Unseen Things

5 Torie

Torie had long since ceased to even feel her physical body. Was she still crumpled in a pile on the sidewalk? Or had the thing taken over, animating her body while it continued to snuff out her soul? The answer didn't matter. It was just one of the things that cycled through her thoughts, even though they were no longer her own. Hate and fear tainted every thought. Like the tortured nightmares of a fevered sleep, unable to break the cycle, continuously hunted by terror, despair, loss. If she had not gone to the help center that morning. If she had even run into one of the street gangs on her way there. Any fate, any fate would be better than this.

You'll know you're dead when you start to burn, the thing continued to taunt her. She was not yet burning, but it seemed to her she could smell the sulfur. Nothing, no frail cord of a physical body to hold her back, no hope, no Light, stood between her and the utter void.

But she was still alive. The thought struck her suddenly, with the force of a thunderclap. So powerful that it grounded her. She knew it. She did still occupy time and space. What time, and what space, she had no idea. The thought did not come from the thing—rather, she felt the thing recoil from it. And then Torie began to fight.

She didn't know how. How does one fight when they're only a vapor of spirit and nothing more? But she did, struggling to retain that grounding, that knowledge that she still existed. That hope. She screamed. Even as the first faint tingling awareness of her own body began to seep into her consciousness, she screamed.

"Hush, you're alright now. Hush." Someone was trying to calm her. A woman. She could hear it with her own ears. When she opened her eyes, wild and pleading, begging for this to really be true and not one last cruel trick, she saw the woman, middle aged, with spiky white hair and deep bronze skin, leaning over her.

Torie continued to scream. It was her only reply. Screaming for all the terror that she would be dragged back to the brink of hell somehow. That this was not real, or that it would be ripped away. She couldn't close her eyes or cover her face. Never again did she want to be without sight, to be locked in her own mind. What if it still lurked there?

"By all that's Light, child!" The woman leaned back, looking pained.

"Is that a good sign?" A man's voice this time.

Torie finally shut her mouth with a gasp and a hiccup. "You!"

"Me?" the young man said, taken aback. Dark hair curled over the tips of his ears, and he looked exhausted.

"I found you?" She grabbed his arm, uncaring how desperate or crazed she might seem.

"Found me? You tried to kill me." Despite his harsh tone, he didn't try to pull away.

She shook her head. "I tried to follow you. You were glowing. You and..." her eyes moved from him to the other man, moving painfully to join them. "...And him." She blinked. No corona of light surrounded either of them now. It had been the thing inside her, lending her some kind of second sight, which had let her see it at the time. The other man looked chalky, his head circled in a bandage, his arms wrapped from wrist to elbow. At any other time she would have thought he looked like death. But now that she knew what death looked like, he seemed nothing short of gloriously alive. "Who are you? And where am I?"

"Matt Murray," said the first, the dark haired one with the muscles. He jerked a thumb toward the ghosty looking guy, and the older woman. "That's Vail, and she's Miranda. Apparently I'm the only one with a second name." He scowled meaningfully at the others. "And we're in the middle of nowhere."