Hunter's Alpha (gxg) ✓

12. Liar

For you, SuicidalSeal
You've voted on this story throughout this whole time. I love you and I appreciate you so much!

When I dream, I dream of her.

It's always her. A young girl. Eight years old―and I don't know how I know, but I do. And her eyes, shades of storm and sky. One the deep blue of a sky filled with thunder, and the other one the colour of a summer afternoon.

In my dreams, she appears to me. A friend. An enemy.

I never know who she'll be until she's here.

Tonight, we are friends.

"Come play," she says, gathering up her yellow skirt and racing me to the swing set at the park. I recognize this from when I lived in Louisiana.

Sometimes I get this feeling―of remembering something I didn't know I remembered. It happens in my dreams all the time. Everything before I moved to California is blurry. Everything of my life before my dad and my brother died―almost nonexistent.

There are times when I wake up, and I can't remember their names.

That, more than anything, is what scares me about growing up. The fact that I'm now older than Jeremy was when he died. That, one day eventually, I'll be older than my dad was. That I'll keep living, even after everything.

The girl in my dream touches me.

"Jude?" she asks, scared.

"What is it?"

She only points to my hands. Which are now red―as though I've dipped them in blood. As I lift them, shaking, to my face, they drip onto the playground sand.

The girl with the blue eyes screams.

"I―I―it's not my fault," I say. "I was just trying to help―"

The memory of the teenager's face springs back to mind: her anger, her tears, and the body that laid dead in front of her. I didn't ask you to! she had screamed.

I had thought I was saving her.

"How could you?" the girl asks me, and her summer-and-storm eyes are filling with tears. Tears that rain down on us, from clouds that spill over.

Despite the rain, my hands are still bloody.

I wake up.

Gasping, breathless, I don't even notice that there are hands on me until I see her.

Hunter's eyes are wide with something indistinguishable. She searches my face and, when she realizes I'm awake, she steps back.

"A nightmare," she says, and her voice is different. Less cold. Almost . . . kind.

I nod, still dazed, and sit up in bed. This is when I notice she has returned from wherever she was―I didn't see her come back after she left and locked the door.

And then I see the third door―one I hadn't noticed. It's slightly ajar, and through the sliver of space, I see a bed. A connected suite.