Page 53 of Possessed By Shadows

Chapter 16

No police escort home, but we’d found a cab and I dozed during the ride, Micah’s hand in mine. The trek up the path and through the garden was about all I could take, hip and back screaming in pain. Water poured down on us like the floods of Noah were coming to roost. Once inside, the sound of rain was comforting and familiar, though I didn’t like the look of the pools growing in the yard.

“It will be fine,” Micah assured me as he tugged off my clothes and shoved me into a warm bath. I thought briefly about teasing him to join me for some play because both of us naked at once was always better. But once in the water, heat leeching away the pain, all other thoughts vanished.

Micah roused me enough to get me onto the futon rather than upstairs, and I’d have protested if he hadn’t wrapped a comforter around the both of us and curled up beside me. If he turned off the lights and double-checked the door, I was already asleep and didn’t notice.

Most of the time my dreams were vague, forgettable, and little more than impressions, but sometimes I dreamt of my military days. The fact that I landed in the sands of Afghanistan was a bad sign. The wind whipped around me, hurling the dirt hard enough to tear skin. I’d always equated those sandstorms to feeling what it was like being under a sander, blasted with debris. Add the heat on top, and it was a mess that could grind a man down pretty fast.

During the worst of the storms everyone would be in their tents, waiting it out, often finding several feet of sand covering stuff when the wind finally stopped. But this particular storm was familiar, and rather than just sand, I felt blood on my skin. Not windburn, or even the pounding of the sandstorm, rocks grating on my skin, but the hot liquid of life’s blood spilling, and the writhing of something dark in the distance.

That particular storm hadn’t happened at night. The midday hours turning black instead. Black and red. A hurricane of wind and dirt, dropping red soaked sand on us. But this time around it was night, almost like it had been that night before when I’d watched that thing approach our camp.

I stepped out of my tent and into the intensity of the wind. The frenzy eased a little around me, blowing the sand around as the dirt beneath my feet crunched. Bodies were strewn everywhere as though they’d been flung there by the tornado strength of the wind. No one moved but me. And my lungs were tight from the horror of it, faces torn up from the blasting sand, bodies bent at unnatural angles, and eyes staring vacantly into the distance.

Familiar faces. But not all of them had been in our camp. Some had been guys I’d trained with, or served with in other countries years before, finally getting to that camp in the desert. The number of bodies was insane. There hadn’t been that many in our unit, as numbers that large would have been easy to detect on radar and from drones. But the graveyard of bodies stretched as far as I could see. And in the distance was that wriggling mass of shadows and faces.

My heart raced even as my body froze in place, unwilling to move closer. Sky lay broken several yards away. Brad too. Jojo, and even Dion. Everyone I’d ever met. All bent, broken, and void of life.

My heart stuttered in terror at catching a glimpse of the familiar pale brown, wavy, curls I loved to bury my fingers in when we kissed, or hugged. Even just when I took a break to stare at his beauty.

Micah.

I blinked at his twisted form, tears filling my vision, blurring it, as his broken body lay unmoving. None of this was real. He hadn’t been there that day. I hadn’t even met him yet. This had to be a nightmare.

I forced myself forward, body and soul in agony, fighting against the confirmation of his death, even while that writhing mass ofDeathclosed in on me. When I reached his side, I dropped to my knees and gathered him into my arms. He’d been broken, twisted up like a doll to be thrown in the trash. My chest throbbed as though my heart was about to give out, pain making it hard to breathe. Physical or emotional, I couldn’t really tell. It was all too much.

We hadn’t been together all that long really. A blip on the radar of my life so far, but our relationship stretched beyond anything I’d experienced before. Maybe because I was no longer running around the world as a toy soldier, or perhaps because he’d become my home. Not that it mattered. Having him in my life had centered my orbit, cleared my brain, and gave me a place to rest. Without him, what did I have left?

The wind around me whipped and intensified, slamming into me as through to shove me away from Micah’s prone form. But I clung to him, feeling like the sand was stripping away the skin from my bones, and stared up into the monstrous darkness.

It had more of a shape than I remembered. More like that unknown soldier headed toward our camp that night than the ever-shifting mess I’d seen a handful of times in my life. Little more than an outline at first, a defined male body, or at least a very generic type in uniform. The face swallowed up in sand and darkness, leaving me trembling, but unwilling to run.

He was close now. A few yards away, stepping over bodies as if he’d done it a thousand times and didn’t care how heavily strewn with the dead the area was. He seemed determined to reach me, as if angry to find me alive among his mass genocide of my life.

The wind began to pick up the bodies, flinging them into the distance as the form got close, as though it were offended by their prone forms. They vanished into the darkness of whipping sand and blood. It yanked at me, trying to rip Micah from my arms, but I refused to let go, clinging to him as though we could both be flung into the barren wilds of sand and death.

It stretched a hand toward me, reaching me and moving to grab Micah from my grasp. For a brief half second, I could see its face, and it was my own, but not, Lukas’s perhaps? Maybe another version of me? Either way, I reacted with instinct and that was to curl myself around Micah and scream into the face of that darkness. Not in terror, but in rage, like I was coming for it, and would fight to my own death to keep Micah with me.

The thing paused, shadowy form disappearing back into the darkness, even as my rage echoed all around me, muffled by a field of the dead and the slashing wind, but breathless as I continued to scream.

The shaking took a few minutes to break through. I gasped and fought for air like I rolled from screaming to trying to breathe and back again.

“Alex.” More shaking.

Suddenly the screaming stopped. I blinked into brightness. Heart hammering and feeling like I was about to have a heart attack. Then Micah’s face appeared above me. His hands on my cheeks, his hips straddling my waist, weight holding me down.

“Alex,” he breathed again, like he’d been trying to reach me for a while.

I heard Jet hiss somewhere close by, which made me suck in another breath, too fast, and I choked, but the screaming didn’t return. I panted like I’d been running a marathon. Exhausted, terrified, and relieved to find Micah alive and staring down at me with worry.

I gasped out his name, “Micah.”

“I’m here,” he said, wrapping himself around me. “You had a nightmare. But it’s okay. I’m here.”

“You were dead,” I whispered. “Everyone was dead.”

“A nightmare,” Micah promised, kissing my face and holding me tight. Jet was on the kitchen counter swatting at Precious who sat unperturbed with black eyes. The fact that the ghost cat glowed, and Jet appeared as little more than a shadow, didn’t make the entire thing less ominous. Had Precious given me the nightmare?