Blakeshire (Insight #9)(8)

It didn’t matter if I let my thoughts rest or ramble; they always pulled me into the dimension of Esterious, the darkest one of them all, the one place that would likely never run out of souls to mend. Of course, that was also the same place where Drake, the boy in my dreams, lived and was set to rule.

He was an added complication to all of this. I was mad at him for, in some way, cheating on me. So jealous that I have been near ruthless since I saved his life. He only managed to get me to be real, open up, for a few hours last night. No matter how hard I tried, each time I looked into his eyes I saw him staring back at Willow, the girl he fought to have for months, my celestial twin.

I had mental battles about that issue often. Part of me agreed with my friends that he was tricked into that—that he was in some way looking for me. The other part argued he never should have been fooled, that he should have known the difference.

The fact that Drake was blunt and honest didn’t really help me. He admitted loving Willow, admitted that he was sure he’d had past lives with her.

It seemed that in some way we were both pushing and pulling each other away. Doomed lovers, no doubt.

I pushed the thought of him away as I stared at the steaming water my feet were dangling in. You would think that because I’m a water sign, a proud Scorpio, that I would adore water, feel at peace around it, but I fear it. At least when I could feel fear, I feared it. Now I just know that I don’t care for the element.

The whispers of the damned have always been there, lingering in the background of my mind, but as I grew up they became fiercer, like they were sick of me ignoring them or something. Not long after that point, shadows started to move and form into awkward images.

My mother, a spiritualist at heart, thought that I needed a natural escape, so she packed up her only daughter and rented a beach house. I think she thought that the waves would block out the sound of the dark whispers and relax me, and they did, for all of about five minutes.

Right when my feet touched the water, which was heated by a blazing summer day, chills spread across my skin. Even though the sun was out and the water was fairly clear, my mind pulled me into a different world, a different time. I saw a black pool of water. I could see something moving within this water that might as well have been ink. As I peered closer, I saw the largest octopus that has ever existed. I also saw a woman’s reflection. Every feature on her face was chiseled, almost squared off. She said one word: run. And I did.

I ran screaming past my mother into the beach house. It took my mother three hours to convince me to come out from under my bed, and I squealed when she made me take a bath to get the sea salt off me. I squealed because every time my mother let the water pool in the tub, I saw that woman’s face, heard her tell me to run.

My mother had a reason for everything. She convinced me that I had watched The Little Mermaid days before and my mind was shifting through images and had managed to take my fears of the whispers, which I shouldn’t hear, if you ask me - and turn them into something tangible that I could see.

I bought that for a time, that is, until every time I went near water, saltwater, I would see that woman.

Later, my best friend Charlie figured out how to make the whispers stop, or calm down at least. She taught the rest of us to use our ability to ‘see’ and figure out where these souls went wrong in their lives and remind them of a time they were loved; after that, they almost always moved on. Of course, more came, but at least they were nicer and we were now in charge of the curse. When Charlie taught me this, in the back of my mind I thought that maybe that woman was just a ghost that had died by the water and needed my help to move on. I never had the nerve to test that theory and stayed pretty much landlocked until a few days ago.

I saw that woman again. And she wasn’t in water. She was in the palace that Drake lives in.

The second I walked into that palace to save Drake and Landen, the boy that was with him, I heard that woman. I saw her. Her image was in every piece of artwork that had any water or sky within it, which was literally like every few feet. Not easy to deal with when you figured out that you have a celestial twin and the boy that should not be real, was. What a disaster.

I tried talking to that image of the woman, used every trick in the book to get her to move on, but she wouldn’t. She just became more and more furious because I wouldn’t listen to her. Maybe I should have. I did get stabbed right after that, but still...something was off about that ghost.

The other shadows refused to go near her. She was all alone, standing within a vast sea of the damned. It was almost as if they feared her. Of course, my nasty habit of being obsessed with anything weird has left me to ponder this endlessly, on top of everything else.

Any time I go near that palace, I see her. Now, if she is as evil as my gut is telling me, evil enough for the damned to shy away from her, and if she told me to run, then she was trying to get me away from something that she doesn’t want me to have—right? That is the way I see it anyway.

So what would my fate have to do with her? With water? And why was she, along with fate itself, trying to keep me away from that palace? Was it Drake? Was that what she was trying to keep me away from? Why? Maybe it was because the ghost that dominates that palace, Donalt, wanted Drake to love Willow. That thought alone made me sick to my stomach.

The palace was near the ocean, but I’d been that close to seawater before and not tormented by her. At one time, I thought maybe the entire existence was symbolic, that the octopus stood for something, the black water that was made of salt, but all of my research led me to nothing but dead ends. Which is why I just fell into rhythm with Charlie and the others, focused on what we could do, and tried to figure out why we could do what we could do. There were enough damned souls in this world to occupy any soul for a few lifetimes, but right now, in this near numb state, I’m almost sure that was supposed to be my distraction.