Just so I don't go insane while editing The Awakened, I have to play around with book two every once in a while to get me excited about where this story is going. And since none of you will be reading book two for a while, I thought I'd do spontaneous teaser posts of scenes that will be incorporated into it. This is for your enjoyment as much as mine, so please tell me if you like it.
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One...two...three...!” Caden Howell’s voice echoed loudly through the woods as a dozen pairs of feet scampered away from the tree that his face was pressed against. Giggling could be heard in the first few seconds of the game, but soon even the most excited of the kids running away from him fell quiet.
Hide-and-Seek was a time-honored tradition for Caden and his friends. At least as time-honored as anything could be when you were ten years old. But none of them were as good at it as Kyla.
Sprinting on her tip-toes with a grin on her face, Kyla James ran as far her legs would take her before she heard her best friend reach forty-five. Then she worked her way up into the branches of the most climbable pine tree in the woods around her. Caden had never been as good at climbing as she was, so even if he saw her up here, she knew he wouldn’t be able to tag her.
She was highly impressed with herself as she steadied herself securely on an upper branch and waited for the “Ready or not, here I come!” that Caden called out loudly in the distance. She saw him start off in the opposite direction from where she had hidden and forced herself to sit still, knowing she had to wait for the exact right moment before she bolted back to base.
Kyla waited excitedly, but then she realized her excitement was keeping her from being still, so she calmed her breathing and made an effort to line it up with the still evening air.
Kyla was very patient; more patient than most nine-year-old girls. That was why she was so good at this game. But patience didn’t always account for everything. Sometimes things happened that couldn’t be controlled…things that couldn’t even be explained. And when one of those things happened while Kyla was positioning herself carefully in the branches of that tree, no amount of patience could do anything to keep her calm.
Just as she positioned herself in a way that she could climb down easily and with the necessary speed, there was a shift in the air, in everything around her, enough that the smile fell from her face. Kyla felt a tinge of cold hit her skin and she looked down at her arm, seeing that it was covered in goose bumps.
That didn’t make any sense. It was the middle of summer.
She heard a noise behind her and whipped her head around. That was when she saw a flash of a shadow slip past her vision. Kyla didn’t know what to make of it, but it so startled her that she was knocked backwards out of the tree; too fast to fight it, too shocked to scream…too terrified to even breathe.
By nothing short of a miracle, she managed to catch herself on a lower branch. Sucking in sharply, she gripped it with her hands, hearing a snap and feeling it crack, though it was somehow able to hold under the weight of her seventy-one pound body.
Holding the branch tightly with her feet dangling beneath her, Kyla finally found her voice. “Caden!” she screamed.
At the exact moment the branch snapped off completely, her best friend broke through the trees and slid underneath her. Without hesitating for a second, he threw his arms open to break her fall.
Kyla shrieked in terror, her body weightless as she flailed through the air. Time wasn’t something she was able to grasp anymore; all she could do was scream and wait for it to be over. But when she collided with the boy on the ground who had thrown himself in her way, the impact jolted her silent.
Crashing into Caden, her breath was knocked out of her, and the branch that had fallen with her slashed across his forearm. It cut a deep searing gash into the skin just below his wrist.
Kyla rolled off of him quickly, gasping for breath and panicking when she saw that he was hurt. Crawling back over to him, she helped him as he struggled to sit up.
“Caden…”
He looked down at his arm and then back up at her. “Are you okay?” he asked her. He sounded twice as afraid as she was, but not about the blood that was pouring from his arm.
He was afraid that she’d been hurt.
Kyla didn’t answer him, mostly because she didn’t know how. She certainly didn’t feel okay. Holding the wound on his arm closed with her hands, she called through the woods for help. This would be so much easier if she hadn’t run so far off from the others. Blood poured through her fingers as she stared down at Caden, and flashes of the shadow she had seen in the tree reappeared before her vision. Kyla stared forward unmoving without the coherency to blink, and when Caden saw this, he became even more worried.
“Kyla…” he said, trying to shake her from her daze.
She didn’t answer him.
“Kyla!” he tried more loudly.
She didn’t even hear him. The third time he said her name she gasped and looked up at him, straight into his chestnut brown eyes.
When her gaze locked with his, she knew Caden could see the fear in her.
“What happened?” he asked her frantically.
Kyla felt herself shaking. “I…I saw something.”
“Just close your eyes and breathe a minute,” he told her when she didn’t blink for a full ten seconds.
She did what he said, but it didn’t make it any easier.
“What did you see?” he asked.
