Arianna's Awakening (Arianna Rose Part 1 & The Awakening Part 2) (21 page)

She waited and watched as he turned to leave before she stole up the steep staircase.  Luke was halfway to the door before he turned and realized she had tricked him.

“Damn it Arianna!” he yelled and scrambled up after her.

He reached the top of the stairs just a few steps after her and must have taken them two at a time.  He grabbed her arm again and turned her to face him.  “That was
not
right,” he said, his eyes hardened.  “We don’t know what is going on here and you pull shit like that?”

“Sorry,” she said and made no attempt at sounding sincere. 

“Yeah, you really sound it,” he said sarcastically. 

She stood on her tiptoes and pressed her lips to his.  “Oh don’t be mad,” she attempted.  “We’ll just do a quick check then get out of here.  We will call the cops as soon as we get to the truck.”

Luke narrowed his eyes at her as if assessing whether or not she was telling the truth.  When he felt satisfied she was telling the truth several seconds later, he released her from his gaze and smiled. “Okay, okay” he agreed.

“Okay,” she echoed him and walked to Lily’s room.

They stepped inside and Luke immediately commented on the décor.

“Whoa!  This room is like, I don’t know, a dream or something,” he observed.  And he was right.  Arianna had always loved Lily’s room.  The striking midnight blue walls with Sun and Moon ceramic wall hangings and floor-length gray drapes with matching gray bedding, though dramatic and unusual, were whimsical.  Shimmering stars in silver and gold tones of metal hung from beaded strands from the ceiling just over Lily’s bed. 

“I know,” Arianna nodded.  “I always loved sleeping over here.”

“I can see why,” he said as his eyes scanned the room.

The room looked neat, far neater than Lily had ever kept it.  Every knickknack was in place and looked freshly dusted and polished.  The bed was made so meticulously it looked as though a hotel chambermaid had done it.  Lily had never liked to make her bed, had usually left it unmade, in fact.  The sudden change set off warning bells inside Arianna.  Ignoring the bed for the moment, she crossed the room and walked toward the window.  For reasons she could not explain, she felt drawn to it.  She pushed the curtain aside and peeked out.  As she did so, an image jolted her.  She felt suddenly terrified and began to tremble.  The fog outside wavered briefly before it was replaced by bright light, blindingly bright light.  Her breathing came in shallow pants and she felt the urge to run, to search for Mr. and Mrs. Andrews.

She bolted out of the room past Luke.

“Arianna!” he called, alarmed. But she did not stop.  She went straight to Lily’s parent’s bedroom.

The room was empty, just as Lily’s had been and possessed the same sterile quality; it was neat, too neat, and smelled of cleaning product.  She stopped at the foot of their bed and her heart pounded frantically.  A vision flashed in her mind’s eye, a vision of Lily’s parent’s lying in a pool of blood where she stood.  She stifled the scream that begged to escape her throat and walked on unsteady legs to the window.  The backyard beyond it, though enveloped in fog, looked different.  She could plainly see a patch of grass on the otherwise scrupulously maintained lawn had been burned, its shape a near-perfect circle.

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

“What is it?” Luke asked, concerned.

“There,” she pointed to the grass. 

“What am I looking at?” he asked, confusion in is voice.

“The grass has been burned in an almost perfect circle.”

He moved his head closer to the pane of glass and strained his eyes against the mist beyond it.  “Holy shit,” he murmured.  “What the hell?  Why would anybody do that?”

“I don’t know,” she said.  But an instinctive awareness drifted across her skin like a sigh of warm breath. 

She took Luke’s hand in hers and pulled him out of the room toward the top of the staircase.  She ran down the stairs and turned down the center hallway once she reached the bottom.  She ran straight through the kitchen and opened the sliding glass door that led from it to the backyard.  She stepped outside and walked until she stood upon the burnt grass.

Standing near the center of the scorched patch of grass, Arianna was hit with a surge of energy unlike any she’d ever felt.  A dark, sinister force crashed against her.  It felt like a million needles piercing her skin at once.  She felt pain immediately, pain and heat.  Burning heat started low and rolled up her body with a flash of intensity, singeing her cells.  She felt her feet burning, felt flames licking at them, writhing and blistering up her ankles and calves.  She cried out, heard the sound tear from her throat, but was powerless to stop it.  She no longer felt in control of her body.  She knew that Luke waited somewhere along the edge of the charred circle of grass, knew that he’d heard her scream, but he began to fade.  The world around her began to fade.  Blackness taunted the edges of her vision and the low clouds that occupied the early morning sky began to spin round and round, threatening to send her off balance.  Her legs buckled beneath her.  She dropped to the hard, unforgiving earth on her knees and for a moment, the world fell completely silent.  She no longer heard anything but the surge of her own blood through her veins.  An acrid stench began to fill her nostrils, smoke and sulfur mixed with something else, something like hair and oil burning.  The smell tore the air from her lungs and made it difficult for her to breathe.  She gasped for breath, yet every attempt she made was strangled by air so heavy, so blackened and foul she could not seem to fill her lungs.  She struggled against the blackness that beckoned her, and felt rage fill her.  Her entire body began to tremble.  Sweat trailed down her form, hot and cold contending.  She squeezed her eyes shut, tried to force back the scorching heat that had reached her thighs.  When she lifted her lashes, a face appeared before her eyes.

