Legacy of the Defender (The Defender Series Book 1) (37 page)

“You do not have to tell me if you do not want to,” she reassured.

“Or cannot,” I interjected.  She smiled at me, reflecting that everything was going to be all right.  Part of me wanted to believe her.  The other part knew something was terribly wrong.  Something was so wrong that I could not explain the foreboding feeling inside me.  I tried to fake a smile, but it turned into more of a grimace.  I knew I was in trouble because I could not hide my feeling from her any longer. 

"I have not forgotten about those words you spoke to me.  They are part of me now.” she said.

Hearing her say that felt like a punch on the chin from a dragon.  I had no response.  What I felt inside did not compare to how I was feeling that day.  Things escalated quickly amidst the chaos of my life.  My focus right now needed to be on figuring this out, but my heart would not let it go so easily. 

“Eryn, there is something,” I paused.  “I do have something to tell you.”

She locked eyes with me.

XXVII

Confessions

“So what exactly did that Sergeant say that got you so upset?”  Eryn asked, looking intently into my eyes.

I could not help but get lost in her eyes for a moment.  She had this ability to calm me down when she started talking to me like this.  It was hard to stay frustrated. 
She soothes me.

“The room surveillance, are they listening to us right now and watching us?”  I asked.

“No,” came her reply with her very gentle voice.  “They turn off the cameras and listening when officers show up to speak to a patient and since this is not an interrogation cell, they do not want their methods recorded.  I don’t like it, but today I don’t mind.”

That was kind of strange that they would not want their questioning recorded, but then again this was not the police station either.  It made a little sense that they would not want to have things recorded of the premises and out of their control.  I cannot imagine the lunacy the officers must deal with on the day-to-day dealings with the public.  Then again, now that I was on their radar, they had plenty to talk about even though my situation was unlike any they had ever dealt with.  I hoped this was the case.  If my new life was a day-to-day routine, the world is in for a rude awakening.

I was not sure what I could tell her.  There was so much that I knew was real and just as much confusion that I did not know where to start.  So many un-answered questions remained; more than I could count.  What was happening now?  What happened then?  Where to start was even tougher than imagined.

“You don’t have to tell me anything you do not want to.  Take your time. 
We
have time.”  Her words rang true.  I loved how she used the word
we
.  I liked the sound of that.  It made me feel good that someone seemed to have my best interest in mind since the doctors were trying to make life study cases out of me.  This woman seemed to really care.  I did not know how to respond. 

A large part of me wanted to trust her with the truth...with everything.  The other part wanted to not say anything at all and see where this led.  I just did not know what to do or say, or if saying anything at all would be detrimental.  My current situation was that I was getting closer to this woman to the point of having feelings for her.  I had never really had a girlfriend.  The girl at the lake the day that my life changed was the closest ever.  A few childhood crushes happened, but nothing was ever serious.  This feeling could be anything.  It just felt good to feel it. 

I gazed at her.  She stood in front of me staring me down with a faint smile and accepting eyes.  Her hair was out of her ponytail a bit; the part that would be the bangs was barely long enough to be in her ponytail, and she was always adjusting it.  Boldly, my hand went to her face.  She closed her eyes while my monstrous palm cupped her cheek.  It was so small against my hand to the point of freakishness, but that did not stop me.  I knew this woman cared for me.  I leaned forward and gave her a gentle kiss on the lips.  To my pleasant surprise, she responded and kissed me back. 

I experienced something that I had never felt before in the excitement of my first kiss with the girl at the lake.  It was a sinking yet lifting sensation...
giddiness.
  Fear gripped me. 
How to respond to this feeling?
  Anxiety pulled me back.  I did not know what to say and found my lips moving.  “Sorry, Eryn, I…”  Her finger found my lips and she pressed it ever so gently to them.  Next thing I knew she was kissing me again.

It was classic to compare kissing to losing track of time, but it happened.  I felt silly while my brain processed what happened.  A kiss
could
say a thousand words but at this moment I think my brain processed about ten thousand in the blink of an eye.  I could not imagine something so simple feeling so good.  Time passed.  Eryn was now holding onto me and her head was on my shoulder.  We sat in silence for a few minutes...  with me smiling like a schoolboy.  I could not help it.  My life had hope for the first time since waking.  For this to work, taking a chance in telling her everything was paramount.  If she did not receive it well, I would deal with it.

