Every night for the rest of the week I had nightmares. I'd wake up to Ivy shaking me furiously and my own throat killing screams. I was exhausted from the lack of sleep and the excessive crying wasn't helping much either.
The nightmares kept coming back, but they changed sometimes. Some nights I was in the forest, other times I was in a cave. Sometimes that man was there, sometimes he wasn't. One time he wasn’t there, but I was chained to the wall and couldn’t get free no matter how hard I yanked against the mental cuffs.
One thing I was sure about though, was that every night they got worse and worse. I didn't know why, but I had a gut feeling that they were warnings.
It was finally Friday and it was early morning…again. I was used to waking up early in the morning because of nightmares, but today I had had enough. Though I woke up feeling exhausted, but restless. I was going to get back in the swing things ASAP. The wallowing in misery and fear thing wasn't going anywhere. I had to move on.
I pulled on my usual jogging clothes, but skipped over the iPod. Not being able to hear what was going on around me scared me to death. I slipped out of the house silently, sure that if Dad or Ivy knew I was sneaking off alone they'd be mad, and took off jogging down the street without getting caught. It was five thirty in the morning, but I didn’t care. Maybe exercising would make me so exhausted that I’d just pass out later on tonight without nightmares.
For almost two hours I varied between walking and jogging, and I felt even more exhausted than I had during the week. My limbs were heavy and my lungs felt like they were going to explode. I stumbled to a stop and bent over, hands on my knees as I tried to catch my breath.
A wave of unease washed over me and a familiar prickling feeling made the hair on my arms stand on end. I straightened up and looked around, mild terror seizing me. I had stopped right next to the forest. In the early morning light, it didn’t seem so bad. But looking deeper into the forest, I could see the darkness within.
I sniffed the air cautiously, and there was that metallic scent again, which I now recognized as blood. Except it was stale this time.
There was no around. The morning was peaceful, too peaceful for anything bad to happen. I took a deep breath and stepped into the forest. I was sick and tired of being afraid of something that most probably was just my imagination. So, that’s why I swallowed my terror and made my way into the inky blackness. I followed the scent of blood and hoped I could find the scent of the thing that wasn’t quite animal and wasn’t quite human either.
For a long time I walked cautiously, just sniffing the air. I had already made it to the darker, creepier part of the forest where everything was dead. Where I had found the blood on the rock.
I shuddered and continued walking around, trying to calm my pounding heart, as the scent of stale blood grew stronger.
A twig snapped, and I stopped, my head whipping around to follow the sound. But there was nothing and no one around, so I kept moving as silently through the forest as a shadow.
I finally found the rock with blood, except the blood was dried now, just a faded stain on the rough surface. I sniffed it, trying to figure out who it belonged to. The scent was familiar to me, but I just couldn’t place it no matter how hard I tried.
I sat there for a while, crouched next to the rock, just thinking about whose blood it could be until I heard it.
Death.
I stiffened and my eyes widened. It couldn’t have been a nightmare, that was just wishful thinking.
Again and again it repeated, and my fear seemed to slowly creep up and tried to swallow me whole.
YOU ARE READING
Werewolves and Vampires
RomanceWerewolves and Vampires is the story of, you guessed it, werewolves and vampires. Lila Silver had been a pretty normal girl until her sixteenth birthday and her dad decided to move her and her step-sister, leaving her old friends, old school and old...