The face was monstrous.  Charred and puckered, his complexion was a patchwork of pitted skin in varying shades of brown, gray, pink and red.  His mouth snarled and he glowered at her with sunken, slate-colored eyes devoid of eyelashes and eyebrows.  He spoke to her, words that were muddled and indistinct.  She strained to hear them, but could not concentrate, for something else was happening.  His dark energy shot through her body, clawed its way through her muscles and bones.  She did not know who he was or where he’d come from, but she knew what he wanted; he wanted her dead.  His hatred of her was palpable, throbbing and pounding like a heartbeat.  She blinked and fortified her resolve, pushed back against his encroachment.  A tingling sensation of success raced through her.  She clung to it like a lifeline and pushed harder until his putrid face vanished altogether. 

“No!” she cried out, the guttural cry of a warrior.

She heard Luke’s voice, felt his touch jerk her back to reality.  “Arianna!” he shouted.

“They killed her, Luke,” she heard herself say before sobs overtook her.  “They burned her to death right here!”

“What?” he asked
bewilderedly.  “Who burned her to death?  H-how could you possibly know that?”

Even in the gray light of the overcast morning, she could see the confusion etched on his face, the worry in his eyes.

“I saw it happen just now.  I felt her pain.  And I’m sure they’re coming for me next.”

Chapter 21

Howard Kane sat before his massive cherry wood desk in the office of the Soldiers of the Divine Trinity Church and heard a distinct ringing sound coming from one of its drawers.  Surprised, he immediately reached for the drawer’s knob and pulled it toward him.  The ringing was coming from a cellphone, and not just any cellphone, but a phone he had purchased and reserved exclusively for emergencies.  What he and his congregants categorized as emergencies generally dealt with their dogged pursuit of evil in every form, and more specifically, witches.  He watched for a split-second as the small black phone vibrated and moved itself less than an inch in one direction then stopped.  He scooped it up and depressed the “send” button and answered.

“Hello?” Howard spoke into the receiver.

“Sir, it is John.  I’m here at the Andrews house, and was told to alert you of any unusual activity,” the voice on the other end said.

Howard waited patiently for John to continue but was met with silence.

“Go on,” Howard urged.  “You’re calling me on an emergency line, so clearly there is an emergency.”

“Yes sir.  Sorry,” John began.  “I can’t be sure, sir, but I think the Sola is here.”

The phone nearly slipped f
rom Howard’s grip, shock weakening it.  John Cartwright had been stationed at the Andrews house for the last two weeks, but just as a precaution.  On the off chance that a vile cohort of Lily’s visited, he had wanted the area secured and with someone in place capable of handling such a being.  Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined that the Sola herself would arrive.  Yet, according to John, she had. 

Howard inhaled a trembling breath, anticipation squeezing his lungs.  “What makes you think that the Sola is at the Andrews house?”

“Well, we were here, and the doorbell started ringing.  It rang several times and we assumed it was family or friends stopping by.”

“Go on,” Howard encouraged.

“This person, a girl, she was able to enter the house.  She opened the front door and walked in as easy as you please and began calling out to Lily and her parents.  She announced herself as though she knew them.  She said her name’s Arianna Rose.”

The name jarred Howard, a jolt of inexplicable recognition registering in his brain.  His pulse rate sped, racing dangerously, excitedly.

“Then what happened?” Howard asked John careful to conceal his eagerness and keep his voice level.

“We had been hiding in a hall closet upstairs and came out when she and her friend went outside.  She stood at the center of the patch of grass, where we burned the witch, Lily.  She stood there for a long time then collapsed.  While she was on her knees, she screamed out, the sound of a demon if you ask me.  When her friend grabbed her, she told him she had seen her friend burn.  She said she knew what had happened.”

“It’s her,” Howard hissed, awareness tingling through his veins like lifeblood.  His leathered skin tightened near the spot where his scalp used to be and he felt the few fine hairs of his body that had remained raise and quiver.  The Sola was in his crosshairs.  He would finally have her and the world would be rid of her depraved presence.  “Who is she with?” he asked.

