Incompatible Means (Completed)

Chapter 25

Instantaneously, I know that I am back in a memory, although it is unlike any memory I have ever thought of, I can feel myself apart from the thoughts of past me, past me is unaware that I am in her head just as she is unaware that I brought someone with me. I can feel Roderick there with me, other than knowing he is observing I get no other sense of him or his thoughts. I brace myself for what is to come.

The darkness was an invasion of all my senses. An oppressive pressure surrounded me, I couldn't tell if the darkness was complete or my eyelids were being forced shut. I tried to feel my face but I couldn't move, my body was frozen, held prisoner by the pressure. I couldn't hear anything but the frantic pounding of my heart in my ears when I tried to cry out to Chris my mind finally caught on. As soon as my mouth opened the world around me came flooding in down my throat and into my lungs. The gritty taste on my tongue told me I was trying to breathe in the dirt. I was in the ground, I was buried alive.

As that thought cement into my head, all other thoughts take off and scatter. Running too fast for me to catch, luckily being buried alive doesn't take intelligence to correct. With my heart pumping even faster and with my breathe stuck in my lungs I began to move, shifting dirt around me. My hands became claws as I dug towards what I was praying was my way out. If I was buried face down would I know the difference? The soil to my front felt softer than the hard packed dirt to my back, that would have to be enough. White sparkles danced across my vision, looking so much like maggots in dark soil. Before I could freak out at that thought, my hands felt freedom above. Soon after my face was above the crushing earth. Spitting, coughing, and clawing the dirt from my mouth and throat I finally sucked air into my lungs. The sensation burned like hell-fire in my still encased chest. The panic now brought tears to my eyes as I scrambled the rest of the way out.

Staring up at the sky, slowly brightening before dawn, I took a moment to appreciate being alive. My backyard surrounded me just as it was a few hours ago while I sat outside reading a book. There had been a man, he had asked me crazy questions about living forever. When I turned him down he must have been angry and tried to kill me, I was lucky to be alive. The sky had begun to lighten, dawn was approaching and Chris would be up soon to get the boys ready for school, I needed to tell him what happened before the boys saw me. I stood on shaky legs and made my way into the house, the light was on in the kitchen but the rest of the house remained dark. A sense of dread engulfed me with my first step onto the porch, something was wrong, I knew it in my bones.

I could smell burning metal and another sour metallic scent before I opened the door. The first sound I heard was the gas from the stove as a pan burned on its surface, the water long since boiled out. The light over the kitchen sink was the only light and other than the gas the house was silent, a silence so pregnant it filled up all available space making it hard to breathe. But even without the silence, I knew the house was not empty, I could feel them there. My heart lived in this place, in them, I would always know whenever they were near. I knew that I should have been looking around but a cold fear gripped my heart and directed me where to go, only a few more steps and I would be in the living room.

Once I entered the trashed room I saw Chris, my fiancé, on the floor. His chest and neck were ravished with gouging wounds, his blood surrounded him in a macabre halo, his face pale was frozen in an expression of fear. My first instinct was to run to him but I slipped in the blood splayed on the floor, causing me to fall and slide around the corner of the couch. That's when I saw them.

The children laid still, peaceful and pale, their small bodies held the illusion of warmth, but with their blood missing it is only a shadow, of what life they once held. The two boys, aged six and four, look to be only asleep but I felt their souls as they slipped from their bodies as I grabbed their prone bodies, clutching them close to my shattering heart. As if I could possibly catch their fleeting souls from escaping out the window. I looked up. A monster stood crouched by the window, blood on his fangs as well as painting his chin and neck. The boys' blood covered the monster disguised as a man, before he jumped out the window the memory of his face is seared into my brain, never to be lost.

The screams of desperation clouded out the sound of the sirens approaching, with an unnatural internal snap, I felt something in me break. The connection I had always felt to the people in this room and to myself was broken with their untimely departure from this world.

Several hours later after every emergency person tried to remove me from the children, many got hurt trying, a cop with animal eyes and the scent of jungle held me in what appeared to be restraint but his whispered words of empty comfort made it feel more like an embrace as they finally sedated me.

The memory faded and before the connection to Roderick was dropped I whisper into his mind.

"Do you think this time if I could wake up in a different place, at a different point in time, I could wake up a different person?"

Then the connection is gone and I see the scene around me has changed. Rakel is gone, I don't know where she is but I know if she escaped she is no longer a threat, Roderick and his people will be safe. Silas and Declan flank either side of Roderick who is on his knees with his head bowed and his hair covering his face. I see many more guards and vampires around the yard but I keep my eyes on Roderick.

He finally looks up, he has tears trailing down his face and he looks at me with such understanding it twists my heart. I have to turn away from his look, but I don't have time to look anywhere else before the pressure finally becomes too much and I scream in agony, I feel my bones fracture and the blood vessels in my eyes explode. Then there are arms around me, a familiar power envelopes me feeling like nothing and everything at once. The pressure lifts enough to open my eyes and I see Declan looking at me with a strained expression.

"You have to absorb the power or it will kill you Aisling," he yells to be heard over the thundering in my ears. I shake my head. I don't know what he is talking about. He looks into my face and understands, "Then you must push it into me."

"But then it will kill you."

"I promise you it will not, please trust me," he said it with such conviction and pleading that I believed him. One problem though, I still had no idea how to do it. Declan sees the fear that must have been written on my face and nods, then he juts out a hand into the lightning sphere jerking back so hard it surprises me. Instinctually I reach out for the lightning to pull it back but now I can feel the connection, he did it so I could find a way to push it into him. Trusting his promise that it won't kill him I reverse what I did with Rakel and begin to push the power into Declan.

It happens faster this time, as more power flows into Declan we float back to the ground and I am able to step back a couple of steps. I continue pushing more bringing my fans back around and concentrating the flow when my fans are about a foot away from each other I push them together with all my strength and clap the power into Declan. I look at him in the eyes, he smiles and winks at me, I feel relieved. As the last bit of power slams into him, his body explodes into dust. Charged dust particles twinkle in the night light as they drift to the ground all around the gathered crowd.

With my last bit of energy, I scream at the night sky.