ENSHROUDING LIGHT

THE DEAL

CHAPTER 19

THE DEAL

Nevaeh floated and swirled into a white light, a drowsy sense of nothingness washing away all bodily sensations. A wispy white being with a male, sonorous voice was speaking somewhere beyond the light.

'Bright one,' the voice said, 'you are our only hope.'

A quiver stopped her basking in the total lack of tension, and she stopped drifting at once. As she followed the voice with her mind, she rushed through the light at high speed.

'We can't thank you enough.'

She turned to a vision of pure white light, so bright that the figure was hard to focus on for a moment. As her vision adjusted, the figure was shivering like it didn't know how to control the waves and electrical pulses of its unfixed form.

It looked vulnerable. Like it had been left out in the cold too long with no one to care for it. She couldn't move. She was hypnotised by the erratic, gassy, smoke trails the being produced as it progressed.

As the more formulated white orb drifted towards the fragile light, an intense jolt of pain erupted inside her. She must protect the being from him! She lunged forward, but she was nothing more than a messy mass of green wisps and pulsations.

'I just hope I can do what is necessary to help,' the white light said in a pale, masculine voice. His being was flashing intensely like he was agreeing against his will.

Something seemed to pull and stretch her core.

She had to protect him! There was something familiar about his being like it belonged to her somehow. He was hers to care for. Her being grew weak.

She tried to shout out, she needed to tell him not to agree, but nothing came out. She tried again, forced the words to where her mouth should've been, but they wouldn't form.

'The fact that you are willing to try,' the white orb said, his voice smooth, calm and persuasive as he moved closer to the nervous being, 'is the greatest help we can ask for right now.'

Nevaeh floated towards them. 'I will help you.' The words came from her! From the green being...from the Designer.

The shivering light grew in size, then his whole being sank into hers as if needing every inch of the comfort she provided, turning her phosphorescent.

She wrapped her tendrils around him and, as they blended, swirled and danced in a foggy, loving embrace, a sense of heaviness pulled her down.

'Leave him alone!' Nevaeh woke in a sweat, the distant echoes of the dream...or lost memory...haunting her mind, the emotions more real to her than anything she'd ever felt in her life. The tweeting birds and the smell of a sunlit meadow wafting through the window above her bed jolted her back to the reality of the previous night.

She trudged to Tom's room with the arms of her dressing gown hanging as low to the ground as she felt. She should call her mum to bring some of her old clothes. Her heart constricted at the thought of having to explain why.

'Tom?' She opened the door to his room. 'David?' She walked into his empty en-suite and then back onto the landing. She wrapped her dressing gown tighter, walked to the stairs, peered over the balcony and sniffed in the smell of toast. Her knotted stomach rumbled. She walked down the first set of steps, and a few different voices floated up from the kitchen.

'One day I'll be able to make you see, Mary!' Tom said.

'Thank you,' Mary said with a giggle.

Jack laughed. 'You gonna be an eye surgeon when you're older, or you just talking crap again, mate?'