“A boy, a teenage boy,” John replied.

“Did they arrive together?”

“Yes, she arrived in his truck with him.”

“Excellent.  Please get me the license plate number of that truck, John.  I want to find out as much as I can about her friend.”

“Kyle is getting that for you as we speak,” John said.  There was a pause in their conversation and the sound of paper rustling crackled over the line.  When John’s voice returned, he shared the information his partner had obtained.  “Okay, the plates are from New York and the numbers are K4E695.  Did you get all that?”

“Yes, yes.  I got it,” Howard replied as he scribbled the numbers down on a sheet of paper.

“What would you like us to do, wait for you and the others to arrive?” John asked.

“No, they will be gone by then.  Kill them, kill them now.”

Silence befell the other end of Howard’s conversation and was interrupted only by the sound of John’s ragged breathing.

“Are you there, John?  Did you hear what I said?” Howard asked.

“Yes sir,” John replied and Howard heard the faintest tremble in his voice.

Howard ended their call knowing that John and his partner, Kyle would likely fail.  The Sola would not be taken easily.  But they would have to try.  They were bound by oath to do so.  It was what God wanted them to do.  And their sacrifice would not be in vain should they fall to her malevolent powers.  They had identified the Sola, unearthed her human name: Arianna Rose. 

Arianna Rose
.  The words blew through him like an icy wind and left him breathless. 

He clutched his arms across his body, bracing himself against the chill of her soulless existence.  But his arm
s provided little comfort.  The only comfort he would feel would be when she had been burned at the stake like her ancestors before her.  He would formulate a plan.  Should his soldiers fail, as he felt certain they would, he, with the Lord’s guidance, would bring down the Sola.

Chapter 22

Arianna remained at the center of the charred circle of grass, sweat covering her from head to toe and breathing unevenly.  To Luke, she imagined she looked like a lunatic.  After all, she’d just told him she’d
seen
what had happened to Lily; that she had
felt
what Lily had felt and that people were coming for her, too.  She sounded like a delusional, paranoid maniac, but had blurted the words out suddenly.  She hadn’t bothered to filter what she’d said. 

“What?” Luke asked Arianna incredulously.  “You can’t possibly know that.  I mean, you can have a feeling, like a gut feeling or something, but you can’t
know
for sure.”

Luke was looking at her as if she were insane and she couldn’t help but feel resentment creep into the panic-stricken state she was in.  She understood how he most likely felt, seeing her wild-eyed, hearing her scream as she
’d experienced the burning heat of flames licking at her body, the same flames that had claimed Lily.  He hadn’t seen what she’d seen.  He hadn’t felt what she’d felt.  He had no idea what she was.

He approached her slowly, timidly, with his palms facing her at chest height.  In a soothing voice he said, “Everything is all right, Arianna.  I’m not sure what you think you saw, but you’ve had a lot of stress lately: new school, new trailer, the attack at the club and worrying about your friend.  It’s been hard for you, hasn’t it?”  He didn’t wait for her to answer.  Instead, he continued.  “I think it’s best if we get out of here.”

“I saw it happen!  I felt it!  It happened!” she screamed.  “Why don’t you believe me?”

She knew she could not reveal herself to him, could not tell him she was a witch, and not just any witch, but the Sola.  He was already treating her like a mental patient.  Her screaming at him, pleading with him to believe her, would not help her cause.  The rational part of her knew he was reacting the way any normal person would, that he thought she was having some sort of breakdown.  But she had seen everything, had experienced it as though it had been happening to her. 

“What?  C’mon Arianna, it doesn’t make sense,” he started to argue, but was silenced when something whizzed past his ear and shattered the window of the detached garage to their left. 

“What the hell?” he said and immediately ducked with his hands over his head.

“Gunshot!” she cried.  “That was a gunshot!  Run!”

More shots followed, their distinct popping sound pierced the quiet of the morning and echoed as they hit the garage.  Arianna had known they were the intended target, had sensed it before it had started.

Crouched low, she grabbed Luke’s hand and pulled him toward the garage.  Taking cover behind the garage was not the best option, but she figured at the very least, they were safer there than standing out in the open in the middle of the backyard. 

With the small structure between them and whoever hunted them, Arianna paused to catch her breath.  “What the fuck?” Luke wheezed.  “What the hell is happening?  Why would anybody be shooting at us?”  His skin had paled to the color of his white shirt and his chest rose and fell quickly as he struggled to catch his breath.

She did not try to answer him.  She did not have time to explain. 

