Child of Red and Blue

Chapter Three

One image chased Alana's mind from the abyss of death: her arm, composed entirely of lava and layered in flames, ending with Hunter's charred body in her grasp. The fire encasing Alana had crawled down his throat, leaving it black and bubbled. His blue eyes were wide and wet, despite the black and red cracked flesh. He was pleading, in agony, betrayed.

Air rushed into Alana’s lungs and her blue eyes snapped open. Her muscles shook to generate the heat that had been sapped by the icy ground under her. Deep aches of pain twisted her gut, drowning out a long groan. Afternoon sunlight did it’s best to warm her.

Wait.

Alana shot up, her arms crossing over her exposed breasts. Crisp, January air tickled her skin, dancing across her thighs and up her abdomen before falling over her shoulders to slide down her back. Smoke clung to Alana's hair and ash painted her skin. Around her, scorched stone sat melted, peeling away from her as if pushed by a great wind. What was once three stories of lavish living was barely enough to form the missing roof.

Leon. Alana sucked in a shuddering breath as tears came to her. He'd tried to kill her. How could this have happened? How could she have let this happen? Then behind her lids, she saw flames eating at the one thing keeping her alive: Hunter.

“No,” Alana called. She needed to get up. See him with her own eyes. He must have gone home.

She stood. Everything within two hundred yards was destroyed, leaving an oval ring of green beauty out of her reach. Ignoring the crunch and jabs of charred wood under her feet, she stumbled forward.

To the right, just over ten cars stood crooked and mangled. A few of them were on their side. Alana's face crunched. A brown van sat in the middle of the mangled mess. It still had the oversized dice in the window Hunter's eldest sister had installed years before Hunter was born. The pink fuzz, now black and brown, had curled away from the foam interior.

“He should have gone home,” Alana told herself.

But when Leon came out of the forest alone, Hunter must have gone in after her. He always knew Leon would hurt her one day. He would have seen her, laying there, bleeding.

And then he saw her killing him.

“No,” Alana said, pressing her palms to her eyes. Even with them closed, the flames licked at him. “No. It's not real. Wake up.”

“This is very real.”

Alana turned, a scream already flying from her mouth. A man stood twenty feet from her. Two steps from where she'd woken up terrified. He was too tall to be human. Eight feet, evenly proportioned.

He wore a leather coat down to his thighs and a button-down tunic. The morning sun was behind him, casting shadows over his features. He was older than her by nearly two decades. His eyes weren't roaming her naked body, nor did he smile. It was as if he were staring at an insect under a microscope.

Alana took a step back. Then, she dipped down for a wooden beam and brought it up like a bat.

“Stay away from me or I will—” her voice caught when the man’s hand snapped around her neck and he lifted her to his eye level. Her weapon clanked to the ground and she put her energy into swatting at the man.

She hadn't seen him move. How could he be choking her?

“You have ten seconds to tell me why you have the Ankora's soul.” His voice was deep and smooth.

Alana opened her mouth, desperate to get air down her windpipe. The skin between the man’s fingers pinched and burned. Her eyes watered and she scratched at his hand. Blood and flesh came away under her nails. Alana met his eyes and hated that she had to use them to beg for her life.

Gray eyes stared back at her, void of all emotion. Globs of turquoise danced and shimmered on the edges of his iris. As if seeing her notice, they stalled. What the hell was this man?

“Time’s up.”

His hand opened and Alana fell to the ground in a fit of gasps and coughs. Before she could scream for her body to get away from him, pain snatched her. It clenched each of her muscles, keeping her at a standstill. Air refused to make its way down her throat. Acid replaced the marrow in her bones. Her skin, now hot with pain, felt as if it were being forced through a juicer. The hand of a giant crushed her while fire ants tunneled into her veins.

Just before she felt she would finally be squeezed into nothingness, razor sharp pain split her skin. Her muscles were freed from the invisible force and she crashed to her hands and knees. Tears dropped onto the scorched earth and she finally screamed.

The squeezing retreated to her depths, away from the deep waves of heat pushing through the splits in her skin, but now, the pain rolled emotions through her as if it had gripped her soul.

In that moment, she wanted to die more than she ever had. Years of disappointment pummeled her. She felt betrayal, rage, sadness, grief pull at her. She killed the only good thing in her world. How was that not worth enough to end her existence?

The cracks ripping across her body swelled to thick ravines that caused the snow around her to vaporize. Out of the corner of her eye, Alana saw the lava flowing under her skin. Despite the tears, it did not drip onto the destroyed planks or leak out of her like blood. Its heat burned away the ice and the pain and Alana wanted it to take her.

Every piece of her skin was ripped into these cracks and she was a being of lava. And still the pain didn’t cease. The man still stood a foot in front of her, his brow wrinkled in hatred and concentration. Alana gasped in air as his fingers dug into her soul.

The force squeezing Alana from within was whisked away, leaving the hot, razor zigzags. The strength to keep her eyes open failed her and Alana’s body relaxed on the jagged, cold ground. Her body shook in rising fear and cold. Her skin ached as the cracks crawled to a close, sealing the lava within her once more.

Shoes scuffed the dirt somewhere close to Alana’s face. She opened her eyes to see the giant man looking down at her with turquoise eyes.

“This shouldn’t hurt.”

There was a light pinch around her neck, like a string had been pinched tight. Then it was gone and she fell into nothingness once more.