She looked at me, but I didn’t know what to say in response.
“When we meet again, we will be on solid ground, not in dreams.” She kissed my cheek and then, just like that, she was gone, and I was standing alone in the darkness.
What was I supposed to do? What was coming? Just when I thought I had my next move all planned out, something else came along and sent me on a different path.
Chapter 1
Dreams and Phone Calls
I shot out of bed like a bullet. My hair was wet with sweat, and my clothes were clinging to my body. I had seen her, touched her, spoken to her! My mind was full of images of the smiling girl so full of love. Yet her love was for a monster who had robbed her of her purity and light — leaving her abandoned in a dark closet where she had willed herself into the arms of an angel.
I had felt her emotions, seen her world, and been part of her existence. Even though it was only for a brief moment, it had been long enough for me to understand the evil that had hurt her. It was enough to show me that we shared a common bond; the same man had hurt me too.
While I had been in the city seeing one of Wesley’s favorite bands, John had abducted me from the front stairs of the venue. He had tied me to a dumpster in an alleyway and took my remaining innocence from me. He had expected me to die as she had. To my own surprise, I had survived. My bleeding body had been found by my best friend, Adam, and I had been rushed to the hospital.
I relived that nightmare every night in my dreams. That is until someone summoned me to another plane, or I was able to block it out with another almost as depressing memory.
I had lost my boyfriend because of that attack. It had shaken him, and he had answered the call of an ex-girlfriend. She had hijacked my body and made me say things that I would never say, in a language that I did not recognize. She had taken Wesley from me by threatening to kill both his family and mine. Once his bond with me was broken, she told him I was just like her; an unlikely mixture of two bloods. She failed to mention, however, that the two bloods were not the same.
My dream of Krista continued to haunt me. It left me with more questions than I cared to consider. She had called to me in the darkness and delivered a warning. But was war really coming to Midvale?
I felt confused and disoriented. I knew there were more beings out there in the world with me. I had even met a few, but none of them seemed capable of war. Well, I supposed the vampires might be. It was too bad my mother had vaporized them when they took Wesley. Since then I hadn’t come across any other demonic beings in Midvale that might provide answers to my questions; unless you considered the kids at school demonic.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked aloud to myself as I fell back on my pillow and put my face in my hands.
****
For days I thought about that dream, how real it had felt and how it had left me wondering what exactly was coming. Or was it a who? The whole thing was perplexing and took over my thoughts entirely. Every hour of every day I tried to figure it out.
I could tell my mother was concerned for me. She never pried, but I knew she would be there once I needed to let it all out in the open. I didn’t want to say anything to anyone for now; it would make the dream seem less real. The last thing I wanted was someone trying to take Krista away from me. She was my lifeline, the only other being I knew who was just like me.
The one thing I couldn’t wrap my head around was the fact that she would be given a chance at a second life. What did it mean to be given a second chance? Would she be reborn into the world, or would she simply rise from the coffin where her body had been laid to rest? In due course, I supposed I’d get the answer. Little did I know I would have a huge hand in resurrecting her from the world of the dead.
Two months had passed since the school shooting. The other students were starting to let go of the notion that I was their savior. In fact, I was slowly returning to invisible status. I welcomed that, not that the attention hadn’t been nice for a day or two. But now all I wanted was normalcy again, or at least my definition of it, I should say. The only reason anyone wanted to talk to me, anyway, was to find out how I had done it. I seemed to have demonstrated super-human gifts, and that had provoked a lot of curiosity. To me though, it was nothing that remarkable. It was in my blood.
I began to suspect that someone (or something) was working their way through the student body, one pupil at a time, working on them to change the story into something different, taking what really happened and twisting it into something more believable. With that came a degree of peace. The other students quit trying to probe about what had happened. Instead, like me, they seemed content to move on from the whole mess.
The truth was, I had seen I could save the others in my class by forcing them into the closet so the gunmen would not find them. They had confused impressions
