Toy Soldiers (Helford #1)

(12) Lights

I’ve been in abandoned places before. Despite the stereotype, it’s not where spies hide out or where we take bodies to hide them—sometimes our targets have the bright idea that the old warehouses and hospitals will be the ideal place to live outside of the public eye once they know we are out to get them, and it’s disheartening to think that our enemies could so easily underestimate us. Sometimes they are used for storage or meeting places or just a place where they go to get away from it all for a couple of hours.

I had seen abandoned warehouses, hospitals, schools. But I had never before seen something like this.

That’s how I know it is a dream.

I stumbled forward, feeling like my feet are nailed to the ground with the effort it takes to make it less than a foot forward. I reached toward the door, dropping down to my knees. I know they are stuck, too. The lights overhead begin to flicker spastically, like a strobe light, making me nauseous. I can hear screaming but I don’t know where it is coming from. All I can see is the hallway in front of me and the door at the end, industrialized, metallic, sturdy. I know that I have to get to that door if I want to make it out of this dream.

But I can’t move. Panic begins to set in without me allowing it to guide my senses, my instincts. I begin to claw my way forward, tugging my lower body behind me, numbed with cold from the waist down. I clawed toward the door, screaming and crying out, but there is no one there to help me. In my own mind, there hasn’t really been much other than myself there.

I keep glancing up at the lights, letting it blind me, and then moving again.

It seems like it takes a century of tugging pains and chilled limbs and horrified stammers of my heart before I make it to the door. My hands are bloodied and my eyes are burning with unshed tears. My throat feels like it is closing from the hoarseness of my screams. I tug one final time before heaving myself up, stumbling to the door. I fling it open—

Light. Nothing but bright white light.

And then I hear the screaming; and I realize that it is me.

~*~

I gasped, and when my eyes flew open, a scream ripped through my throat.

“Caitie!” Rian boomed, sounding panicked, so unlike himself that it threw me off for a moment. His eyes were wide, terrified, and he was above me, looking down at me so close that our noses were close to touching. I suddenly could feel his hands like vices pinning my arms down, but one of my arms was restrained against his chest—I followed his arm with my eyes only to find my own hand gripping a military combat knife, long and sharp and curled at the point, and the sharp point was less than a centimeter from his throat, so close but too far away. I blinked, and I couldn’t understand how that foreign tanned hand clutched in his mammoth one was both mine and the only one with a weapon.

He squeezed on my hand, pushing it back at the wrist, trying to get myself to disarm. I didn’t let go for a long, long moment.

“Alastair!” he cried, and the knife clattered to the wooden floor.

But he didn’t let me go. He looked me straight in the air, panting heavily, laying on top of me and pressing me fully into the ground, using his entire weight. I should have been winded, crushed, but all that I could see for a moment was not the sweatpants and tight t-shirt that he wore to bed, and not the stark white socks on his feet—it was his wrist, directly at the pulse point, where there was a thin strike wound from aim that I immediately recognized.

My breathing stopped in my throat, and my head started to spin.

He grabbed me and shook me a little, trying to zap me out of my daze, and I snapped my gaze back to his face. He stared down at me, his hair messy and his eyes maniacal, sweat coating his brow to the point that the hair that normally falls handsomely in his face was stuck to his forehead in clumps, giving another air to the craziness in his eyes. He took a deep breath, and his chest inflated and deflated, like he put a lot of effort and muscle into something as small as that one intake of air.