Keeper Chronicles: Awakening (37 page)

Numbness paralyzed her for the next few days. She didn’t eat. Didn’t sleep. Didn’t speak. She could only lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling, trying to forget everything that had happened. If she closed her eyes, nightmares ravaged her sleep. Nurses and aids came in to check on her and change her bandages. They tried to coax her into visitors or encourage her to take a walk. One turned on the television. The station was static. Like her. Lights on but nothing coming through. She neither looked at it nor turned it off.

Gabe began knocking on her door the third day, sneaking around the nurses. Trying to get in. She devoted the same level of attention to him as she did everything else: none.

The doctors put some more tubes into her after a while—how many days she didn’t know. She didn’t fight them. She barely noticed them.

“I’m coming in here whether you want me or not,” Gabe broke down the door. “Beks...please look at me,” he begged, standing at her bedside and taking her limp hand. “Do something. Anything. Yell at me.” She didn’t. “Tell me you hate me.” She didn’t. “Damn it, Beks, I love you.”

Rebekah flinched. “The demon said the same thing to me. What makes you so different?”

Kissing her hands profusely, he grinned like he’d won the lottery. “I knew you were still there. I knew you’d come back to me.”

What did he have to be happy about? “Go,” she said, barely a whisper. “I want you to leave.”

“What?”

“Leave. Now,” she said a little louder.

“No.”

“Leave me alone. Get out of here.” She pushed him in the chest.

“Never. I love you.”

“I hate you. Leave.”

“I’m staying here.”

“Leave!” she shouted at him, the rage boiling up inside “I don’t want to ever see you again.”

Gabe climbed into bed next to her and held her as she fought to get away. Even being a Keeper, her strength wasn’t what it had once been, and he won the contest as her storm of energy quickly passed. Rebekah lay with his arms around her the rest of the day, getting her first sound night of sleep since waking up.

****

The smell of a quiche woke her—not blood or death or any of the thousands of terrible things she’d smelled in the last month, but the warm aroma of baked eggs and vegetables.

Her stomach growled.

Gabe slept next to her, and she tried not to disturb him and sat up, pulling the cart over and eating every last morsel of food on the plate. When she’d devoured both slices and an entire bagel, she lay back and closed her eyes again. For the next day, the routine was the same: sleep, wake, eat; sleep, wake, eat—a routine any infant could manage. He didn’t try to coax her into speaking; instead, he let her come to it on her own.

“Is he still alive?” she asked.

He nodded, worry lines pulling down his eyes. “Yes.”

She had thought as much. “Take me home. Please.”

He checked her out of the hospital that afternoon, driving her to the bed-n-breakfast in his patrol car and helping her up the stairs to the porch as her legs were still wobbly.

The witch, her hair in black and blonde curly pigtails, hugged Rebekah. “Welcome home,” the girl said. “You don’t know how happy we are to see you. Don’t worry, boss. I’ve been keeping everything up for you. Colette and Nicholas even helped. They’ve been staying here with their daughter, Jenna.”

They had a quiet evening just the six of them, and she got to learn what else had happened on that terrible night: Gabe’s father dying, the attack on the office, killing the second demon. She listened quietly, afraid that if she spoke, her words would turn into angry shrieks of rage.

That night, she woke in a sweat, screaming as she dreamed of the demon. The next three nights passed the same. Each time she walked up the stairs, they felt like someone else’s. A woman who’d once shared Rebekah’s body but whose soul had never survived the island. She sat in front of the fireplace as the snows thickened and the holidays approached, feeling like a stranger. Unable to sleep through the night. Every time she closed her eyes, he waited. Dylan. Her mother. A thousand other faces. He could be anyone. Look like anyone.

Gabe said to wait it out. Things would get better.

They didn’t.

Four Weeks Later

“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” Gabe asked. “It’s not too late to change your mind.”

Rebekah took the black pen and forced her hand still. “Where do I sign?”

The title company’s representative indicated three places. The six of them were crammed into the small office: Rebekah and Colette sat at the mahogany desk; Gabe, Nicholas, Jenna, and Mia stood along the back wall. Before anyone else could speak or she could change her mind, she signed her name in each spot, wincing slightly at the pain lingering in her chest.

“Now it’s your turn,” the representative said to Colette.

Before signing, Colette glanced over at her. “Any time you want it back, it’s yours. This is only a temporary circumstance.”

“Just sign the paper,” Rebekah ordered.

Once the process of signing over the bed-n-breakfast to Colette and Nicholas began, Rebekah relaxed in the knowledge that there was no going back despite the woman’s insistence. When she’d first broached the plan to the couple, they’d tried to argue her out of it. Tried to argue her out of becoming a Hunter. Especially Gabe.

But she had already made up her mind. Until she killed Dylan—until her father’s katana sliced open that creature’s throat and spilled his demonic blood across the soil—she would find no solace in sleep or company, no pleasure in the comforts of life.

Using her mother’s memories and likeness against Rebekah would be the last mistake he ever made.

****

The train deposited him at Grand Central Station.

Around him, thousands of people milled and pushed and lusted and hungered and wept and hurried and fretted—such a riot of emotions and possibility the likes of which he’d never smelled before. The intoxicating aroma wafted thick in the air; curbing his instinct to grab the nearest woman and kill her became a heroic effort.

But he resisted.

Taking the luggage he’d bought to help him fit in—that store clerk had been delicious in a desperate sort of way—he merged with the massive wave of humanity and let it carry him up an escalator, down a long corridor lined with vendors, and out into the streets where the flash of billboards and clamor of man and machine hummed in his blood.

Yes. Dylan was going to like this New York City. He was going to like it very much.

About the Author . . .

A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, Katherine Wynter grew up with a deep love of books and reading. After putting aside childhood dreams of genetically engineering dragons, she began writing fictional worlds filled with demons, monsters, and unsung heroes. She is married and enjoys hiking and traveling. She can be found online at
http://www.katherinewynter.com/
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