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Again.
Each attempt is more pathetic.
Again.
Again.
Again!
I fall backward, hitting my head, and chunky water spatters into my gasping mouth.
“Oh, god! Oh, god! I’m going to die down here! Oh, god. Please, no. Protect my friends. Protect Dessin. Please, I don’t care what happens to me. I could die in this hole knowing my family would find freedom.”
“Protect them yourself.”
A voice that still haunts my dreams, still sends distress escalating into my core, echoes along the stone walls of the drain tunnels.
My eyes search the darkness now filling with the early sun, landing on a man who used to seem so tall, so frightening to me.
His five o’clock shadow, dark shiny hair, and sea-green eyes. His leather jacket and dimpled chin.
Jack Ambrose stands above me, holding out his hand.
“No…” I mutter with a dry mouth and burning eyes. This tunnel of rainwater, debris, and rusty air shrinks around me.
In an instant, it all happens so fast. The memories of what he did to me. And then the truth that the void showed me. He loved Scarlett and me. Our mother loved us, too. He was a victim of these experiments, and he even ended his life to make sure they couldn’t use him as a pawn to hurt his little girl anymore.
“You deserved a good daddy, Skylenna.” His deep voice breaks along with his face, pinching together in a frown. “I’m so sorry they took that away from us. I love you. I’ve loved you your whole life!”
The sound of my father crying turns my body to mush. I cry with him, watching the big man drop to his knees, sloshing the nasty water around us. And I throw my arms around his neck, remembering the sweet moments we had before I turned six. The days under the Red Oaks. The scripture he’d read me on Sunday while I ate vanilla ice cream. He was once a good father.
“I love you, too!”
My father holds me close while he breaks apart softly, stroking my matted hair down my back, giving my cheeks soft kisses. We deserved to always have this relationship. We were robbed of it.
“You don’t have much time, my sweet daughter.” He separates our embrace to hold my face in his warm, calloused hands. “You need to get to DaiSzek. There’s a bond between you two that goes beyond logic. It’s in your blood, linking your souls, and giving you a language no one else other than Dessin can understand. Once you find him, the enemy is doomed to fail.”
Goose bumps prickle up the backs of my arms. The sound and shape of his name quickens my breath and ignites my soul. The urge to find him, to hold my big, furry boy is overpowering. It laces my blood with something stronger and more ferocious than adrenaline.
“You are a warrior archangel sent from God himself to strike down the evil in this world. Be that angel now. No mortal body can contain what lies under your flesh and in your soul.”
My pulse skitters in my throat like a jack rabbit’s heartbeat. I give my father one last look, one last hug. “I’ll always love you.”
“Always,” he replies with fresh tears swimming in his eyes.
My muscles buzz with new energy as I look to the hole streaming with daylight. This time, as I jump, I throw my arms back, swinging them upward, and use my feet to claw against the slimy wall. I kick so hard that I’m able to hoist myself onto my elbows, eyes watering as the light blinds me. Panting, I wiggle out, thrusting myself forward until my boots are free of that dingy hole.
And as I stand, rubbing my eyes against their natural adjustment, I see that my father is no longer here. He did what he needed to do.
As the adrenaline subsides, I feel the sting in my left bicep. The slash of torn skin where the arrow hit me has been opened back up from my many attempts to free myself from the drain.
And blood is dripping down the tips of my fingers.
It’s mixed with the sewage water, splattering on the sandstone street. Like a knee to the gut, I recall the other monsters that are looking for me.
Blood Mammoths.
Those awful products of generational incest, big like ogres, long hair, and no ears. They’re inhumanly strong, impossible to escape if they catch the scent of blood…