“We need to get out of here,” he said and held her gaze.  “You run.  I’ll distract them,” he surprised her by saying.

“What?  No! I’m not leaving you!” she protested.

“Go!” he yelled, and with his cry,
he gave up their flimsy hiding place.

Her feet moved beneath her, though she had not willed them to do so.  She ducked and stayed close to the siding of the garage.  But rather than running toward the woods or making a dash for the front of the house where she would be visible to neighbors and passersby, she darted to the front of the garage, determined to catch a glimpse of the shooter. 
She
was the one being hunted. 
She
was the one they wanted dead.  The phantom “they” that pursued her knew who she was, but existed as a nameless, faceless entity.  Howard Kane was the single name she’d heard.  But she needed more.  She needed faces.  She inched around a drainage pipe and peeked around the side of the garage.  Her head pounded and kept time with her thundering heartbeat.  Luke had announced their exact whereabouts, but no one had approached, yet.

Arianna’s insides began to quiver and she focused on the man, or men, who had shot at her and Luke.  In an instant, the world around her began to fade.  The sound of chirping birds hushed.  The buzz of crickets and katydids silenced.  All she could hear was the decelerating beat of her heart, and that began to fade as well.  She immediately recognized that her senses had heightened.  Earlier, she had struggled to see through the dense fog that clung to
every surface around her.  Now, however, she could see clearly as if her surroundings had been scrubbed clean of the mist and haze.  She could plainly see a man inching cautiously toward the garage gripping his pistol expertly.  Clearly, he believed himself to be cloaked by the milky miasma for he sought no other form of concealment.  He had been wrong.  He had underestimated her powers. 

She was about to step from the inadequate protection of the garage when the faint scent of sweat caught her attention.  Bitter and pungent, an acrid odor assaulted her nasal passages and was followed by the sound of walking.  Blades of grass crashed noisily against one another under heavy footing that approached from behind her.  She spun around to greet the person who
intended to surprise her.

A dark hulking figure stood before her and clutched a gun between his hands.  The gun was aimed at her chest. 

“It’s you,” he spat with disgust.  “The Sola.  I’m going to be the man who kills the Sola.”

“No, please,” she begged him not to kill her.  His
obvious but baseless disdain for her was palpable.  He wanted her dead, intended to kill her where she stood.  She froze temporarily, her arms reduced to useless, leaden appendages at her sides, unable to summon powers she knew she possessed. 

“Die witch!” he screamed.  But as he squeezed the trigger, a sickening thud echoed through the air, and a stunned looked screwed up his features.  The shots he’d fired zipped past her and missed her completely.  The man dropped his pistol and fell forward to the ground, a pickax lodged in the back of his skull.  Behind him, Luke stood with a look of utter horror on his face.

“H-he, he was going to kill you,” Luke stammered, his bottom lip quivering.  He ambled toward the man’s fallen body; his eyes pinned on the pickax.  “What have I done?” he asked and began to breathe unusually rapidly.

Arianna paused for a moment, her mind struggling to process what had just happened.  A man she’d never seen before had attempted to kill her, had revealed her to be a witch, but her boyfriend had killed him first.  Her visions, her newfound powers, her title, the fact that she was being hunted, all of it closed in on her.  Death surrounded her at every turn,
and all were deaths that she was responsible for in some way, shape or form.  She wanted to drop to the ground, squeeze her eyes shut and cover her ears with her hands and will all of it away.  But Arianna knew that was not an option.  She needed to stay in control of herself.  She needed to protect Luke and survive.  She needed to find the other gunman.

Refusing to succumb to the hysteria that hounded her, she closed the distance between her and Luke and gripped both of his arms.  His skin felt cool and clammy and his eye
s refused to focus on her.  “You had no choice but to kill him, Luke.  You saved my life,” she told him.

“I-I didn’t need to kill him, though,” Luke replied dazedly.  “I killed him.  He was alive just a second ago and now he’s dead…because of me!”  He pulled away from her and raked both hands through his hair before covering his face with his hands and squatting near the dead man’s feet.  “Oh my God!” he cried. 

She knelt beside him, all too aware of the fact that the other shooter remained, lurking in the early morning shadows.  “Luke, look at me,” she said and cupped the sides of his face.  “You had no choice,” she repeated firmly.  “He was going to kill me, kill us.”

As the words fell from her lips, a man emerged from the mistiness.  Both of them spun to find the muzzled of a gun pointed at them.

“I have you now, witch,” the man said and did not hesitate to fire.

Arianna saw the instantaneous flash of the shots being fired and screamed, “No!” 

