, that she half expected it to blister her lungs just by breathing it in.

Bodies lay in crumbled heaps, most of them shredded so horribly she could not discern where one body ended and another began. Shards of wood were scattered about the lawn, splinters of the bones of the old trees, having been thrown outwards with such force that some were even embedded into the low stone wall that surrounded the front of the mansion.

The mansion itself burned with a sultry, angry light, flames like little demon tongues licking across exposed surfaces and hissing their delight as they left blackened scars in their wake. The gaping hole in front of the building, full of hanging wreckage and lit from within, looked like the gaping maw of a dragon about to strike, about to breath out a torrent of hellfire and destroy the last living things out in front.

There was death everywhere, there was destruction all about, but there was something right at her feet that held her motionless, held her nearly senseless, keeping her mind sawing back and forth between knowledge of reality and the vague disbelief of this twisted dream world. At her feet were six teenagers, lying in a circle, feet in towards the middle, their bodies as still as the earth itself. The complete stillness only death can bring.

As seemed to be dictated by the strange rules of this half-reality she felt she was in, there were no visible wounds anywhere. They looked whole, complete, not ripped apart like everything else around her. And yet they laid there like terrible statues, carvings from uncaring clay, so perfect that they warped reality. Lying still in death right before her eyes. Right before her memories.

She could see every detail, every line of skin and sinew, every nuance to the planes of their features. She could see a blonde girl, lithe, small. Full lips and high cheekbones. Beautiful even in death. An image that tore her at her mind, worrying at the shreds of her sanity like an enraged wolf on a bloody bone. An image of her. Like a reflection, lying there on the cold grass, like a portal to another realm.

And within the clutter of memories she hadn't known she had, she found a place for this girl. She found realizations that shook her ever harder as she dwelled on them. The Lab had stolen so much from her. Mirage had called her sister. She hadn't been lying. And now, staring down at this familiar girl, she understood. She hadn't lost just a twin tonight. She had lost both of her sisters. She had been a triplet.

The jumble of her own memories, so long not a part of her life but now returned by the Torn, was complete enough to snatch her up in the icy embrace of grief and hold her frozen. She felt like a wall of ice, a towering dam holding back a flood so cold it would wash away the warmth of life and leave her hollow. She could see cracks appearing there, black lines racing off into the unknown. And she was terrified.

"Callin." She choked out, a ragged whisper that barely made it past the invisible fingers of fear and grief that were crushing her throat.

He heard her. He heard the horror in her voice, in her very heart. She had turned to him, she had ran away from the pain. He sprinted to her side, conflicting emotions warring within. What had happened now? She sounded so stricken that he half expected to see her holding that incomprehensibly rage-filled link between realities, the one that had been tearing the Torn apart from within.