The Bewitching - Book 1

Chapter 3 - To Dream of Shadows

The waves rolled slowly along the ocean upon this quiet San Diego beach. The air smelled fresh and clean as the sun broke through the cotton candy shaped clouds. Slowly she strode along the beach, her feet and toes digging softly into the wet sand from the rain storm that had ended not more than an hour before. Her strawberry blonde hair blew softly in the breeze, framing her innocently rounded face, and large doe shaped eyes that shined a bright blue. Her body was small and petite, yet nicely curved. It was the perfect hour glass frame that most women would die to have, and most men would give their lives to ravage. The beach itself was peaceful and quiet. It was almost perfect. Almost…

Elyssa let a long sigh escape her lips as she gazed out upon the sparkling water, watching the rainbow like colors dancing upon the tips of the waves. Her arms wrapped lightly around her body. The breeze had brought a chill that had begun wandering gently up her spine. It was all she could do to stay warm. She closed her eyes and listened closely to the sounds around her. She could hear the waves lightly brushing against the shore after having caressed their way through the rocks. The gulls had begun to return. Their squeals of delight from having waited out the passing storm could be heard in the distance.

In her dreams it had been different. For roughly the last month this beach had preoccupied her mind at night as she slept. At times it seemed so real that she struggled trying to differentiate the dreams from reality. Maybe now, this moment too was a dream. She pinched her arm gently and felt a slight pain. Slowly she opened her eyes and looked around. Nothing had changed. The colors still danced upon the water, the gulls were still off in the distance. …Nothing had changed…

Quietly she made her way back along the beach towards the rocky trail, her mind lost deep in thought. She had walked this beach so many times in the last couple of weeks that she could have easily done it from memory. If her friends had known this, known her reasons for coming here, they would probably have had her committed to some dark, dank room with puffy white walls. She laughed to herself at the thought.

What was she hoping for? She thought back to when the dreams had first started. The first week they had been sporadic. A couple here and there that woke her up in the middle of the night. She had reasoned that maybe she had spent a bit too much time reading romance novels and watching old romantic films. That had to be the reason for dreaming of such a romantic setting. Maybe she had stared a bit too long upon the covers of those books, always with the heroine wrapped in the arms of the hero as they both gazed out to sea.

In her mind this made complete sense. What struck her as odd was how vivid they had started to become. It was almost as if she could feel the sand beneath her feet and the ocean breeze brushing along her cheeks. By the end of the second week a lone figure had begun to appear within the dreams. He was never close enough to be seen distinctly yet she knew he was handsome. She could almost make out his lean yet muscular physique beneath his tightly worn clothes. It was when she would close her eyes within her dreams that she would feel his strong arms wrap around her small frame, and his warm breath caress her neck.

The dreams had scared her at first, and yet she was intrigued. As they wore on she began to welcome them more and more. Why wouldn’t she? Her fantasies were much more interesting than her current life…single, lonely, and lacking of excitement. This was exactly the reasons her friends had given her as an explanation to the dreams. This too had made sense to her as much as she hated to admit it. Yet there was this one little hitch to that reasoning she hadn’t counted on happening.

She had never been to, nor seen the beach that she had been dreaming about. As far as she had known it existed only within her mind, buried within a small hidden cove along the ocean that required navigating a steep rocky trail to reach. The only way such a place could exist was in fantasy, or maybe on some far away island that no one’s ever heard of. She could only imagine the look of shock that must have played on her face the night she stumbled across it.