The Daylighter Chronicles

Chapter Three: Sanctuary

It's been almost a year since my meltdown and later, after I was taken away from all the voices, Kai informed me that at one point it felt like I was screaming for help inside of his head, something that I have yet been able to do again. I now have to concentrate on keeping the voices out instead of letting them in. Nobody knows why my freaky mind power went haywire all of a sudden, but with Baen's training and an iPod filled with very loud music, I can now go out among people and not feel like my head is going to explode. I think that I have made great strides in controlling my ability. Although I will admit that most of my time was spent in the basement, which was also the gym, not because I'm especially fond of working out, but because it is soundproof and essentially the quietest place I know. It was my sanctuary, and now it was locked.

I stormed into Baen's office with fury rolling off me. If he had been a human or even a vampire that wasn't as old as time itself, I have a feeling that he would have just handed me the damn key and backed away slowly. But seeing as he had probably already seen how this little scene played out in his head he was not intimidated by me as I slammed the blue postie note that he had left on the gym door telling me that I needed to interact with humans and that I needed to get out of the house.

"What the hell is this?" He glanced at the note that was written in his very precise handwriting as he sighed,

"I thought it was pretty self-explanatory. You can't hide forever." I scoffed,

"Wanna bet?" He took a deep breath as his grey, almost silver eyes met my golden ones and said,

"Forever is a extremely long time to be alone. You will go mad, and there is nothing scarier than a mentally incapacitated vampire. So get out of the house. Go walk around the woods, draw, take some pictures, anything, as long as it isn't in this house."

I rolled my eyes and crossed my arms over my chest in childish defiance. Baen then rubbed the back of his neck as he stood and glared down at me. "This is not up for discussion, Eerie. I will force you if I have to." My mouth fell open. I couldn't believe he would even think to invoke the sire bond,

"You wouldn't?" He sighed again as he sank back into his chair like he truly was an old man and not the thirty-something guy everyone saw when they looked at him.

"To keep you from going completely insane, yes, I would. I don't want to, but if you refuse to help yourself I will do it for you." I was speechless. I couldn't believe that he would actually use our bond to force me to do something, but the look on his face said that he was completely serious. I glared at him for a few seconds longer before I stalked out of the room and slammed the door behind me. I then stomped down the stairs and passed Kai on my way to the front door. I heard him asking himself why I was throwing a tantrum. I glared at him as well,

"I don't want to talk about it." With that, I walked out the front door and down the road that dead-ended into the woods. I took a deep breath of pine needles and sunshine before I walked through the foliage.

As I watched the sunlight trickle through the trees I became lost in the silence that I could find among nature. This place that I had walked by hundreds of times since we moved in, and I had no idea that it could possibly hold this kind of silent beauty. It was at that moment that I felt the need to immortalize this scenery, which shocked me because I hadn't had that feeling since I was turned. But here I was in the middle of the woods and my fingers itched to create something, to share the beauty of this place with everyone. I sat on a tree stump as I thought about how I would show this amazing piece of land with the world. I wanted to do something that would capture these leaves and trees as they were now, at this instance, not how they would be by the time I finished drawing them, because as I sat there I noticed that even the slightest breeze could change everything.

That was when I decided that I should take pictures. I jumped up in excitement and pulled my phone from my pocket. Once I switched it to camera mode I took pictures of everything until the sun went down and my battery ran out.

That night as I looked through the pictures I had taken. I knew that this is what I wanted to do with the rest of my eternity, but to capture the beauty of the world outside of these walls I was going to have to deal with people, and it would seem that I now had a dream that was greater than my fear.