Kyla shook her head, trying to shake the image from her mind. But even more than the image, it was the feeling…the fear that had hit her when the shadow had passed.
She never wanted to feel that again.
That was when another thought hit her. Re-opening her eyes, she looked at Caden in question. “How did you get over here so fast?” she asked him. “You were on the other side of the woods.”
Caden hesitated and bit his lip. “I was already running,” he said.
Kyla stared at him for a long time, not understanding how that was even possible; but then as she watched his eyes and let the truth behind them hit her, she fell to a familiar awe.
This wasn’t the first time something like that had happened to them. It wasn’t the first time Caden had been able to feel her like that.
It clicked in her suddenly, something like a survival instinct; only she wasn’t the one she was worried about surviving.
“Come on,” she coaxed him, tying to get him up.
He put his best effort into it and collapsed back to his knees. Kyla swallowed hard. She couldn’t let her fear get the best of her now. She had to try again.
“Come on, Cade,” she said again. “We gotta get you home.”
He nodded in agreement, but she could see by his expression how disoriented he was. His eyes weren’t focusing right and his head was moving in subtle, concentric circles like everything was spinning around him. Kyla thought he might throw up, and she was a little surprised when he didn’t.
Getting brave, she looked down at her hand, moving it away slowly and cringing along with Caden when she saw that it hurt him. But when she saw how deep the laceration went into his arm, suddenly he wasn’t the one she was worried about throwing up anymore.
“Oh God…” she breathed. She could feel the blood leave her face and she clamped her hand back over the wound again, determined not to let it go.
It was much worse than she realized.
Caden could see how freaked she looked and he tried to reassure her. “It’s okay,” he told her, but she could tell that he was afraid.
That was such a lie. This was anything but okay.
Kyla called out through the woods for help again, but none of the others could hear her. She had run too far in the opposite direction from all of them.
Why had she been so stupid?
She tried one last time to help Caden up and move him in the direction of his house, but he collapsed to the pine-needled floor.
Kyla held her breath. This wasn’t good.
Kneeling down beside her best friend, she stroked his back comfortingly. His head was down and his hair hung limply in his eyes, and by the look on his face he was already defeated.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized to her.
Still holding his wound closed, Kyla wrapped her free arm around him. “It’s okay,” she told him. “This isn’t your fault. It’s mine.”
Caden shook his head and the gesture made Kyla furious with herself. He had always done that; tried to take the blame when it clearly fell on her. She knew she was the reason they were stuck out here in the woods with no one anywhere near them. She also knew that whatever happened to him, it would be her fault.
No, Kyla wasn’t about to accept that.
Looking up and all around her, she prayed under her breath, “Help me, God.”
Her eyelids fluttered as she waited, feeling a heat surge through her, a strength that wasn’t her own. And once it came into her fully, Kyla knew it was time to try again.
“Hold on, Cade,” she told him, grabbing him securely by the arm and hoisting him up so she could drag him.
She was a little afraid that he might pass out on her since she wasn’t strong enough to carry him on her own, but he was fighting it enough that she thought they just might make it. She also felt a strength and a grace to be able to carry him that she shouldn’t have felt.
Caden tried to hold up his weight so he wouldn’t put the burden on her. He stumbled and staggered, but he tried his best, and the two of them managed to push their way through the brush. Then, as they approached a very distinct point in the woods where the trees looked stranger and the ground looked darker, Caden started to tremble.
Kyla noticed it when she felt him physically shaking against her, but she tried not to be afraid. “You okay?” she asked him.
No response.
“Caden?” she asked a little more firmly.
He couldn’t pass out now. They were finally moving in the right direction.
“Caden!” she snapped at him.
The boy sucked in a sharp breath. “Something’s not right,” he said. “I don’t feel safe here.”
Kyla was grateful to hear his voice, but something about the way he said it made her feel uneasy. “You’re almost safe,” she said, trying to reassure him. “I’m getting you home.” But she knew that wasn’t what he meant.
When they passed through a grove of aspens, there was one tree in particular that caught Kyla’s eye. Caden followed her gaze to its base and he winced at the sight of it. She wasn’t sure if that was from the pain in his arm or the strange-looking symbol that had been carved into its bark. Kyla didn’t recognize it. She wasn’t sure if she should have, but even in its unfamiliarity, the symbol made her shiver. Something felt strange about it. She didn’t know why, but whatever it was, she didn’t like it.
Then something else happened that she liked far less.
