All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 28: Exit Stage Left

Music Track List:

Peter Jöback - Hollow

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Emma's POV

I was sitting on the floor in the middle of the lab. It was dark. It was night. Candles burned hot and bright, licking paths through the shadows. David had drawn some shapes around me on the ground. In salt. For good luck and good measure but explained it wasn't really necessary. What was necessary was that I emptied my mind and relaxed...and follow the labyrinth. Find the string. The gossamer thread. That would allow me to be pulled along, guided, like a child tethered to a parent in the lead.

It all started with my hands in his palms as he sat across from me on the ground, legs crossed. Pepper was there too. Sitting and watching, but in the edge of blackness; the candlelight flickers occasionally catching her features.

David and I had been breathing deeply for some time when he finally took his finger and started to trace the pattern of a labyrinth on the center of my palm. He traced my skin slowly and sensually and with longing, and I could feel the struggle in him as he waged a war – a conflict of wanting to keep me safe by not letting me in the secret and keeping me safe by letting me know what I needed to know.

I looked at his brooding brown eyes and they warmed me and I felt, not seduced, but appeased. I sighed and then he taught me the pattern on my palm for myself to trace. And so I did so, and as I did, I closed my eyes to empty my thoughts of everything except the feeling of the trace on my palm. Again and again, until all I could feel was my hand running along a gossamer string...a velvet rope leading me to the edge of blackness.

And I felt myself walking with the rope...let it lead me through the labyrinth in my mind with nothing else but the sensation of my skin caressing the silk string in my hand.

And it felt like I walked forever in the blackness, guided only by the string, walking and walking and walking...perhaps over the precipice of madness.

And then.

The smell of a cedar, soil, cinnamon and blood hit my nostrils. I opened my eyes. And gasped for breath only realizing that until now I had been holding my breath.

I was in the dark cell, cross-legged on the floor. And there he was folded in a lump on the bench only a few feet in front of me.

I could feel him rolling and turning his head toward me, his aching bruised body lolling onto his side. And then he spoke, his voice croaking from lack of hydration, "Is it you?"

I wondered what he meant but then I guessed. He must know somehow. Must have figured it out. That somehow, I was not the me of this world, but the me of mine.

I nodded in the dark and wondered if he could even make out my form and gestures in the darkness. He must have because he finally answered. "You should go. It's not safe here," David said in a hoarse whisper, his steel blade voice cutting the darkness.

"I've come to save you...from him," I replied, hoping he'd get my meaning.

He sat up and planted his feet onto the ground, and we suddenly crashed into each other. He held his body against mine and in my arms. I cradled him in a fragile hug and I realized he was even worse for wear than the last time and my body grieved for his battered one.

"It's not him, you should worry about, Emma," David said but his voice was strange and changed to that of a thousand dogs howling inside of a hollow tin drum and I felt a sudden terror liquefying my bones.

David's muscles tensed like a puppet on strings. His broken body suddenly tight and lithe and spidery as an arachnid, and so I pushed him away and scrambled back, rising as I did so. And it was then I realized that ominous presence I had felt several times over had been in the room, with all eyes on me, and my tiny body refracted in its lenses, the whole time with us, only I hadn't even noticed because I had been too content to be sitting in the same room and world as him. And that presence was bigger than both of us...bigger than the room...bigger than even the giants who once the Earth did roam.