Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 88849 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 444(@200wpm)___ 355(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88849 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 444(@200wpm)___ 355(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
“The messenger has bonded with her again. She can’t handle everything at once. She senses too much. It’s overwhelming her.”
“I know,” Kellan growled and then stood before me. He tried to look gentle, but the fear was clawing at him. I felt it within him. It was clawing at me, too. He didn’t know how to help me; he didn’t know how to make it stop.
Then he made up his mind. “Out! Now!” My aunt went, but looked back over her shoulder before pulling the door shut behind her. I felt her concern as if it was my own and it shook me. How I could feel that? How could I know what she was thinking, what she was feeling, when she wasn’t me?
Kellan gripped my shoulders and lifted me in the air. He carried me, holding me against his chest, and went to one of my windows. It was opened in an instant, and then he perched there, holding me for a moment, and leapt through the air. The trees moved for us. Some helped us along the way, brushing their leaves against us while other ducked out of the way. We landed in the small pool behind the house with the waterfall beside us.
With one hand on the back of my head, he ducked us both underneath. Immediately, everything went away. It was as if I was normal again, the old Shay who didn’t know who I was. The relief was so powerful in me, I almost started crying, but I opened my eyes and saw Kellan in front of me. He held us on the bottom, anchoring us there, and he watched me, fearful. I felt it inside of me, taking root. I smiled and lifted both of my hands to grasp his face. My thumbs rubbed back and forth at the corners of his lips, and something else started to come over me.
The fervor was deep inside, but it started to climb. Then it matched with his, entwined, and twisted together to build even faster, higher, at a rapid pace. My heart started pounding. I gasped, but water rushed inside. Before I closed my mouth to stop more water from getting in, Kellan slammed his mouth over mine. His lips sucked the inside of my mouth dry, taking the water back out. He moved back once to spit it out, but his mouth was back before I fully realized he had even left. One of his hands gripped the back of my neck and the other lifted me up so my legs wrapped around his waist. He held us steady there, on the bottom of the lake. My arms wrapped around him, but I was lost on the inside of him. Everything was wrapped with him.
My heartbeat was racing so fast I was afraid that I’d combust in a moment, but I never did. Kellan calmed me down, still kissing me with a finger on the pulse at my neck. He rubbed against it, and somehow it calmed me. But then the hunger for him burst inside of me. It exploded, and I held on, weak, as if I was starving. My lips searched his.
He gripped me tightly against him, and then we were going to the surface. We broke the surface, and I gasped, pulling away. My eyes saw everything through a glaze of water still on my eyelids. It was as if we were still swimming, but I blinked a few times and brushed away the water. I saw it all clearly and then too clearly—everything until Kellan held my head in his hands. His eyes bore into mine, and he commanded, “You can control this. She was a part of you before. She’s a part of you now. Accept it. Accept her. Accept everything else, even though I know you don’t want to, but you have to.” He jerked me against him, wrapping his arms around me in a tight hug and kissed my shoulder. “Accept who you are. Please. I need you.”
My fingers clung into his shoulders, digging into them. I was trying, I really was, but everything was too much. I felt the birds as they landed on their nests. I heard the laughter from a neighbor on his phone miles away. I felt my aunt’s concern in the house behind us, sitting in a corner in the kitchen with a glass of wine to calm her nerves. Her hands clenched it tightly, and her fingers were tapping the counter, in a nervous reaction. I felt everything. Still. And I couldn’t handle it—then I gasped, arching upward in the water, surging against him.
“Shay,” Kellan choked out, the sound gurgling in the back of his throat, as he held onto my waist when I leapt upward.
It was too much. It was all too much, and then something in him shifted—he shifted inside of me. It was his demon. He reached inside, leapt with me, and yanked at everything. It was fine—it was all gone. I still felt all the information, everything that I had sensed, but it was okay. I could handle it, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what had happened, but I realized that Kellan’s forehead was pressed to my shoulder, limp. He hung on to me, as if I was holding him afloat now. He’d gone slack from exhaustion. Something occurred between us, something with his demon, because all his energy was spent.