The Heart of the Sea- A supernatural thriller

Dreams

Death.

The wrath paced between her and the raging sea.

He was tall, ancient, and clothed in sheets of mystic darkness. A greedy smile caressed what she thought was lips as it watched her struggle to breathe. It was not her time to die, not like this and not by his hand.

She'd come to Kiyaya to be human again. Pleaded with him to give her back which he had taken from her.

That had been her first mistake. Going to him. And she hated herself for it. She hated that she'd thought there was any good in the man she'd spent five thousand years with. Hated that she thought he would let her go if she just asked.

She begged the mother to let her live long enough to give Jacy a fighting chance.

She knew she didn't deserve the mother's mercy. Not after everything she had done with Kiyaya's encouragement. But she needed Jacy to have his bloodline awakened. Awakened so he might be able to fight against Kiyaya when he came for Jacy. For revenge.

Blood soaked her animal skins and pooled into the sand.

"Tala,"

Jacy's voice rose above the crashing waves. He watched from the edge of the forest. His grey eyes a storm of rage and despair.

Not your fault, she begged her voice to say, but she couldn't bring out the words.

Then the water surrounded her. It filled her lungs as she yelled Jacey's name. Hoping the man on the boat above her gave a shit about her enough to save her.

His hand broke the surface and reached out for her, but never came close enough. A brush of their fingertips and then nothing as he tried over and over. As she slipped further down. Her body stiffened as her lungs filled with water.

You died this way.

The words caressed her panic, stroked the rage she had felt since her first day of awakening.

Jacy's hand broke the surface again, found her hand, and pulled her from the sea.

Talia jerked awake and sputtered the ice-cold water from her lungs. Even if it was only in her dreams that she had drowned. Her lungs and chest convulsed like she'd been in that ocean.

She tried catching her breath. Each rasp sent sharp aches through her chest. Drowning—in seemed—was as real in her dreams as she suspected it to feel in real life.

Terrifying. And something Talia didn't want to experience any time soon. She rubbed her wrist and knew the feeling of fingers digging into the flesh would be there all day.

Jacy.

Talia felt the letters on her tongue. The way it pressed against her lips as she spoke it.

The long black hair shaved to the scalp on both sides and adorned with braids. It accentuated the narrow face, high cheekbones, and his grey eyes. Those eyes that looked like her favorite stormy Seattle day. He had a fine nose framed by his almond-shaped eyes and the skin that was the color of mahogany.

For a dream, he was handsome.

She flexed the weight of his fingers from her wrist and climbed out of bed. Every part of her chest ached. Even the birthmark above her right breast sang with tiny stabs of pain.

That birthmark that looked like a knife wound. The one that showed up her first night in the NICU and no one--- not even the head nurse—could tell her parents where it had come from or why it hadn't been there the day before. Not one of the staff that had worked on her that night still had a license to practice.