Lunatics {Book 1 ✔️}

Chapter 25

"Please, I'm desperate to know. I feel like someone told me the basics of swimming in a classroom and then dumped me in the middle of a riptide. I've got no idea what I'm doing and nobody seems to have any answers on why I can do the things I can do."

Anna must have sensed the turmoil in my words because her face softened. She took the seat directly across from me. Her eyes were sharp.

"You feel like your drowning?"

I looked at my hands. "Y-yeah, it's like I know I'm drowning, and I know I shouldn't take a breath because I'll let all of this water- this bad stuff in, but I can't help it. I have to. I have to breathe it in."

My voice shook toward the end and my hands were twisting in my lap.

And I sink further and further every time I open my mouth, I added silently in my head.

Anna didn't interrupt or offer up any response. She only watched me with mild, intellectual interest.

I continued because I couldn't stop.

"I feel the darkness around me, choking me, and it's gotten worse since I've gotten here. I feel the death of your people like an anchor on my foot pulling me. There's no escape from it, either. I feel it in my dreams. This...abyss surrounds me and sometimes I see glimpses of a light that I need to get to. But I can't."

"That," Anna interrupted. "Is your tether."

My head shot up. "What is? The light?"

"Yes. As you said, the death of my people is serving as an anchor to you and you will always feel it. Destruction, death, darkness it's one half of the coin that daemons are constantly flipping."

She put her hand on mine and I almost coiled back at the sensitive gesture. I felt and saw nothing, however, from her touch. Her mind and her feelings were guarded. The white noise was off-putting as I didn't have to struggle through resisting the infiltration of her mind- off-putting but not unwelcome.

"What's the other side?" I asked quietly.

"Your tether. It's the thing or the person who pulls you back up to the surface of the water. It's the rope you cling to, the ladder you climb to resist the darkness."

I thought for a moment about what she said before I could react. Something to pull me out of the darkness- or someone. My brain wandered to someone in particular but I stopped myself before wandering too far. The rational part of me refused to go down that road, but the part of me- the part I barely understood, the one connected to the ley lines- told me otherwise.

"Do I get to choose who or what it is that pulls me back up?"

She let out a raspy laugh. "Unfortunately, nothing is that easy. All I can say is that I'm relieved that Gray is not yours."

"Why?"

Anna stood and wandered to the side of her tent where incense was burning. She lit one end of the stick and watched it burn, the flames reflected in her eyes.

"Wolves and daemons are two creatures that thrive off of the energy of the ley lines. When one is tethered to the other it creates an imbalance in energy and power. Werewolves are dark creatures, they can hardly help lead a daemon into the light."

My heart sank for reasons I wasn't interested in looking into.

"Just look at those boys you so love," she continued, "They're orphans now because of a tether made between a wolf and a daemon."

I stood then, my feet stumbling on the pillows thinking of the Joy boys and their parents. She simply raised an eyebrow, unconcerned. Anna Denvers was a woman with little facial expressions but an overwhelming, stifling presence.