Shades of Human (Faerie-Tail Awakening Book 1) Read online

  As I jogged over the railway tracks, the old concrete building rose like a location from a horror movie, looking near on abandoned the closer I got. Except for the pickup truck out front and the stocky guy I could see through a window sleeping with his legs perched up on a desk.

  Slowing and keeping quiet, I slipped inside the open door to find a hallway of storage containers with roll-down garage type doors. The voices stopped, and I took my first full breath since stepping off the bus. They were each numbered, but none of the numbers matched the one on my key. Plus the numbers were painted in green, not black. My heart fell as I neared the end of the hallway. This was my last stop, the only storage place left in the entire city. What had I expected? I was following clues from a split-second delusion. “Bloody dead ends…”

  My heart picked up speed as I noticed the hallway didn’t actually come to an end. Curving to the left, I followed the path, finding more roller doors on the inside wall and a bay of windows further down that amped up the heat down this end with the light that beamed in. And then I reached the last left bend…and found a bank of smaller storage lockers. My heart sank at the sight of the combination locks that sealed each one up tight. And there it was, four-six-four. Fourth row down on the right-hand wall that mirrored the left, and halfway along.

  I kneeled before the locker and pulled on the combination latch. It didn’t budge. I twirled the lock, listening for any discernable clicks that would alert me to hitting the right number. And guess what? Yeah, that didn’t work either. Not that I’d actually expected any different. This wasn’t Mission Impossible, and I wasn’t the lead vixen with all the spy moves. I slumped back onto my butt and kicked the door. Maybe if I were a karate ninja it would’ve popped open, but you guessed it, nothing happened.

  Ready to give up and risk talking to the guy back in the office, I began to hum a tune Mom used to sing to me when I was upset, pulling myself up before I could accidentally sing the words I had so desperately longed to unleash since she left me. My promises were all I had, but the words, if I remembered them right, went something like this… You are my number one. The two of us together. Forever and ever. Just smile my child, and know you’re special. My one and only fairy princess. My reason for everything. My heart and our future, three down to one. I love you, my little princess.

  I gasped suddenly, my jaw falling open. It was a long shot, totally unlikely, but…hey, what wasn’t lately? And that song, I’d never heard one so short with so many numbers. I recited the song in my head, making sure there was no tune and only words, giving airtime to the numbers as I passed them. “One. Two. Twenty-one. Four. One. Forty-one. Three. One. Thirty-three. Bingo!” The latch shifted as I pulled down, the padlocked releasing with the right combination.

  I swung the door open and stared at what was inside. A feeling of déjà vu washed over me, making my spine tingle. The box was wooden with an ornate copper plate covering the keyhole on the front. And it was painted with a rainbow of colors that created a mural of one of the places I dreamed about, one of the same places I splashed over my canvases. A sparkling castle sat in the distance behind a deep-blue lake and luscious green grass, and sided a plunging waterfall that spilled down from an arching rainbow. I touched the curved lid, feeling the raised strokes of paint. This wasn’t a printed box and a misguided memory from my broken childhood. This box was hand painted…by my mother.

  I reached for the key—

  “Hey! What are you doing in here?”

  I vaulted up from the ground to find the office guy standing in the gap from the hallway. He wore a scowl and tapped his foot impatiently.

  “There’s no hiding. No escaping.” That crackly voice was back, clear as a bell and as sinister as ever. “I see you, Calliope.”

  “Well, I asked you a question. Calliope, is it? And you need to sign in before you can take anything out.” The man reached for me. “I need your address before you can leave.”

  I jerked back as the guy with thinning hair and a ginger beard stepped forward, clutching the box to my chest. The cracked glass window behind him caught the light at an odd angle, revealing the emerging face of my nightmares.

  “I see you. Do you see me?”

  “Not real. It’s not real.” I darted to get around the guy.

  “What’s not—hey!” He caught my bicep and flung me back around. His fat fingers crushed my arm, tugging me closer. “You’re not going anywhere.” His brown eyes burned with intent before he called out like a nut bag. “You have your price. Give me my reward.”

