Page 8 of Ruled By Fate

Brie took a few shallow breaths, staring up at him in bewilderment, near-blinded by his beauty, stunned senseless by that perfect, impossible visage.

She punched him in the face.

Then she passed out cold.

Chapter Three: The Savior in the Woods

?

The dreams always came in fragments, like shards of a mirror, reflecting her past in incomplete, cutting splinters of memory.

Her mother, smiling with tears in her eyes.

The way their hair had floated around them, weightless, as their car flew from the cliff.

A monster with its hand inside her mother’s chest.

A blue-eyed angel staring in shock as her pendant glowed white.

But this time, the angel was speaking to her, calling out her name.

“Brianna… Brianna!”

She opened her eyes and found herself staring into those pools of ocean blue again. The eyes that couldn’t exist. The eyes she’d conjured with her own imagination. This couldn’t be happening. Several doctors and all her friends and family had been telling her for years this could not be happening.

She blinked, hard. When she opened her eyes again, he was still there, still holding her by the side of the road.

Still bleeding from his nose.

She said the only thing she could think of. “Where the hell have you been?”

Looking back on it later, it wasn’t the most pressing question. Were you just throwing lightning bolts? What the hell attacked my car? Is there a radioactive half-life on spontaneously combusting jewelry? Those all might have been more on the money. But in a strange way, she had been expecting this. A part of her felt like she’d been waiting for it all these years. No matter how many hours she’d sat in therapy, no matter how many false promises she’d made, or mantras she’d repeated at the ceiling, trying to fall asleep.

Cameron.

When he’d told her his name and asked for hers, she’d been cradling her mother’s lifeless body in a forest much like this one. She’d held his name like a talisman for years before giving up and moving forward as though it was all a hallucination.

But she’d never truly believed it.

In her heart of hearts, she’d always known it was real.

“It’s a long story. Which I will tell you,” he added quickly, seeing the look on her face. “But for now, let’s get you taken care of. How’s the leg?”

She couldn’t move it. She couldn’t begin to move it.

“It’s fine,” she said through gritted teeth. “How’s your face?”

He went perfectly still for a moment as if he’d never considered such a thing. A tiny line creased at the center of his forehead, then his lips curved up in the unlikeliest of smiles. “It hurts.”

A small trickle of blood slowly traced down his chin. Blood that shimmered when blood shouldn’t, emanating a soft, curious glow.

Problems for Brianna’s NEXT therapist.

They stared at each other, neither one speaking a word, until there was a small explosion behind them, and they both turned to watch as fire slowly engulfed her car.

“I hope you’ve updated the insurance,” he offered, trying to keep things light. “What are all those things in the back? Anything important?”

She lifted a trembling hand and tried to rub the clouds of soot from her cheeks, succeeding only in making herself look like a chimney sweep from the seventeenth century. “Just my life’s possessions.”

---