Enflame (Insight #6)(93)
When I didn’t respond, she turned and wrapped her arms around her petite body. Her faint freckles along her high cheekbones were made apparent by the blush that surfaces when she’s angry. “What else is back? Are the illusions back?”
“She’s not an illusion,” I said under my breath, knowing she was talking about my friend Skylynn, the one who’d given me this scarf, the one that had brought me back from the brink of insanity so long ago. “And she never left. I just stopped talking about her.”
I turned to walk to the edge of my bed that was centered before a massive window. I collapsed on the edge and held my head in my hands. A beat later I reached for the small pillow on the bed, the one embroidered with a flaming ‘F’; when I touched it, if I let my mind carry me away, my mother would appear. I would see her holding this pillow as she sat at the end of my bed and listen to me tell her about my day. She would smile warmly, eagerly, as I told her every secret I knew. This was a memory. A memory locked within that pillow, one that I could call forth at any time.
That was one of my other odd flaws. I never dreamed when I was asleep, but when I was awake, if I touched something that belonged to me, belonged to someone I loved, these vivid images would appear around me; ghostly images carrying an echo of a lost past. A past that was rich within the manor I was raised in, a past that I dare say I was madly in love with.
I have been told by more specialists than I could remember that I never really reached or stayed in a dreaming state at night, so my mind produced these memories, these images, as a way of locking my memories in place.
I would have believed them if it weren’t for the fact that when I touched really old items, items that this manor was filled with, I saw images from a past that I could not have possibly been old enough to witness. I have personally watched the most epic love affair of all time within these walls. A love affair that I could feel in nearly every room. The images of the past were so vivid that at times I spent more time staring into the past, to a love that could never happen again, rather than living my own life. I was obsessed with this manor. Obsessed with each memory locked away within it.
A few beats later, I felt Cadence sit down next to me. “Freaking fantastic,” she uttered under her breath.
Cadence was the last foster child my parents had the privilege of taking in and later adopting. My parents, by all means, were philanthropists. They both came from old money, money that would take centuries to spend. A year after they were married, they opened their home and became foster parents. At all times, there were no fewer than seven children in their massive home. I guess you would call them children; most them were fourteen or older, kids that just needed one break, one chance at a real life. Each of them left my parent’s nest with infinite love in their hearts, a solid education, and the means to change the world—or even create one of their own. Before my parents died, they had changed eighty-four lives…they had changed the world and had planned to save so many more.
I was the only one they adopted at birth, and that was by fate itself. On a cold winter night almost twenty-one years ago, my mother woke from a dead sleep. She thought she heard screaming. She rushed outside in the snow thinking that one of her children was hurt somewhere on the grounds.
In the snow, she found my birth mother, she found me, minutes old...the second my mother cradled me in her arms, tucking me in her coat, my birth mother breathed her last breath. She died without ID, without any evidence of who she was or even how she had made it on the grounds of this manor. It was as if she appeared only to give me life.
When I was fourteen, they adopted Cadence. She never had a chance to get to know them the way I did; they died three months later. Cadence was safe with us, though; my parents had the foresight to assign my grandmother as the primary guardian over the two of us. My uncle Jamison was the secondary, with which I had no issue. My only issue was that he married a gold-digger, and right after he did I lost my family. I’ll never forget the look on Mrs. Rasure’s face when the police escorted me in the manor, telling her that I’d survived, that I wasn’t on that boat. I saw right through her fake grief. That day, our war officially began. That was the last day I had a night terror.