  I quit struggling and did the first thing that came naturally—from past years of practice. My knee drove up, crushing his means to father children as I screamed. My arm ripped free and I shoved him, racing back the way I came as he toppled.

  “Stop! Come back!” he choked out.

  But I was already gone, and I wasn’t stopping this time. Self-preservation had kicked in and it refused to let up. Bursting out into the fresh air, I was blinded by the sun as those whispers returned full-force. There were too many to understand as I whirled and saw nothing, except for the one that repeated over and over.

  Tick-tock, Calliope. Your time is running out.

  Chapter Eight

  I slammed the door closed behind me, threw the antique box onto my bed, and then shoved the trunk across the floor until it butted up against the door. The voices were long gone, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Breathing hard, I slumped to the floor. Sweat stuck my T-shirt to my body, and my legs felt like they were on fire. Running from the storage place, I hadn’t stopped until I flagged down a bus. The wrong one. I jumped off as those voices grew louder and louder, reflections threatening to appear as surrounding buildings and trees created darkened patches for the unthinkable to emerge from.

  My legs had kept up the fight, aching as I ran like a crazy person to get to West Main Street. Finally, a familiar bus trundled up, and I leaped on as if my life depended on it. Sitting in a side seat, knees up and head down didn’t alleviate my breathing difficulty. And as soon as my stop arrived, I vaulted up and escaped out the doors before they even had a chance to open all the way.

  Now I was here, back in my safe place that had really never been safe at all. The face I’d seen in the mirror at my shrink’s office was the same one that had begun to appear in the window at the storage place. The monster from my nightmares. The monster that killed my mother downstairs from where I now sat like a frightened and broken child on the cold ground.

  “No way.” I was not a weak little girl anymore. I’d survived a horrible childhood and solitary existence. I’d been alone. Starved. Locked away like a mangy dog. And worse… I cringed as a flash of my second foster father appeared in my mind. One of the many times he cornered me and did things I didn’t know were wrong, but that made me feel sick then and even now. I had been weak and vulnerable. I shook my head. “Never again.”

  Forcing my breath to slow, I lifted my head and glanced around. Within the old and rusted bones of this upstairs warehouse loft, things of beauty and lurking dangers surrounded me. The extra canvases nobody wanted lined the metal-clad walls, always a permanent reminder of what I’d seen and all that I dreamed about. They were the scary ones that were too dark for most people’s taste in art. But my focus didn’t stay on them now. Instead of getting lost in their promise of fantasy and a place other than this, I got up and went to my bed.

  The box lay near the center, unharmed from my frantic race home. It was time to find out what the hell was going on, what I was up against, and hopefully, who my stalker was and why he was after me. It was time to take charge and look after myself, to man up and stop acting like that frightened child I’d left behind in the dark recesses of my memories.

  With shaking hands, I plucked the key from the pocket of my jeans and took a deep breath “Time’s up, Mamma. I need the truth.”

  The key slotted into the hole perfectly and turned without resistance, emitting a soft clink as the internal mechanism shifted. The
latch popped open.

  “Here goes nothing…”

  The stiff lid opened without too much effort and the face staring up at me caught my breath in my throat like a fish out of water. “Mamma…” Tears flooded my eyes, blurring the photo of her beautiful features. I blinked, releasing twin streams down my warm cheeks and clearing my sight. And she was—had been—beautiful. Just like I remembered her, but somehow even more stunning with an appeal to her ocean blue eyes. Now I knew my memories at least of how she had looked were real. An older replica of me, with flowing auburn hair and a radiant smile that somehow touched my heart and had my own lips curving up as if I was a mirror.

  Narrowing my eyes at the heart-shaped sapphire that hung around her neck, I picked the photo up—and froze momentarily.

  What had been on view was only part of the printed photograph. The paper was folded in half, the rest of the image right behind. Then I noticed the hand that laced between my mother’s long fingers. A male’s large hand and thick fingers with blunt nails, rather than long turquoise ones like my mom. Could it be…was I about to see the man who I’d never once met but had been told about only once that I could remember before my mother’s death? The man who’d loved us both but had died in Afghanistan? Was I about to see my father?

