Legend of the Black Rider (Preternatural - book #1)

2: The Other Person

8 Years Later

A blue sky with two maybe four clouds in the sky stretched over the world. A warm sun smiled down at everything and everyone. Buzzing came from the shrubs. A flutter of wings was heard somewhere in the distance.

Celine arrived home after a long day at work. She parked her sedan outside the house and climbed out with two plastic bags and a tired look on her face.

Their farmhouse was painted burnt-umber, situated in the middle of nowhere in a place where no one could find them. There was an old church next to the house with nothing but shrubs and a few trees beyond it far as the eye could see.

Their border-terrier, Tina, sat out front with her one puppy, Bruno. Tina was their guard dog trained to attack if anyone besides Celine came near the house.

"Daniel, I'm home!" Celine announced as she entered the house and walked through the entrance hall, turning left straight into the kitchen that had walls covered in stained teal and wooden portraits of painted fruit.

Celine untied her hair and bounced it so that it could fall down her back and shoulders.

"Daniel?" she asked again, wondering if he could even hear her. "Daniel, where are you?"

When he didn't answer her a third time, she began panicking. "Daniel?" she asked as she exited the kitchen and raced up the stairs. "Daniel, where are you?"

She looked through her bedroom, the bathroom and the spare room upstairs, but he was nowhere to be found. She began to hyperventilate when she didn't know where he was. Why did she have to leave him all alone? Would it have hurt her if she finally employed a babysitter?

She was taken from her overflowing thoughts when she heard shouting from the backyard. Still holding her hand over her head to show her tiredness and worry, Celine walked into the spare room and gazed out the window where she saw Daniel, her sweet and lively boy, sitting in the backyard and playing in the mud.

Relieved, she breathed out slow and left the spare room, jogged down the stairs, and then she made her way through the house and out the back door. Daniel didn't even notice her when she came walking up behind him.

Daniel had played in the mud that day. He was laughing with himself while making clay cupcakes, smashing them and then rebuilding them. He wore baggy clothes and kept his feet free of shoes. He pretended that he was a giant attacking a kingdom of mud people. In his mind, it was the best solo-foreplay he could think of.

"Hey, kiddo." said his mother as she sat down beside him. "What you up to?"

"Making mud cupcakes that are also people." answered Daniel, not quite excited of his mother's arrival seeing as her return meant he would have to leave the mud people and their half-destroyed kingdom to go and clean himself. By the time he returned they'd have mostly rebuilt; time moved faster in the world of the mud people.

Celine smiled and put her hand on his shoulder. It was small and so easily breakable in her hand. She cursed herself for thinking that.

"I brought you some real cupcakes, if you want one." she said. Once she saw his disinterest she added, "They're blueberry."

Daniel's dimpled smile brought warmness into Celine's heart. She roughed up his dark-brown hair and looked down at the necklace he wore. It had a small wolf dangling from it. The wolf was completely white and made out of actual animal bones. Its eyes were small blue rhinestones. Grabbing the wolf with her two fingers, Celine looked him in his green eyes with seriousness on her face.