Shadowstruck

Chapter 1 Part 2

She gasped and bolted upright, breathing quickly and heavily, blinking and looking around. She noticed trees. Lots and lots of trees. She was still in a forest. Then she saw a fire, though it looked like it had been lit a while ago and was now a few twigs weakly burning in the afternoon sun. She looked to the right of the fire and saw the same boy from before. Noah. Yeah, his name was Noah. She groaned and rubbed her head, trying to get rid of the headache that was growing. The boy - Noah - glanced up at her and she saw his face immediately brighten before she was thrown back in a tackle-hug.

"April! Oh my god. Are you okay? Don't ever do something like that again."

"Noah - "

"Ever again. It was stupid. I shouldn't have agreed to it."

"What - "

"Promise me that you won't ever do that again."

"But I - "

"Promise me."

"I would if I knew what I did."

Noah slowly let go of her as he took in her words. "What?"

"I don't know what happened." She closed her eyes. "I don't even know who you are, other than your name."

Noah's eyes widened and he slowly stood up. "Shit. Okay." He studied her face carefully, trying to find any sign that she recognized him, but found nothing. "This is fine. It's all fine. I'm fine." He sharply exhaled and turned away.

"There's a couple things I remember." April looked up at Noah.

He sat down and watched her. "Like what?"

She leaned forward and looked at the ground. "Uh, okay...I remember a dark cloud thing..." Noah nodded and she kept going. "and a bunch of blood, my blood I think." Noah looked towards her forearm. She followed his gaze and saw bandages wrapped around her arm in the same place she remembered there being a large bloody cut. "And I think you were there, and then we were in a forest."

Noah raised an eyebrow. "Anything else?"

"No, sorry."

"Okay." He rested his head on his hand, thinking. "Okay. Could be worse."

April looked up at him. "Did something happen?"

Noah closed his eyes. "Yeah. We were fighting that, well, 'dark cloud thing' as you so eloquently put it." He smiled a bit before going on. "You got hit on the arm pretty bad. I had to bring you back. The others were really worried about you."

April tilted her head. "The others?"

"Okay. This is going to take a while."