Airel: The Awakening (Airel Saga Book One)

Prologue

IN MY DREAMS I was always in control. I was always the person I wanted to be. There were no limitations—there was nobody to tell me I couldn’t. I could be myself, beautiful by my definition—the only definition that mattered.

But those were my dreams.

Real life was different. Being seventeen, I was old enough to suspect that adults were lying to me when they told me to “shoot for the stars” or that “you can be anything you want to be.” I knew there was something behind the scenes that wasn’t being said, and it was the same thing that was going on behind the eyes of most boys in my school when they happened to see anything walking the halls that was even remotely feminine.

Secrets, in other words.

Adults had secrets. I had the feeling that only experience was going to unlock these mysteries.

I was unable to fit in anywhere—and it wasn’t from a lack of trying—so it was hard not to feel like any dreams I had were just a cruel illusion that life had been busily counting down all this time just so that it could explode on the launch pad.

All I wanted was to be left alone, to be free to live my own life. It pissed me off that life was already so unfair.

I was walking on a path in a huge wooded clearing, a high alpine meadow. My dad had taken me on lots of camping trips before, up into the Idaho mountains, up to Redfish Lake and the Sawtooths. Though I knew some of those unpeopled landscapes like the back of my hand, the place in my dream was better. It was familiar, but also insupportable somehow, like it didn’t belong, and I was both dreaming it for the millionth time and for the very first time all at once.

The path I walked was in the shape of a big ring, a perfect circle, bigger than the football field at my school. The path cut deep through tall wildflowers, its shape beckoning me onward to the next part of the circle, just out of sight. I was ambling on the circuit of the path and there wasn’t much to it, which made me happy. It was simple, like walking around this circle was what I was made to do. My existence meant walking along this dark rut, my hands brushing along through the bright petals of wild daisies.

But then the dream changed. It darkened.

There were people. They were shadows, ethereal. I couldn’t see their faces, but I knew they were standing, watching me. I couldn’t tell who they were, but I knew them nevertheless. The images skipped and popped and shuddered and it was clear to me that their haziness was because of me, because of something I hadn’t yet done but was going to do soon. It was clear that whatever was decided, whatever was done, would determine which of each of these shadow identities prevailed.

That’s when I felt him.

And that’s when I knew that the something that was different in this dream was bad. Dark. I wasn’t in control here. There was someone who … or something that … wasn’t supposed to be here.

I felt him draw nearer to me, and then I could see him flickering and shimmering like the others—two identities fighting over one body. I could see his eyes clearly. They terrified me; they were an emulsion of love and murder.

He was impossible.

One of his faces was a death masque. Destruction pooled under it, ebbing outward in heavy ripples of blackness like tar.

His second face was light and love and power, and the juxtaposition of these two overwhelmed me.

He moved swiftly, cutting into my circle and standing before me on the path. I stopped, overwhelmed, and looked at him. And then I understood. It was just as plain and inescapable and final as it had felt when we buried my grandpa. This man, the man with two faces, was going to be the man who killed me.