Shattered |Leo Valdez|

Chapter 2

Chapter 2:

Erikka's P.o.v

Fire. It was everywhere. It licked up the walls and lapped at my feet. It raced over the floor and encased my body. It killed me over and over again. A booming laugh shook the walls as the temperature dropped. A blackness swirled in front of me, its form like black sand slipping through your fingers while blowing away with the wind.

"Aw, little Erikka is scared. Just like always." My hands tightened as I opened my mouth to speak. But the words wouldn't come while the fire raced to enter the new open space, forcing me to close my mouth or face more pain.

The Abyss laughed at my struggle before a blast of black sand shot out at me. "You know," he sounded amused, "your mother wasn't supposed to die. You were. Unfortunately, that did not happen." Tears spilled over my eyes before quickly evaporating in the scorching heat.

However, it just continued (I hadn't decided if The Abyss was a boy or an it.). "Since you outsmarted my little," he stopped to chuckle grossly before continuing, "experiment, if you will, I shall spare you the long death I had planned to deliver to your father." At that moment, I broke some of the curse that was holding me in the flames.

My father had been a chubby, kind man who had always been there to pick me back up. "SHUT UP ALREADY!" The pause that followed was either for thinking, or surprise.

"Your fighting spirit is admirable, but I can't allow defiance. The world is changing. Bring me that which I seek in twenty days, and I promise to bring her back just as she was."

"LIES!" This seemed to have caught 'the darkness' off guard, so I continued with my hand making a fist toward him. "Cancer is nothing to live through twice. I would never wish it upon her."

"MY ENCHILADA!!!"

My eyes jerked open and The Abyss was gone: filed away in my nightmares. Directly in my line of sight was a wooden ceiling. Normally when I fell asleep next to my mother, the nurses took me to the green couch for visitors so I wouldn't have a kink in my neck. And when I woke up, it was a white styrofoam ceiling: not wood.

Something hot dripped down my hand and I looked to my right. An enchilada wrapped in tinfoil was squeezed tightly in my hand, the juices spilling out. Next to the enchilada was something I wasn't expecting.

A guy, maybe seventeen or twenty, with curly hair and a goatee was looking down heartbrokenly at the food crushed in my hand. He reminded me of a Jamaican hippie because of the rasta beanie on his head. For some reason, the hat seemed stretched over two spots that pointed out oddly over his curly brown hair.

"What have you done?" The guy whispered, still staring at my hand.

"Sorry about your Mexican delicacy, dude, but where the fudged quackery am I?" My voice came out scratchy and wrong, but the fake swear words made me smile. Mom and I always did stuff like that. Mom. Where was she?

"Your in an infirmary: where sick people get treated, not where delicious food gets destroyed." The guy glared at me and I threw the stuff into his lap. That's about the time I noticed that his lap was fuzzy.

My first thought was a new pair of ugly pants for the fuzzy lovers. That is, until I followed them down to his feet. Or, should I say hooves? Suddenly, my ability to scream came back full force as my memories rushed back into my head. Quickly, I scooted as far away from the thing as I could, not wanting to fight something else, and not wanting it to end in another death. However, the cot I was on was extremely tiny and I ended up falling right off.

"Calm down, kid. Calm down. My name's Grover. I'm a saytr. I'm not going to hurt you. If I'd wanted to, I would have killed you while you've been unconscious these past two days." My eyebrows knit together. Two days? No. Not possible.