No sooner than she saw this symbol, another flash of black came before her sight, almost identical to the one she had seen in the tree she had fallen out of. Kyla froze in her tracks when she saw it. It jolted her, paralyzed her by the same fear she felt in those branches.
Caden asked her frantically, “What’s wrong?” but Kyla didn’t answer him. She couldn’t.
“Kyla!”
His voice shook her from her trance. Blinking hard, she pulled him back away from the tree and told him, “Come on. I’m getting you home.”
Caden looked like he wanted to press her, but he also looked as afraid of the symbol on the tree as she was. “Yeah, okay,” he agreed. “Let’s get out of here.”
He struggled through his dizziness and the blood he had lost and all of his own weakness and did everything he could to help her get them both out of there. By some unseen miracle, Caden’s strength had started to come back to him, enough that he was actually able to help her.
It made no logical sense, but then prayer rarely ever did. Kyla knew it was nothing less than that that enabled him to put his arm around her shoulder and move with her as fast as he did through those trees.
She felt a cold fear flood her veins as they pushed through the woods. The darkness she felt surrounding them was like nothing she had ever felt before. It wasn’t even like anything she had ever heard of. It felt as if they were surrounded by a swarm of beings…dark beings that couldn’t be seen, only felt. And she felt them all around her. They wove in and out of the trees as phantoms, moving swiftly through the steadily falling night.
And then suddenly, they were seen.
They were flashes Kyla saw out of both sides of her vision; dark shadows that whirred past her, moving through the trees in every direction.
She screamed at the sight of them and Caden shouted at her, “Don’t stop! Keep moving!”
Kyla started hyperventilating.
“I can feel them too,” he told her. “Whatever you do, don’t stop!”
Kyla screamed at him in a panic, “I don’t just feel them! I see them!”
Caden grappled with that for a moment before he finally told her, “Don’t look at them, Kyla! Keep running!”
As they bolted for Caden’s house, the darkness increased around them as they ran, and Kyla’s fear along with it. She saw other symbols; some on trees, some laid out in sticks on the ground like an upside down star. And she almost threw up when she saw a rabbit that had its blood drained and spilled around it in a circle amidst the symbols.
“Don’t look at it!” Caden yelled at her. Then he steered her in the direction they had come. “Just run straight for where we came from!”
Kyla blocked everything else out of her mind and ran, telling herself over and over, Don’t think. Don’t stop. Don’t breathe. Just run. Don’t stop running until you’re safe.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
One...two...three...!” Caden Howell’s voice echoed loudly through the woods as a dozen pairs of feet scampered away from the tree that his face was pressed against. Giggling could be heard in the first few seconds of the game, but soon even the most excited of the kids running away from him fell quiet.
Hide-and-Seek was a time-honored tradition for Caden and his friends. At least as time-honored as anything could be when you were ten years old. But none of them were as good at it as Kyla.
Sprinting on her tip-toes with a grin on her face, Kyla James ran as far her legs would take her before she heard her best friend reach forty-five. Then she worked her way up into the branches of the most climbable pine tree in the woods around her. Caden had never been as good at climbing as she was, so even if he saw her up here, she knew he wouldn’t be able to tag her.
She was highly impressed with herself as she steadied herself securely on an upper branch and waited for the “Ready or not, here I come!” that Caden called out loudly in the distance. She saw him start off in the opposite direction from where she had hidden and forced herself to sit still, knowing she had to wait for the exact right moment before she bolted back to base.
Kyla waited excitedly, but then she realized her excitement was keeping her from being still, so she calmed her breathing and made an effort to line it up with the still evening air.
Kyla was very patient; more patient than most nine-year-old girls. That was why she was so good at this game. But patience didn’t always account for everything. Sometimes things happened that couldn’t be controlled…things that couldn’t even be explained. And when one of those things happened while Kyla was positioning herself carefully in the branches of that tree, no amount of patience could do anything to keep her calm.
Just as she positioned herself in a way that she could climb down easily and with the necessary speed, there was a shift in the air, in everything around her, enough that the smile fell from her face. Kyla felt a tinge of cold hit her skin and she looked down at her arm, seeing that it was covered in goose bumps.
That didn’t make any sense. It was the middle of summer.
She heard a noise behind her and whipped her head around. That was when she saw a flash of a shadow slip past her vision. Kyla didn’t know what to make of it, but it so startled her that she was knocked backwards out of the tree; too fast to fight it, too shocked to scream…too terrified to even breathe.
