The Fates (Book I) - 2014 Watty Award Winner!

5.1 - Call It Fate

Dear Readers: First off, THANK YOU all so much for following four episodes of The Fates!!! I'm really delighted and grateful to have you on this journey and hope you'll continue to enjoy :D

Let's kick off the fifth and final episode of Book I back in modern-day Athens...

EPISODE 5 - TRUTH

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Scene 1: Call It Fate

A.D. 2015

…Was this death?

Nope, she reckoned as soon as the dim thought occurred to her, rousing slowly in a disoriented haze. This place was way too comfortable to be the fiery afterlife for which she was most definitely fated. Hell, it even smelled nice.

She was still sort of half-unconscious, she supposed. Her senses weren’t at their sharpest, and her eyes remained uncontrollably closed. For a second, her mind instinctively tried to remember what she had been drinking, whom she had been fucking, whether they’d been snorting anything or shooting up tonight… but then Atria recalled that it was not sex, drugs, or alcohol that’d induced her latest blackout. For once, this time, it’d been none of those things. It had been simply horror. Shock. A sense of sheer and dire dread that had struck her more powerfully than any substance ever could.

The memory of that feeling sent another shudder coursing through her soul, nearly threatening to put her under once again. Her consciousness was teetering in a murky limbo, and she tried to stay awake—or half-awake, at least—so as to hear the words now being spoken by the muffled voices humming in the room.

What sort of room was this anyway? It had that scent that struck a pleasantly perfumed balance between commercial and hospitable—clean without being sterile, inviting without really feeling like home. So not a house, and not a hospital, she concluded. The surface beneath her bruised back felt firm and plush—segmented, though, so it was not a bed… Oh, right. A sofa. Things fell instantly then into place: she was in a hotel room, lying on a couch, the latent springiness of which suggested that it was a foldout, though it’d not been folded out.

She figured all of this while her eyes were still shut, and she felt powerless to open them. This half-conscious post-fainting phase was getting rather frustrating. Atria liked to be in full control of everything and everyone around her, and especially of herself.

How long had she been like this, trapped in limbo—seconds, minutes? Hours? Whatever length of time, it’d been too long. She felt her caged consciousness struggling and squirming to set itself free.

“She’s stirring. Call him again, sweetheart,” cooed a voice from somewhere close.

Atria recognized that voice…

She didn’t recognize the voice that now replied, from slightly farther away. A man’s voice, which sounded somewhat annoyed. And nerdy, from what she could tell in this state. “For the twentieth time?”

“Yes,” the first voice answered in unruffled affirmation.

She heard a muted grumble, but somehow knew that Mr. Nerdy was heeding the lady’s command. Atria couldn’t blame him. That honeyed voice seemed pretty much impossible to disobey.

“Still no answer, honey,” the man informed her shortly. “You sure you still don’t want to leave a voicemail…?”

“Right. Like I told you, this is not the sort of message to be left in someone’s inbox. Just hand me the phone once he answers. He will.”