Airel: The Awakening (Airel Saga Book One)

Chapter XV

IT WAS WRITTEN IN the most elegant cursive I’d ever seen and its five simple words chilled me to the bone, even in the light of day.

I know what you are.

I didn’t know what I’d expected the killer to leave in my mailbox, but this certainly wasn’t it. I thought about it all night as I tossed in bed, sleep having declared war and deserted me, and I couldn’t get away from it the whole day at school. My mind was elsewhere; I was a total zombie. What did it mean? “I know what you are.” Shouldn’t it say—who you are? What could I do, though? What would I do? Was it admissible evidence for the cops? Should I tell my parents? Did I dare tell Kim, the village blab?

Any conclusion was impossible, at least for now. While I was preoccupied with how many more days I might have left to live, as I was driving home from school I had to stop the car and open the door so I could puke my lunch into the middle of the street. Weird. It hadn’t looked much different when it was served to me a few hours earlier. That’s what the school lunch program gets ya—food that could be barf, and barf that could be food. 

My mind was made up right then. Time to call the doctor. Doctor Gee had been our family physician since forever. I closed the driver’s door of my trusty Honda, grabbed my phone, and called his office. The receptionist told me if I hustled right on over, she could get me in—they had a cancellation.

After I told Dr. Gee I was barfing uncontrollably and we had gone through all the checks of my vitals, I could see the next question on his face. “No—I know what you’re thinking. It’s not possible.” 

He nodded and grinned, hooking his expensive heavy black pen in the breast pocket of his lab coat. “No boyfriend?” 

“No. Only stupid girls think it doesn’t matter. I’m waiting until I’m married.” I held up my left hand and wiggled my promise ring. “My dad gave it to me when I was thirteen.” I was a little embarrassed to be talking about this, even with my doctor, but he was a gentleman and a professional. Thank God. It’s bad enough, all the crap I get for it. I was suspicious that the girls who gave me the hardest time about it were secretly the most jealous of me. In the end, I didn’t care about what they thought.

Dr. Gee sat back and crossed his arms. He told me what I had suspected he would tell me—that he wanted to run a few tests. He said goodbye and wished me good health, and then the nurse took some blood and had me do a urine sample—all the usual stuff, and I wondered if any of it would end up helping, if I’d get any kind of useful answer.

As I got dressed and signed out, I thought about all the physical changes I’d been going through in the past week or two, and that there was no possible way it could just be some weird late-stage puberty thing, some “coming into womanhood” or “blooming” phase. And it also went way beyond being merely boy crazy, if I could admit anything like that to myself. It was something else.

I couldn’t explain why I was getting sick, how it came on without warning, and how after it was over I seemed to be just fine again so quickly. I had no answer for how my appearance was changing so drastically. I didn’t need makeup anymore, not even a little bit. Now when I rolled out of bed—even without any sleep—I had to confess I looked kind of amazing, even to myself. Kim backed my opinion up too, with plenty of complaining about how it wasn’t fair.

I could explain none of it, and I kept coming back to those five cursive words in that note. The killer had written, “I know what you are.” I thought about change, and about Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which we covered last year in school and I read pretty much under protest. I wondered what I was changing into. I shivered, thinking of giant insects, of superheroes, of enshrouded dead Victorian worlds built on the words of Bram Stoker.

I drove home trying to unravel these dark riddles, thinking of vampires. At a stop light, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I heard a faint, giggling laugh and saw a presence in my mind’s eye shaking its head. It was like a mentor or teacher who had just suffered hearing me say an incredibly naïve thing about silly old legends.

I could feel this presence in the car with me. I got the sense that it had been with me since forever, that it had only just now allowed me to take notice of its presence, and further that it didn’t care how I felt about the situation one way or another. I was stuck with it. It stretched like a cat on the back seat of my mind, curled up and fell peacefully dormant.

The light turned green and I drove on.

I had to laugh out loud; I was a little hysterical. “Airel,” I said, avoiding my eyes in the rearview mirror. “You are going completely bonkers.” I had a new friend. An imaginary one. Oh, yay, I’m five again. I wasn’t entirely sure if I wanted this or not, but I had a strong feeling I didn’t have a choice about it.