A bolt of energy rushed through her body to her fingertips and branched like electricity.  She felt the heated streak flare from her fingertips and leave her body in a burst of blue light like lightning and lurch outward toward the man.  His bullets halted and fell to the dew-covered ground and the man pitched backward, stunned.  His gun fell as well.  The man did not venture toward her.  He remained where he was, immobilized, his face a mask of shock.

Arianna entire body trembled, humming and buzzing with energy she could barely harness.  “Why are you trying to kill us?” she demanded of him, her voice shrill and frantic.

“I’m trying to kill you,” the man said and pointed a meaty finger at her.  “Not him.”

“What?  Why?” she asked, but in the dark recess
es of her mind, she knew why he wanted to kill her.

“You are a soldier of evil,” he spat.  “Killing you is the Lord’s work.  I am doing the Lord’s work.”

“You are the one who’s evil!” she screamed at him.

“No!” he shouted back.  “I am a servant of God!”

Arianna took a step toward the man, wanted to look upon his face for a feature or characteristic familiar to her.  He wore glasses; that much she could see.  But perhaps he had a birthmark or freckle, something that would set him apart from others.  As she approached, however, his face faded temporarily, replaced instead with the orange-red glow of flames.  Heat swathed her once again and flames crept up her body.  Her arms and legs were bound and she suffered.  But through the thick smoke that billowed all around her, a face appeared, and it did not belong to man with the charred and scarred flesh.  This man’s head was cloaked in a heavy, dark fabric that edged his pasty skin.  Beady, black irises gaped at her from behind wire-rimmed glasses.  The flames snaked up her body and began to melt away her skin.  She wanted to cry out, desperately needed to, but under the watchful, maleficent gaze of the beady eyed man, she could not.  When finally, the flames engulfed her fully and she felt life begin to escape her, she saw that the man smiled, a satisfied, self-righteous smile.

Blackness teased at the edges of Arianna’s vision as she relived her friend’s final moments.

“You were there when she was murdered,” she said through her teeth recognizing the beady bespectacled gaze of the man before her.  “You watched her die.  You watched a sixteen year-old girl burn to death, and you enjoyed it!” she hissed and felt ire roil and swell inside of her.

“She was evil!” he countered. 

His words set off a firestorm of reactions within her.  Every cell in her body began to teem with anger, anger unlike she’d ever felt before.  It rose like molten lava, pressing and surging, brimming so closely to the surface of her flesh, her skin felt heated.  She struggled to suppress the urge that raged inside of her, the powerful need to punish the man who’d tortured and murdered her friend.

“She was the devil’s minion!” he offered a final charge.  And with his words, she erupted.

“She was my friend!” Arianna screamed in a voice that sounded foreign to her own ears.

“Arianna, no!” she heard Luke cry out from a distant remote place.  His voice called to her, weak and muddled as if she were submerged in a vast ocean and he ashore.  She was gone.  Her vision was awash in crimson, her body adrift on a blood-red tide.  She felt her arms shoot out in front of her and she watched through a scarlet veil as the man who’d brutalized her friend levitated several inches off the ground.  He shrieked in terror, seemed to sense his fate, but she did not care.  She felt a charge rush through her arms to her fingertips before leaving her body, then saw the man’s head and neck twist sharply, violently, to one side.  She heard a sickly snap and witnessed his head flop and loll to his chest.  His lifeless body dropped to the grass, motionless.  Arianna dropped her hands to her sides and felt drained.  Color slowly returned to the world around her, driving out the crimson.  A voice called to her, a panicked voice; Luke’s voice.

“Why did you do that?” Luke cried.  “
How
did you do that?”

“H-h-he killed her.  I saw him, he
enjoyed
it,” she replied in a trembling voice.

Luke took a tentative step back, away from her, away from the two dead bodies that litt
ered the backyard of the Andrews house. 

“I don’t understand,” he said in horror.  “I just don’t understand what happened here.  It just, it’s just, all so unbelievable.”  He raked his hands through his hair and rested them at the nape of his neck.  “Y-y-you killed him, without even touching him.  What the fuck
are
you?”

His words stung.  She had not intended to tell him of her powers, much less example them for him, but had used them twice in his presence, nevertheless.  The first time had been to rescue his sister, and herself, from a brutal attack, and this time, she’d had avenged her friend’s murder and had prevented them from being exterminated in the process.  Of course, he had no knowledge of the truth of what had happened at the nightclub with Stephanie.  But he had witnessed everything that had occurred moments earlier.  Arianna swallowed hard against the lump that had formed in her throat.  Her heart clenched and felt unnaturally heavy in her chest.  He saw her for what she was: a monster.