“What do you know about how I ended up in the hospital?”  I began, not sure of how to approach what I was about to say.

“I know that you were on your bike riding home and that a car hit you and put you in a coma.”

“A car actually hit both Jason and me.  He ended up underneath the car.”  I paused, waiting for her to say what I knew she would.

“How did you end up here without him?  Your wounds were so severe that I cannot imagine how he walked away without a scratch.”

“Well, both of us were hit.  I flew into a tree from the impact, which put me in the coma.  Jason stayed on the hood of the car and rolled with it while it went off the road and turned on its roof.  The driver took a leaning tree through the face, killing him instantly.  That tree kept the car from crushing Jason.”  I felt her expression on her face change with her face firm against my body.  It was a frown of some sort, but definitely not a smile.  

“Here is the part you are not going to believe.  We saw something that day that defied all logic and brought myth to reality.”  I paused, waiting for her to become unsettled or get nervous.  She did not move.  “It was a Sasquatch.  Jason and I were so surprised to see it that we made jokes about it.”  

Her head came away from my chest and she looked me square in the eyes.  I could see there was a sense of awe on her face.  She stared at me for a few moments.  Part of me felt like she was analyzing me while I watched her watching me.  She expected a flinch or a blink, maybe even smile to show I was kidding.  When my face did not change and I did not reveal any “tells” her face got serious real fast.  Like a mime waving his hand in front of his face and changing his expressions with each pass, only there was no hand waving.  I smiled nervously.  She just stared at me.

“You are serious?  You saw Bigfoot!  A Sasquatch!  Do you know how huge that is?”  She turned her head shaking it in disbelief.  “Man, what I would give to have seen that.”  I was rather surprised at the use of her words.  She had never used the word
man
when talking to me let alone in this context.  Then I reminded myself she did just kiss me. 

She was overwhelmed as she began to babble about how amazing that was and how lucky I am to have been there to see it.  It took her few minutes for to realize I was not saying anything.  She paused and looked back at me with a snap of her head to where she was now making eye contact again.

“Was it scary?” she said, almost mocking me and must have caught that I was not kidding still.  “Are you sure you didn’t just hit your head?”  Her smile quickly faded when she saw I was not amused. 

“There is more; a lot more.”  I took a deep breath, tried to calm my nerves, and started again.  “
He
, it, is the reason we got hit by the car.  The car swerved to miss the creature and hit Jason and me.  I blacked out because when I came to,
it
was lifting the car off Jason. 
It
then brought him over to me while I was passing out from blood loss and going into a coma.  I remember this all clear as it happened, just like it was yesterday.  Then I blacked out again.”

Eryn was staring at me with a look of shock.  I could see that her eyes were moistening a bit.  Her shock turned to sorrow and a single tear flowed from her left eye.  The moisture reached its brimming point and overflowed the lower lid, allowing the tear to run free making a streak down her cheek.  She smiled slightly.  The sight of the smile returned warmed my soul again.

“And here you are now,” she said after a moment of silence.

“Yeah, here I am…a freak of nature.”  I looked at the floor for a moment when I felt her hand on my chin.  She held my gaze for a few more moments and cocked her head to the side ever so slightly. 

“There is more Eryn…more that does not make any sense.  I have these waking dreams now that are so real it feels like I am standing there.  There are daemons fighting me.  This happens more and more.  It literally feels like there are two swords in my hands when facing these creatures, and I am using movements never seen before, not even in the movies.  A normal person that is trained probably could not do them.”  I paused and looked at her.  She remained trained on my eyes with hers.

“In the actual dreams, my skills are impressive.  There are monsters that I assume are daemons, that are so horrific that I cannot believe I feel no fear.  I get excited even as I am saying this at the thought of fighting them.  I literally think about them when I am awake, trying to sleep, or sleeping.  I just want to slay them.  My viewpoint in the dream is never looking at myself but based on where I am standing and sometimes looking at the ground.  My size is the same as now.”

