Awakened【BOOK 2 OF TRANSLUCENT】

Chapter 1 - The Mysterious Pendant

It all started with the stupid pendant–

–which I believed was cursed because otherwise I wouldn't have to endure waking up everyday drenched in sweat and Gemma thinking I took up some substances before sleeping, because I always ended up looking like a bad version of hangover.

We'll be fine.

A constant ring in the head took place as soon as I was seated in my bed. Just another bad dream, except it was the same dream I had every night for a week. The same...meadow, sometimes in one of the dreams, we would move into the manor, welcoming me with its heavy Georgian interior. We floated through the hallways, or at least it felt like so, and had the conversations rolling like usual.

Who is she, though?

Bugger it. There was no time to linger in things that weren't real, as much as she looked real in my head. My eyes weighed a ton at the blinding lights pouring into the room. The curtains were drawn. I rushed to outside the room and the smell of sizzling egg and bacon pricked my nostrils.

"Late again, love?" Gemma's slender figure leaned against the stove with her back facing me. "You promised we'd take turns."

I reached to her side and wrapped my arms around her waist. I leaned down to give her a kiss while her hands were busying on the pan.

"I'm sorry." I muttered, giving her another peck on the lips. "And morning."

I traced her smile with my lips. She groaned as she was wriggling away from my embrace to continue working on the breakfast. She pulled away and resumed working on the breakfast.

"You're a talented distractor." Gemma grinned, pinning the spatula against the bacon surface that turned brown on one side, and garnishing a salt on the other. She gestured me to sit on the dining table she set up for breakfast with two glasses of orange juice. I obeyed. "Your aunt called again today. She tried reaching you but you didn't pick up."

"What does she want this time?" I grunted, turning on my phone to find around twenty-five missed calls from Annie Wilkinson. No wonder she chose to bombard our flat's still-functional landline.

"She didn't say. She said she'd rather have you call her back." Gemma came and set down two plates of bacon and eggs down on the table. "Maybe it's urgent."

I shrugged. "She just misses me."

"You haven't visited her for a while now, have you? Maybe you should go check in on her or something."

"Why bother?" I muttered.

Gemma Parker pondered for a while but then we began munching on our breakfast silently. We had this conversation before brushing it off wouldn't be a surprise. It was early but Gemma has had her dark chin-length bob hair smoothened against each side of her heart-shaped face symmetrically. It would take her at least an hour to her look into perfection, including donning the blue cotton uniform that she occasionally covered with a white coat and a brown, knee-length pencil skirt that outlined her willowy frame. She had always looked attractive this way, after all, this was the very look that drove me crazy the first day I saw her when I took Harry to the ER due to an injury that required a minor surgical suture. Gemma was just in her second year, kicking off her medical training in the hospital as a paediatrician.

Needless to say, we hit it off that day, and as for Harry, we got him out just fine later that day. One date led to another, and a couple dates off and we moved into a cozy flat a couple blocks away from the Medical Sciences campus, exactly at St. John's Street, which was undoubtedly a decent neighbourhood. We were still here and we were going into our second year now. I couldn't have asked for more.