Blakeshire (Insight #9)(6)

She stood, gently running her palms over the creases in her gown. “You are well aware the crown is yours. You are the only one holding back, son.” She walked to the doorway before looking back. “We do not live in an instant world. Fate cannot be seen from moment to moment, but over the path of life. You run now, and you will be throwing away each sacrifice your family has made to bring you here.”

She left before I could say another word. That woman always had to have the last word. Always.





Chapter Two

Madison




I’m blind...well, maybe not blind, but I’m definitely seeing the world through new eyes. Up until a few hours ago, I always saw the emotions of others, their auras. Not only did I see them, I felt them as if they were my own. That was, at one time, my normal. I suppose every climax has a fall, and this must be mine.

You may have guessed that I have never been quite ‘normal,’ but then again, who is? What exactly is normal? Anyway, beyond seeing energy constantly, I have a few other odd flaws. I can see the dead. The damned-dead, that is. I also have some odd sense that allows me to see into the souls of the living, too.

So a few weeks ago, if I were to look at any soul I would see a wide range of colors around their body, so many that their image, in most cases, glowed or seemed angelic, soft at least. I would also see a constant stream of life events, usually ones that said person was pondering at the moment. And on top of that, I would hear whispers—whispers of the damned.

That was my normal.

Then all hell broke loose. My best friend Charlie was basically hunted, and her memory was taken. We managed our way through that, but then one of my twin cousins, Draven, fell into some kind of dark world that we later came to call The Realm. In that mayhem, we figured out that his energy was more than likely a little darker than the rest of us—the rest of us meaning his twin brother Aden, along with me and Charlie.

All of us can hear the damned, see them in our own way, so for a while we had been looking for a way out, a way to live a ‘normal’ life. With everything happening to Charlie and Draven, we became fierce in our search for peace.

The more we searched, the more we fought, the worse I became. I mean, I’ve always had a bit of a dry wit, but lately sarcasm is all I seem to speak. I thought at first it was just because I was exhausted. My dreams became so vivid that I thought I was living a double life a time or two. I’ve had weird dreams my whole life. I call them weird because in my dreams I didn’t see the way I did when I was awake. There were no colors or energy; each one was all too real, including the sensual boy with eyes as deep as midnight. The boy that could make my heart skip beats with a glance.

Those dreams of him seemed to amp up right around the time Draven and Charlie started having trouble. I tend to research everything, so I assumed, like every article I could find, that in some way my dreams were just a reflection of what was going on in my life, that they were not real. So, I wasn’t all that worried when the boy in my dreams started making horrid decisions, or worse was hurt because of those actions. I took them as a warning for me and my friends to tread carefully, which we always did anyway when it came to redeeming the damned.

Weeks later, I realized that the dreams were not a reflection. I realized that when I saw an epic battle; when I saw Bianca, a girl that had caused a lot of trouble around all of us, fight not only us, but also another girl that looked just like me.

The dream scared the hell out of me, made me think I was having some kind of mental break. My mother put me in a deep hypnosis and recorded the process for me to watch later; she knows I have to have proof of everything. The words that came out of my mouth struck me at my core. I told my mother that a boy that I loved across time thought I was someone else—that the girl he was chasing was in danger, just like me. When my mother pressed for me to explain, all I said was, “Seven; seven deadly emotions.” I repeated words like: ‘twisted,’ ‘fated,’ ‘lost,’ ‘misguided,’ ‘new world order’...tell me that’s not terrifying for anyone to hear.

I reflected on that exercise for countless hours, maybe days; I don’t know anymore. I do know that I came to the realization that the boy I dreamed about in some way or form was real, and he was cheating on me. That made me mad. No, furious. I also assumed that my dreams were telling me that random souls around me were being pulled together unnaturally, that when or if we were all close to one another we would be in danger, making it far too easy on our enemies.

Even though I knew my analysis meant that at some point I would have to walk away from my cousins and my best friend Charlie, I held on to that idea and waited for the world to open up and show me the path to my fate, meaning I kept fighting and waiting for the right excuse to walk away.

In my mind, I wanted Draven to be in a safe place because if he was safe, Charlie was safe. I wanted my other cousin, Aden, to face his own haunts, and I wanted to help Charlie figure out how to protect a fifteen-year-old girl, Monroe, who had landed on our doorstep. That was the long and short of my to-do list.

Basically, I figured I was a servant for now and would lead soon. That once I got everyone else taken care of, I could figure out my own fate. Fight my own demons.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way; instead, that girl that looks just like me, Willow, found us and needed us to save none other than the boy that was in my dreams. Our enemy Bianca had pulled him along with Willow’s soul mate, Landen, into The Realm.