I glanced at her.  She intently listened to me but had a questioning look on her face.  She had to be thinking,
"He is insane
.”  Those thoughts ran through my own mind when this first started to happen.  I brushed it off as some sort of posttraumatic stress but the more they happened, the more it made me question my sanity.  In the end, I still felt nuts for even experiencing what my life had become.  She seemed to be taking the information well, but I knew that she had to be thinking I was crazy.

“To top all this off, Eryn, there is the small matter of all those wounds I was receiving.  How do we explain that?  How can anything explain that?  I know the church believes in stigmata, and that is why they came to examine me.  I am fine with all that.  Whatever…I just…I just.”  My words fell silent.

“You just what?” she asked.

I stared at the floor.  A flood of emotion built inside me, like a volcano preparing to erupt.  My shoulders shook.  It was the first time I had actually listened to myself explaining things aloud.  It was the first acknowledgment that something might really be happening to me. 

Eryn stayed put.  She said again, “You just what?”

“I just want to know why.”  I looked at her.  My eyes began to moisten.

“We will figure this out,” she said.  “For now, just keep talking.  Keep sharing.  The more you talk, the more you will understand.”

I stared at her, amazed.  Did she understand me?  Was she real? 

“Talk,” she repeated.

“Okay, um…  Well, the church obviously felt it was daemon attacks on my defenseless body while I was in a coma.  I was never much of a religious person.  Daemon attacks don’t make much sense, do they?”  My recant must have stirred deeply, her memories of caring for me.  She was crying now.  I was not accustomed to drying her tears.  Thankfully, I did not poke her eye out or something.  For having large digits, my hands were very dexterous.  The flow stopped after a moment and she put her hand on my cheek again.

“Whatever this is, Tathlyn, we will figure it out.  I am really going to have to get used to this new name you have given yourself.”

“Dieter is no longer.  Whatever I am is yet to be determined, but he is gone.”  Hearing these words come out of my mouth was very strange.  After sixteen years of answering to my name...that felt like a distant memory.  I tried to imagine my future, but there was an insurmountable wall needing climbing.  It was ironic that there seemed to be daemons on the top of the wall and flying above it.  I found it ironic that they looked like the ones from my dreams.  I knew this was just an image in my head.  It just seemed like it was actually there, especially now.

Silence blanketed over the room like when a hero on television gets his bell rung and he cannot hear anything.  The sound comes rushing back as he got his senses back.  It was very similar to me as I sat there in this intimate moment with Eryn, except there was no explosion...just a moment of clarity that everything truly was connected.  The answers existed somewhere inside my mind.  It would not be easy since with no idea how to do it.  As I sat there holding Eryn, it was hard to not feel that together we would be unstoppable.  I could not explain this feeling.  I only knew it to be true.

The door rattled like someone tried to open it without the key and Eryn sat got to her feet.  She pointed up to the camera and made a motion that would turn them on soon.  It was easy to forget they were watching all the time.  She had to maintain that she was not forming any attachments, which made sense.  Since my awakening, I knew now that she felt the same in return.  Moments later the door opened and in came another nurse with something on a tray that looked like meds.

I glanced at Eryn and shook my head slightly.  I did not want any medications.  I looked at my arm still shaking my head.  She saw my look and stepped forward towards the other nurse.  “I’ll take that,” she said, intercepting her rather quickly.  This startled the other nurse.  She handed the tray to Eryn, glanced at me, and scurried out of the room.  Eryn looked at the tray and frowned.  Her reaction was obvious that she did not like the contents of the tray.  She knew that I had only agreed to test if there were no medications involved.  There was nothing wrong with me mentally and she knew it.

This was another ploy for someone in some office somewhere to try to gain control over me or make me do something.  They had a reason to keep me.  Eryn walked over to the door and unlocked it.  She winked at me and nodded.  Opening the door, I saw her slide the contents from the tray into her pocket very discreetly.  She gave me one last smile and said, “I’ll be back to check on you after I look in to whose order is attached to these meds.”  Then she was gone.