By nothing short of a miracle, she managed to catch herself on a lower branch. Sucking in sharply, she gripped it with her hands, hearing a snap and feeling it crack, though it was somehow able to hold under the weight of her seventy-one pound body.
Holding the branch tightly with her feet dangling beneath her, Kyla finally found her voice. “Caden!” she screamed.
At the exact moment the branch snapped off completely, her best friend broke through the trees and slid underneath her. Without hesitating for a second, he threw his arms open to break her fall.
Kyla shrieked in terror, her body weightless as she flailed through the air. Time wasn’t something she was able to grasp anymore; all she could do was scream and wait for it to be over. But when she collided with the boy on the ground who had thrown himself in her way, the impact jolted her silent.
Crashing into Caden, her breath was knocked out of her, and the branch that had fallen with her slashed across his forearm. It cut a deep searing gash into the skin just below his wrist.
Kyla rolled off of him quickly, gasping for breath and panicking when she saw that he was hurt. Crawling back over to him, she helped him as he struggled to sit up.
“Caden…”
He looked down at his arm and then back up at her. “Are you okay?” he asked her. He sounded twice as afraid as she was, but not about the blood that was pouring from his arm.
He was afraid that she’d been hurt.
Kyla didn’t answer him, mostly because she didn’t know how. She certainly didn’t feel okay. Holding the wound on his arm closed with her hands, she called through the woods for help. This would be so much easier if she hadn’t run so far off from the others. Blood poured through her fingers as she stared down at Caden, and flashes of the shadow she had seen in the tree reappeared before her vision. Kyla stared forward unmoving without the coherency to blink, and when Caden saw this, he became even more worried.
“Kyla…” he said, trying to shake her from her daze.
She didn’t answer him.
“Kyla!” he tried more loudly.
She didn’t even hear him. The third time he said her name she gasped and looked up at him, straight into his chestnut brown eyes.
When her gaze locked with his, she knew Caden could see the fear in her.
“What happened?” he asked her frantically.
Kyla felt herself shaking. “I…I saw something.”
“Just close your eyes and breathe a minute,” he told her when she didn’t blink for a full ten seconds.
She did what he said, but it didn’t make it any easier.
“What did you see?” he asked.
Kyla shook her head, trying to shake the image from her mind. But even more than the image, it was the feeling…the fear that had hit her when the shadow had passed.
She never wanted to feel that again.
That was when another thought hit her. Re-opening her eyes, she looked at Caden in question. “How did you get over here so fast?” she asked him. “You were on the other side of the woods.”
Caden hesitated and bit his lip. “I was already running,” he said.
Kyla stared at him for a long time, not understanding how that was even possible; but then as she watched his eyes and let the truth behind them hit her, she fell to a familiar awe.
This wasn’t the first time something like that had happened to them. It wasn’t the first time Caden had been able to feel her like that.
It clicked in her suddenly, something like a survival instinct; only she wasn’t the one she was worried about surviving.
“Come on,” she coaxed him, tying to get him up.
He put his best effort into it and collapsed back to his knees. Kyla swallowed hard. She couldn’t let her fear get the best of her now. She had to try again.
“Come on, Cade,” she said again. “We gotta get you home.”
He nodded in agreement, but she could see by his expression how disoriented he was. His eyes weren’t focusing right and his head was moving in subtle, concentric circles like everything was spinning around him. Kyla thought he might throw up, and she was a little surprised when he didn’t.
Getting brave, she looked down at her hand, moving it away slowly and cringing along with Caden when she saw that it hurt him. But when she saw how deep the laceration went into his arm, suddenly he wasn’t the one she was worried about throwing up anymore.
“Oh God…” she breathed. She could feel the blood leave her face and she clamped her hand back over the wound again, determined not to let it go.
It was much worse than she realized.
Caden could see how freaked she looked and he tried to reassure her. “It’s okay,” he told her, but she could tell that he was afraid.
That was such a lie. This was anything but okay.
Kyla called out through the woods for help again, but none of the others could hear her. She had run too far in the opposite direction from all of them.
Why had she been so stupid?
She tried one last time to help Caden up and move him in the direction of his house, but he collapsed to the pine-needled floor.
Kyla held her breath. This wasn’t good.
Kneeling down beside her best friend, she stroked his back comfortingly. His head was down and his hair hung limply in his eyes, and by the look on his face he was already defeated.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized to her.
Still holding his wound closed, Kyla wrapped her free arm around him. “It’s okay,” she told him. “This isn’t your fault. It’s mine.”
