Page 54 of Possessed By Shadows

Jet swatted again, actually touching the side of the white cat, which then vanished. Jet snarled and stalked forward to where Precious had been, searching the room with his glowing green gaze reflecting the fairy lights we had strung from the lower edge of the loft. If she was still there somewhere, I couldn’t see her.

The sound of rain and wind echoed that wailing cry of a banshee. I thought maybe this was a bad place to be in a storm, and couldn’t imagine actually staying during a hurricane. “Storms are bad,” I mumbled, feeling drunk with fear and sleep.

“Can add a charge to the air,” Micah agreed. He sat up and looked around the room, then got up after a moment to get something. I reached for him, fearing he’d turn back to that broken corpse I’d dreamt of. But he was back fast with my new pendant bracelet. He wrapped it on my wrist above the tattoo with my information and rubbed the stone in the center which seemed to warm the cool charm to life.

“Sorry I’m so high maintenance,” I grumbled at Micah as he pulled the comforter back up over us and plastered himself on top of me like a weighted blanket.

“Shh. Sleep now.”

“It was me,” I told him. “Or Lukas. I couldn’t tell with all the blood and sand. It was maybe both of us. We killed everyone. Broke them like toys we didn’t have a use for anymore.” The memory so vivid it made my skin hurt, as if the sand were still blasting me.

“You are not the end of everything,” Micah reminded me.

“What if whatever possesses me hurts everyone?”

“You won’t let it,” Micah said. “You’re stronger than that.”

But I didn’t feel that way. I felt like a puppet, or little more than a meat suit used by something else. A demon? That was some pretty heavy thinking. Had what I met in the desert been a demon or some other life-form humanity didn’t understand? Religion taught that demons and angels were equally as terrifying. Maybe someone else had caught a glimpse through the terror into whatever lay beyond. I wished I could opt out, turn off my Scooby radar or whatever.

Micah rubbed my wrist, the stone warming beneath his touch. I focused on him. More than his touch alone, but the sound of his breathing, the feel of his weight against me, all of him grounding me in the now. The terror didn’t completely vanish as I clung to him, but when I closed my eyes, I wasn’t sucked back down into dreams of mass death. The scent of him gave me thoughts of the sewing machine whir and the feeling of a quilt in my grasp as I stitched delicate lines. The piece was for him. Everything for him. He never turned away a gift, even if he had a dozen. And in that moment, if I could have wrapped the entire closet full of blankets around us, to shield us both, I would have. At least they were better dreams for the moment.