Red

chapter 4

The second time I woke up was in a bathtub, ice running through my veins surrounded by what I felt like actual ice cubes. And this time there were actually people in the room and several familiar faces. The decoration was nowhere near weird and I actually managed to place it in my mind. I have woken up at the en suite of the hotel I was staying in, with Daniel standing beside my bathtub along with Dorian. “What the hell is going on here?” my voice sounded so raspy it startled me. Others didn’t really seem to think anything of it though. Daniel touched my forehead with the back of his hand. “You’re back.” He sounded grave. “Now, now, no need to sound so grave, my dear,” our family doctor voiced exactly what I was thinking …okay wait not exactly, “he just has a high fever that’s all. His vitals are all quite fine. Do quit worrying so much.” Daniel nodded slightly but if his straight line of lips was any indication he didn’t really take the advice to his heart. I tried to recall what happened. All I remembered was studying the family photos hung in the weirdly decorated family room of Rosa and then… blackness. “The bed and breakfast where you crashed contacted us, or rather contacted me. I brought Dr. Rodriguez with me to look at you. You were already burning with fever by the time we got to you, and trying to take you back to the capital would’ve made matters worse, I’m afraid.” “Wait, where did bread and breakfast come from?” my teeth were chattering from my attempt to speak. Rodriguez interrupted me. “We need to get him out.” Dorian and my security personal, Winter helped me out. “How did you people even get me in it?” I asked them as Winter almost toppled under my weight. Even though I was quite thin, I was still muscular, not to mention an inch above seven feet tall.  It made me looks really big, resulting in a huge weight as well. Both my father and my uncle were tall, Daniel too, but my height was unique. Jennifer, Daniel’s lovely wife, liked to call me a mutant in the family, with excess height and heterochromia. Everyone in our family had brown eyes, whereas I had green and blue. Daniel informed me it took four people to get me out of the bread and breakfast into the chopper and another four to get me up in here into the bathtub. There it was again, where did bread and breakfast come from? Sure, I’ve never actually been to one but even I could tell Rosa’s house was no bread and breakfast.

As they made me comfortable in the bed and tried tucking me in (I say tried, because it’s not easy to get tucked into bed by four grown men when you yourself are a grown man),I asked Daniel about Rosa. “Who?”  He asked me absently, frowning as I winced from the incessant pounding that went in my head. “The woman who took me in?” I asked him back.”Huh?” We stared at each other.

After the good doctor left Daniel explained to me that they found me at a bed and breakfast several miles away from my car. Apparently some responsible citizen found me unconscious on the road (Daniel paled here as he talked), huge bump on the head from the hit I took crashing (he got even paler then) and almost blue from hypothermia (Daniel actually looked ready to cry at this point, even Dorian grimaced….he never grimaces).the proprietor of the bed and breakfast took me in, warmed me up, charged my phone enough to find my emergency contact in there (That explained Daniel’s presence, last I checked he was in Sicily meeting up with his “business partners”). I blinked at him.”What?” He gestured hesitantly with his hand,”What what?” I told him about Rosa, the weird conversation that she had, her house and the weird interior, the food (the food was incredible, just thinking about it made me hungry again), the abundance of twins and quadruplets, everything basically…something that started to make Daniel go pale again…most probably from thinking I had gone crazy from the hit on my head. “No, I am not going crazy, okay?” I grumbled as Daniel exchanged a worried look with Dorian. “I know I am not making much sense, but I still have the flavor of the soup residue in my mouth, not to mention the stickiness from the pastries that I ate on my fingers.” “Pastries aren’t sticky,” Dorian reminded me grimly. I rolled my eyes at him, “The pastry wasn’t; the meat filling inside it was juicy, smearing my fingers.” Daniel shook his head, “You could have simply had the food at the bed and breakfast, that doesn’t really say anything. For all we know you simply had a hallucination from the hypothermia or something. Because I looked up the surroundings of the spot you left your car at. The nearest inhabitance of human from there is the bed and breakfast, and even that is in the opposite direction of what it sounds like you went to.  There’s nothing within a mile’s radius of your car except for mountains and trees.”