Caden shook his head and the gesture made Kyla furious with herself. He had always done that; tried to take the blame when it clearly fell on her. She knew she was the reason they were stuck out here in the woods with no one anywhere near them. She also knew that whatever happened to him, it would be her fault.
No, Kyla wasn’t about to accept that.
Looking up and all around her, she prayed under her breath, “Help me, God.”
Her eyelids fluttered as she waited, feeling a heat surge through her, a strength that wasn’t her own. And once it came into her fully, Kyla knew it was time to try again.
“Hold on, Cade,” she told him, grabbing him securely by the arm and hoisting him up so she could drag him.
She was a little afraid that he might pass out on her since she wasn’t strong enough to carry him on her own, but he was fighting it enough that she thought they just might make it. She also felt a strength and a grace to be able to carry him that she shouldn’t have felt.
Caden tried to hold up his weight so he wouldn’t put the burden on her. He stumbled and staggered, but he tried his best, and the two of them managed to push their way through the brush. Then, as they approached a very distinct point in the woods where the trees looked stranger and the ground looked darker, Caden started to tremble.
Kyla noticed it when she felt him physically shaking against her, but she tried not to be afraid. “You okay?” she asked him.
No response.
“Caden?” she asked a little more firmly.
He couldn’t pass out now. They were finally moving in the right direction.
“Caden!” she snapped at him.
The boy sucked in a sharp breath. “Something’s not right,” he said. “I don’t feel safe here.”
Kyla was grateful to hear his voice, but something about the way he said it made her feel uneasy. “You’re almost safe,” she said, trying to reassure him. “I’m getting you home.” But she knew that wasn’t what he meant.
When they passed through a grove of aspens, there was one tree in particular that caught Kyla’s eye. Caden followed her gaze to its base and he winced at the sight of it. She wasn’t sure if that was from the pain in his arm or the strange-looking symbol that had been carved into its bark. Kyla didn’t recognize it. She wasn’t sure if she should have, but even in its unfamiliarity, the symbol made her shiver. Something felt strange about it. She didn’t know why, but whatever it was, she didn’t like it.
Then something else happened that she liked far less.
No sooner than she saw this symbol, another flash of black came before her sight, almost identical to the one she had seen in the tree she had fallen out of. Kyla froze in her tracks when she saw it. It jolted her, paralyzed her by the same fear she felt in those branches.
Caden asked her frantically, “What’s wrong?” but Kyla didn’t answer him. She couldn’t.
“Kyla!”
His voice shook her from her trance. Blinking hard, she pulled him back away from the tree and told him, “Come on. I’m getting you home.”
Caden looked like he wanted to press her, but he also looked as afraid of the symbol on the tree as she was. “Yeah, okay,” he agreed. “Let’s get out of here.”
He struggled through his dizziness and the blood he had lost and all of his own weakness and did everything he could to help her get them both out of there. By some unseen miracle, Caden’s strength had started to come back to him, enough that he was actually able to help her.
It made no logical sense, but then prayer rarely ever did. Kyla knew it was nothing less than that that enabled him to put his arm around her shoulder and move with her as fast as he did through those trees.
She felt a cold fear flood her veins as they pushed through the woods. The darkness she felt surrounding them was like nothing she had ever felt before. It wasn’t even like anything she had ever heard of. It felt as if they were surrounded by a swarm of beings…dark beings that couldn’t be seen, only felt. And she felt them all around her. They wove in and out of the trees as phantoms, moving swiftly through the steadily falling night.
And then suddenly, they were seen.
They were flashes Kyla saw out of both sides of her vision; dark shadows that whirred past her, moving through the trees in every direction.
She screamed at the sight of them and Caden shouted at her, “Don’t stop! Keep moving!”
Kyla started hyperventilating.
“I can feel them too,” he told her. “Whatever you do, don’t stop!”
Kyla screamed at him in a panic, “I don’t just feel them! I see them!”
Caden grappled with that for a moment before he finally told her, “Don’t look at them, Kyla! Keep running!”
As they bolted for Caden’s house, the darkness increased around them as they ran, and Kyla’s fear along with it. She saw other symbols; some on trees, some laid out in sticks on the ground like an upside down star. And she almost threw up when she saw a rabbit that had its blood drained and spilled around it in a circle amidst the symbols.
“Don’t look at it!” Caden yelled at her. Then he steered her in the direction they had come. “Just run straight for where we came from!”
Kyla blocked everything else out of her mind and ran, telling herself over and over, Don’t think. Don’t stop. Don’t breathe. Just run. Don’t stop running until you’re safe.