  I unfolded the photo, staring so hard my eyes pricked with dryness from not blinking.

  There he was, somehow I was sure of it. He had my emerald green eyes minus the flecks of sapphire blue, and they were so luminous as he beamed the brightest smile at my mom. His hair was a shade of midnight, thick and styled in a cut that was somehow timeless in the way it reached the collar of his white shirt. The area by his temples revealed hints of gray that were distinguished, showing he was quite a bit older than my mom who had been a fair few years off reaching thirty. Yet he was well groomed, and by the looks of hinted muscles under the white cotton over his chest and arms, he was no couch potato either. He looked kind and gentle, and utterly besotted, if the mesmerized look in his eyes was anything to go by. The photo shimmered as I stared, somehow emphasizing his unusual eyes. But then I blinked and the shimmer was gone—and I noticed what he held in his hand…

  My face shot up, zeroing in on my latest work of art. On the canvas, among a landscape that glittered with a coating of ice that resembled sparkling crystals, was a garden that stood as tall as the ethereal pale woman that reached out to touch the petals of one of the giant flowers. A flower that looked like nothing I had ever seen in my entire life. A flower that I’d researched in the library at college after dreaming about it and had failed to match it to a known species.

  A flower that…was identical to the one my father offered my mom.

  Frozen like the ones I dreamed about, there was no frostbite damage to be seen on any of the many delicate petals. The pale blue flower was the size of a human head rather than the palm-sized peonies it sort of resembled, and it was in perfect bloom. It almost looked like it had been frozen and would remain that way, despite the warm glow of the sun that shone in the background of the photo above a calm ocean with soaring seagulls.

  I lowered the photo…and something caught the fading light that spilled through the broken window siding my bed. Shimmering up at me, I frowned at what I saw. Near on round, but not quite, and as big as my palm. The disc-shaped piece was flat, and I denied any recognition as I reached out to touch it. “No way.” It was impossible. But my eyes weren’t lying, I realized as I ran a finger gently over its silky smooth yet hard surface. “A fish scale.”

  Memories of the previous night flooded in, seeing the moment my stalker appeared in my freaking bath—his legs covered in strange disappearing colors. Sexonlegs…or something entirely different.

  I shook my head and picked the giant fish scale up that suddenly sparkled. “No way. It’s impossible—”

  A scream lodged in my throat as my loft melted around me and a new scenery arose. Open salty air. A calm glittering ocean. Whipping breeze that flung my long hair back—to see my stalker at the end of the pier I was suddenly standing on. I gripped the railing and saw my mother’s and father’s initials etched inside the lines of a carved heart shape. The same pier from the photo of my mom? I had to have hit my head on something and passed out, right? This was nuts. Cuckoo. Totally bonkers.

  I pinched myself—and nothing happened. “Shit biscuits.”

  “Calliope?” Sexonlegs actually seemed surprised, and if I hadn’t been having an aneurysm from the shock of what the hell just happened? I might have noticed the way his casual black V-neck sweater clung to his seriously toned chest. But I didn’t. Okay, well I still did, but I wasn’t dwelling on it much…because he was suddenly walking toward me. “Why are you…” His eyes lowered, but this time it wasn’t to check out my body under my sweaty T-shirt that clung to me in all the wrong places. His dark caramel brows shot up as he stared down at my hand and what I held. “Ah, I see.”

  “You see what?” I shocked myself at my sudden ability to speak and at the fact that I was asking for answers from the psycho that had stalked me all the way home twenty-four hours ago. I gasped as the scale he’d been staring at disintegrated from between my fingers. “What the—?”

  “She wanted us to meet. Her backup brought you to me.”

  I edged back as he kept coming forward. “Uh-uh. No way, Batman. Cool your jets.”

  Sexy Stalker’s eyes narrowed, but thankfully he stopped. “Batman? Jets? You say the strangest things.”

  “I say—” I cut myself off with a growl. “How did I get here? Where the hell am I? And why are you here, Psycho?”

