AllFreeNovel
Share Us
As if nothing had just happened, he walks through the front door, me at his heels, the dog shooting past both of us. I drop the leash and let it drag behind her. Slurping noises from the kitchen make it clear she’s drinking from her bowl.
“I don’t want her to drag the leash into the water,” Rudy says, a statement so banal and normal that the ringing in my ears recedes slightly. He's acting as if his touch never happened, testing my version of reality.
Except there is only one version.
I wasn’t wrong. I don’t doubt myself. I never question my own reality.
That’s another lesson my mother imparted to me before I left. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that what you see with your own eyes and hear with your own ears isn’t real. The world will conspire to tell you the Prophecies are not true. The world will conspire to make you unimportant. The world will conspire to take away your power.”
Rudy’s touch drains my power.
I bend down to unhook the leash from Winnie’s collar when I hear it.
The high-pitched, soft, reedy whistle.
Then a thump. Loud, like a sack of potatoes falling.
Then a long, slow sigh.
Winnie starts to bark, hard, sharp sounds of distress. I move from my crouch to a cross-legged position, pulling the dog into my lap, digging my fingertips gently into her neck, going down along the spine to her tail until she rolls onto her back, her belly to me, her eyes closed, the sweet, sweet submission of a beast fully under her master’s control.
“It’s all over now, Princess,” says a deep voice from behind me.
Rudy hadn’t even turned the kitchen light on, so moonlight has begun its shadowed embrace of the house. A thin piece of moon shining in through the window above the sink illuminates a small trail of liquid, thick and viscous, dark as night falls.
Slowly rolling away from Rudy’s limp body.
I turn away and hold Winnie in my lap.
“Thank you, Jason,” I say to the burly man who comes from the hallway and into the threshold, the silencer on his handgun visible in my peripheral vision.
“The Prophecy above all,” he says.
“The Prophecy above all,” I repeat.
“You are unhurt?” he asks.
I look up, catching his eye, knowing what an honor it will be to him to gain my direct gaze. “You have honorably protected the Prophecy. If Rudy had violated me, I would have had to kill myself. Humanity would be set back centuries. You have my gratitude.”
Jason presses an earpiece, listening intently. I stand, still holding Winnie, cradling her in the crook of my elbow. It would serve no one to let her near Rudy now.
“The Mother would like to speak with you, Princess,” Jason says, pressing his phone screen with his finger. Within seconds, her serene face appears on screen.
It has been so long. Emotion overcomes me, the shock of Rudy’s behavior and death so much.
“Paigelynn,” she says in that soothing tone that makes me feel as if her dry hands caress my hair, as if my head were in her lap and she is loving me. I call her The Mother, as does everyone around me, but she is not my birth mother.
Oh, no.
She is so much more.
“Your training served you well,” she says, her short grey hair perfectly coiffed, large brown eyes warm and clever. “But you should have reported Rudy’s behavior.”
“I was going to, Mother,” I begin, but she cuts me off.
“Going to is not good enough. Rudy came close to ruining you.”
Ruin.
