Page 87 of Stalked By Shadows

Wow, did I have questions. “You and Sarah okay?”

“Yes,” he agreed.

“The cemetery?”

He was silent for a minute or two. “I sort of have a vague memory of a dream of you and me and Sarah in the cemetery.” A mix of emotions rolled across his face as he fought to keep his mask in place. He looked away, his lips tightening as though he were trying to fight back tears.

Not a dream, I thought. He remembered more than he wanted to. “I dreamed of you being pulled into the grave. We tried to hold on, but you pushed us away.”

“Hmm,” I said. Not willing to add to his anxiety with the truth of what I remembered. How much of it was reality? We couldn’t share dreams, right? So there would be no reason that his dream would match mine, unless neither were dreams.

“Sounds terrifying,” I offered without confirming or denying anything.

He gripped my hair and turned my face toward him, anger clear in his eyes. “Stop trying to save me. Especially at your expense.”

“I can’t control what you dream,” I told him. He knew, or at least suspected that what he remembered wasn’t a dream, even while I wished it were. But I also wasn’t going to stop trying to keep him out of harm’s way. “You’re pretty hot when you’re mad.”

He let out a frustrated sigh and let go to lie back down beside me. “The police found us, me and Sarah, both unconscious near the open grave.”

“The same night you went missing?”

“Yes,” he said. “Well it was almost morning. They’d already gone by the grave a bunch of times. Two dozen cops in the cemetery that night and we appeared out of nowhere, with no one able to explain how it happened.”

“You were right behind me. Where did you go?”

“I thought I heard Lukas say he’d found Sarah. Thought you would have heard him too and would follow. Next thing was the dream… and then waking up at the grave.”

I thought about that for a moment. Had he been grabbed by the curse of the grave that had taken Sarah? Why hadn’t it taken me? Instead I’d gone all the way back to his house and encountered something else. The demon from the desert? I still had too many questions to make sense of it all. “I went to sleep in your garden.” That much I was positive of.

“I know. We have you on camera,” Micah said.

That was an interesting revelation. “Just me?” I wondered. Were the black-eyed child and moving gnomes real? I wasn’t sure Micah would ever sleep again if he saw those things in his garden.

“The camera glitched around three a.m. and you vanished before it came back on. Out for like thirty seconds and you were gone.” Something in his voice changed, a hitch of fear, I realized.

“It wasn’t your monster,” I promised him. “It was mine.”

He looked at me with a confused frown. “What do you mean?”

I shrugged. Saying it out loud would make me feel crazy, and sitting in a hospital, I didn’t want to chance someone listening and have them commit me. “Maybe it can wait until we’re home?” I glanced around. “What hospital is this anyway?”

“Piedmont Atlanta Hospital.”

Atlanta? “Georgia?”

He nodded. “We got the call late yesterday that you were here. Couldn’t find a flight right away so we drove. Sorry it took so long. Lukas started off at the wheel but couldn’t keep under the speed limit. And it’s been a while since I’ve driven, but I had to take over. I’m a bit more of a cautious driver.”

“How the fuck did I get to Atlanta, Georgia?” It was all more than a little overwhelming. The dream, losing a month of my life to who knew what, finding myself in another state with no memory of how I got there, and the strain the month had obviously taken on my body. I thought about the fire thing. Jin or whatever it was, who claimed I belonged to it. While it had burned away the shadows, it seemed to have done something to me as well. Taken over, perhaps? Or maybe the loss of time and memory was from the shadows? Could I have survived a month unconscious in the ether somewhere? I had so many questions I wasn’t sure where to begin.

Micah reached up and stroked my face, turning it a bit so I could stare into his beautiful face. I really hoped this was real. “Don’t dwell, okay? I let the time I lost eat me up for months, the questions, the fear, the uncertainty, and it did nothing for me. Let’s focus on getting you well and home, yeah?”

The memory of those shadows eating me flashed through my brain again. The pain, the fear, the certainty that they were death of the soul. Had Micah experienced the same before? Either way, those memories didn’t need to be shared. Though I wasn’t sure I could brush them aside. I nodded. “Okay.”

He leaned forward a bit to kiss me, then laughed a little. “Need to trim this beard else I can’t find your lips.”

I smiled back, feeling a little lighter as he wrapped his arms around me and snuggled in beside me on the small bed. “Whatever you need,” I promised.

Chapter 27