Page 2 of The Shadowed Oracle (The Bonded Worlds #1)
Chapter One
The first of the four strange messages read: “Someone is following you.”
It was early in the morning and Ingrid Lourdes was just waking up, sipping her coffee at her kitchen table. The words appeared fuzzy to her unadjusted eyes so she squinted, focusing, then felt nothing but annoyance once the unsaved number became clear.
The only anonymous messages came from her co-workers at The Boneyard, a restaurant and bar she’d worked at and managed for the past three years.
Ingrid’s phone was connected to the shift scheduling message board and she’d get every bit of information sent straight to her.
Almost always, it was some young recent-hire trying to get out of their shift, spinning all kinds of absurd stories to do so.
A fire at their apartment complex. Stolen car. Broken down car. Sick Grandma. Sick dog. And, of course, the most popular—they were sick themselves. Which was apparently unrelated to the drunken photos they’d posted the night before at two in the morning.
She’d heard them all.
Yet, this story was a new one. Someone following them. Surely that was the meaning. She never thought “you” was in reference to her. Just another typo from an apathetic kid. A kid who was brazenly claiming they had a stalker.
It would have been admirable, she thought, lying to that extent to get out of work, if it weren’t so insensitive.
Ingrid continued to guzzle her coffee, fully expecting one of the hostesses—with frantically bad grammar and plenty of exclamation marks—to follow up with a novel-length text about a shadowy figure outside their home.
But nothing came. The ominous message sat inconspicuously on her phone all day, not spared a second thought.
There were so many explanations of what it might be or who it might be from, Ingrid didn’t bother investigating.
Her day went on like it usually did. Co-workers bickered and stirred up new gossip.
Nasty patrons demanded that their food be sent back.
Men flirted with her, becoming more persistent with each drink.
Old regulars discussed the most gruesome story in that week’s news.
And at least once, some furious and unfamiliar face asked to speak to a manager, then quickly became angrier when Ingrid informed them with a small smirk, “I am the manager.”
On and on this went. No different from the day before, nor different from what would happen tomorrow.
The rare occasions she’d break from this cycle was to go to the gun range, the library to read those antiquated books she found so much comfort in, or to the tattoo parlor for a rare touch-up on days she needed a more painful distraction.
Ingrid needed distraction. The more monotonous the better.
That’s what kept her going, kept her sane.
She worked as much as she did so she wouldn’t have to subject herself to the silence, instead reveling in the noise of the bar until it was time to close down, divvy out the tips, turn off the lights, and make her way back home.
Back to a much different, far more terrifying chaos.
One look at her apartment—consisting only of a couch, a small TV she used as a white noise machine, and of course, a bed—and one could deduce whoever lived there wasn’t expecting to stay long.
Unsentimental, some might think. A habitual traveler, another would guess.
But the truth was a combination of coping mechanisms and bad habits picked up from a childhood spent on the move.
One of the few things Ingrid could remember about her earliest years…
was running. From what, or who, Ingrid never knew.
Her father never told her. He never told her much of anything , she had to admit to herself.
So in those wide open blank spaces, a five-year-old Ingrid filled them with the one thing she was most familiar with. Her nightmares.
When the sun went down and the eerie quiet felt louder than any crowd, that was when the horror began.
When the silence wasn’t silent at all, and felt more like a black brick wall closing in on her.
A wall so tall she couldn’t see the top, and so close that she was sure the oxygen would run out any minute.
It had been like that since she could remember.
In the countless bedrooms she shared with her father, she’d sleep on her side with a pillow pressed over her exposed ear.
In the group home she’d lived in later on, she asked to room with the younger, more restless children, hoping their crying would drown out the internal torment.
Or, as her father had insisted on calling them, “the nightmares.”
The word stuck. It became a blanket code for all that ailed her, all that hunted her.
Ingrid couldn’t go around calling them monsters, or shadows, or ghosts.
It would draw too much attention. Her silky black hair and bright eyes drew enough of it.
And the last thing her father wanted, it seemed, was attention.
The waking visions? Just nightmares. The shadowy creatures that would appear right in front of her terrified eyes? Just nightmares.
They never harmed her, not physically at least, but she did have the feeling that they were somehow alive.
Not someone, but some thing . An amorphous force always lurking over her, waiting to strike when she was most vulnerable.
Waiting for when she stopped running, following her every move, even when all else seemed to fade away.
At age six, her father finally gave up. He could no longer drag her with him on his endless escape, and those nightmares became the only familiar thing she could take with her into the group home.
So she endured them. She went to bed. She fought off the nightmares. She got out of bed. She went to work. She kept to herself, kept to her routine. Then she went back home to do it all again.
Until that night.
That night, when the second message appeared on her phone.
It hadn’t been some shameless tale from a young co-worker. It wasn’t a mistake. It was that something that she had been waiting for, or at least a consequence of it—as if that madness keeping her awake at night might’ve also been drawing in other things that inhabited the darkness.
She was a magnet, always had been, for the vile, the foul and the wicked.
“Do not leave work alone,” the second message read.