  His face cracked with a sudden smile that dared me to smile back. “Psycho?”

  His reactionary chuckle sent spears of warmth from my chest down through my body. Don’t you dare, Calli. Don’t get friendly with Mr. Tall dark and killer with a smile.

  Sexonlegs held out his hand, making me flinch. He held it sideways in the air between us, surfer locks blowing perfectly back from his face while mine tried to strangle me. “I’m Adamaris. Heir to the Deep. And you are in the sleepy town of Mystic.”

  I kept my hands safely beside my body, curling them both into fists. “Oh, right. My next killer is a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Got it.” And Mystic? How had I ended up almost an hour away from home at the same freaking strip of beach I’d ended up at after she vanished? It didn’t make sense, and I wasn’t buying into whatever gibberish he had already spouted. No way.

  Sexonlegs laughed again, and this time I couldn’t stop it. I laughed back too, those dimples of his killing my self-control and apparently my good sense to remain on guard. But then I sobered up, his darkening look reminding me of the terror I’d felt when he’d chased me from college and then appeared in the back alleys near my loft. “I did not expect you to be like this.” He indicated my figure, and I picked at my shirt, swearing when it clung back to my breasts as if it were controlled by his seductive stare. A distant trumpeted horn sounded out over the water, carried on the rough breeze. The look was gone from his face instantly, and his nostrils flared as his jaw clenched. He took a step back as if being a few feet away from me was suddenly way too close. Seriously? Ada-whatever-his-name-was chases me all the way home, appears in my bathtub, and then somehow is on this pier that I am totally dreaming about, and backing away from me? Well, if this was a dream…

  “Nuh uh. You don’t get to back away from me. I want answers—” I gasped as I stepped forward. I darted straight back, seeing a rusty protruding nail sticking up from one of the thick wooden planks that made up the pier and had just penetrated the thin side of my sneaker. “Great. When was my last tetanus shot?”

  “Are you hurt?”

  Sexonlegs came forward, reaching for me. I retreated this time, hitting the railing as my foot throbbed. Not a dream. This was real. My breath rushed and the pumping of my chest drew my stalker’s eyes. “Hey, my eyes are up here, jerk. And—and I asked you a question.” Well sort of, I hadn’t quite gotten that far, but that
didn’t matter.

  Sexy Stalker seemed to get the hint as his roving eyes pegged me with a chilling stare. “I am here to complete a task. A dying wish of a powerful woman in desperate need, a partnership my father agreed to with certain…conditions.”

  Conditions, it seemed, he was on the fence about, looking both intrigued and yet downright pissed at the idea…whatever the idea was.

  I shook my head. “Whatever you are talking about, it has nothing to do with me. I’m nobody. I’m nothing. And I want you to leave me alone.”

  “I’m sorry, Princess. I can’t do that. The deal is done, the terms set.” His lips curved into a sardonic smile. “Besides, your mother sent me. It was her drowning wish.”

  “My—” I actually pushed off the railing to get to him, but Sexonlegs jumped up onto the top rail. “Wait! What does that mean? What are you doing?”

  “Back soon, Princess.” With a final smirk, he twisted as he stood tall, joining his hands in a flat V as he dove off the freaking pier fully clothed like a lunatic.

  I raced after him, hearing the splash before salt water hit my face. With my body leaning over the railing, I saw him for only a second as a delusional flash of a dark night and a car plunging into water stole my sight. And then that too was gone, the low and blinding sun across the ocean returning along with shimmers of gold and black beneath the surface that faded with a release of bubbled air. He was gone, vanished once again, leaving me in Mystic with a crazy story and more confusion than I had already had.

  Monsters, scales, and drowning wishes. What could possibly happen next?

  Chapter Nine

  I stared up at the wall, marveling at the shadows my mother’s hands created as her soft voice weaved a tale of mystical stories. My young eyes sparkled with wonder and excitement as I sat on a single bed with an aquamarine duvet, hands clasped and crossed legs bouncing. “Show me more, Mamma.”