Sapphires and Desires (The Gem Fairy Series Book 1)

Sapphires and Desires

The Gem Fairy Series: Book 1

By Tarisa Marie

Copyright © 2015 Tarisa Marie

All rights reserved.

Cover design, texts and illustrations: copyright © 2015 by Tarisa Marie.

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

-
                                      
Winston Churchill

Prologue

Dear Diary,

Hi, I’m Laytah. This is my first…er…diary entry. I’ve always thought that diaries were kind of tacky. You know, writing all your feelings down in a book and all, but my cousin, Geoff, thinks it’ll be good for me and truthfully I’m about ready to try anything in order to get rid of all of this anxiety and depression. Before you ask, no, I haven’t seen a councilor; although, I know I should’ve done so many years ago. I probably should’ve first seen one about eighteen years ago, around the time that I was kidnapped, don’t worry I was returned to my parents a few hours later haha… Okay,
soooo
not actually funny but if you don’t laugh, you cry, and I definitely pick laughing over crying. Realistically I should’ve probably seen a councilor before I was kidnapped, you know, around the time when I started rambling to my parents about these
memories
that I was having which I was convinced were 100% real but could only possibly be my imagination doing back flips. If anything, I probably should’ve went to a councilor after I watched my parents die in a horrific car accident when I was four years old. But…again…I didn’t.

So now, here I am today, messed up, depressed, and a ticking anxiety bomb about to explode at any given moment. I guess you could say I’m pretty messed up.

Sure my life hasn’t been all bad though. I have my cousin Geoff, and his mom, my aunt, who practically raised me. I don’t know where I’d be without them. After my parents died, I probably would’ve been thrown into the system and passed around from family to family like a damn volleyball. So I’m very grateful for my aunt,
beyond
grateful, actually. When she welcomed me into her house she was only 19 years old, single, and had just given birth to Geoff. I don’t know how she did it. I owe her
everything
. Aunt Carol was adopted by my grandparents from birth and isn’t technically blood related to me but we share the same sapphire blue eyes and light blonde hair. I consider her a mother to me. I barely remember my real mom. The only memory I have that really stands out is not a pleasant one, it is of the car accident, her terrified face as our car fell towards the icy river…and well the sight of her and my father’s blood mixing with the river water and making it this murky red colour. Anything else I remember of her or my father is fuzzy to say the least, seen through a small child’s eyes is why, I suppose. So I can’t say that I really
miss
my parents because as bad as it sounds, I barely remember them. And as much as I wish they could’ve been around to watch me grow up, if they had, I would’ve grown up hours away from Carol and Geoff, I wouldn’t know them the way I do now. 

I’m not saying that I’m happy that my parents died, it kills me every day knowing that I survived and they didn’t. Each day I hear their screams and recall the bloody water inside of the car. It’s like living in my own personal hell. A tragedy like that doesn’t leave you. Ever.

Even though my birth parents are strangers to me, I wish I could know them. There are so many things that I wish I could ask them. Okay, you know what? This really isn’t helping, in fact. It’s only making me feel worse. Enough about my parents, why don’t we talk about…hmm…school? Ah, that reminds me, I have a test tomorrow morning that I haven’t even started studying for. So I guess this is all I can tell you for now, not much I know, I haven’t even started on many of my problems, but I have to go to study. Don’t worry though, you’ll be hearing lots from me in the next while, while I dive into the hobby of diary writing and pray to god that it actually helps me and isn’t just a big waste of my time. So goodnight, Mr. Diary. Wait, are you a man or a woman? Do I name you? Or is that weird? Ah, forget it, I’m losing it. Sweet Dreams.

Chapter One

For the third night in a row I wake up screaming. I’m 22 years old and still have night terrors. The dream is usually the same. I can’t even really say that it’s even a dream because it’s not, it’s a memory. The memory is of the car accident my parents and I were in when I was four years old.

I get out of my bed groggily and turn on the light. Yeah, yeah call me a baby but I hate the dark. It scares me. I hate not being able to see. It drives me absolutely mad. I take a deep breath and switch on my laptop. I can’t go back to bed because as soon as I close my eyes the memory of my mom’s screams, the blood, and the freezing river water will all come back to me as if I’d never woken up. I pull up my e-copy of the ‘Philadelphia Sun’ newspaper to brush up on some of the local news.

I tell myself that I’ll have to get to bed soon if I want to pass this damn final exam I have at 8 o’clock in the morning. Man oh man university sucks. I can’t wait to start working and move on with my life. And it doesn’t help that I’m going to school almost five hundred kilometers from my hometown in Michigan. Why I didn’t stay in Michigan for university is a long story. Okay, it’s not long, I just don’t really know the answer. It’s all so stupid really. Growing up, I’d always wanted to go Philadelphia, I had some strange obsession with it. I’d begged my aunt to take me to see it a million times throughout the years but she could never afford to take me. Once I grew up and finally got here though, I realized that I absolutely hated it. To this day I still do hate it. Now four years since my initial arrival in Philly, I am about to graduate and get the heck outta here.

I flip through the pages of the newspaper sleepily. I barely skim most of the pages. I am easily put into a state of boredom and so I only read something when the headline catches my eye which usually doesn’t happen until the entertainment section. After a couple minutes of flipping, nothing seems to catch my eye. I get up and grab a banana from my bedside table, open it and shove it in my mouth.

“Hello?!” I hear a man’s voice out in the hallway. I look at my clock, it’s the middle of the night but this
is
a university. Probably some drunk kid getting back from the bar. Then again, why would he be in the girl’s dorm? “Can anybody see me? I think I’m invisible! Hello?!” He shouts. How has no one came out and yelled at him yet. Will it have to be me?

“Hellllloooooooo.” His voice sounds again. Do I dare go yell at him? What if he’s some kind of sexual predator and has a gun or something? I mean really. Why else would he be in the girl’s dorm at this time? Booty call maybe. Maybe he showed up drunk to his girlfriend’s door and she kicked him out. I would. I hate drunken idiots.

I rashly make up my mind and swing open my door. I look both ways down the hallway. No one. He must’ve finally left our floor and continued on to harass a different one. Just as I am about to close my door, there is big bang down the hall, like the sound of a gunshot. Out of instinct, I slam my door shut thinking that our dorm is under attack by a shooter or something. My heart hammers in my chest.

The dorm is completely silent. No opening doors, no screaming, maybe everyone has the same idea as me and has decided to stay in their rooms and pretend they’re not there.

After a few more moments of silence I take a look through the peep hole in my door and glance around. For as far as my peep hole will let me see, there’s no one in the hall. Being the idiot I am, I crack open my door and take another look around. Still, no one. I take a step outside into the hallway. No one. Am I losing it? Still dreaming?

I look at the slits under all of the other dorm doors. They’re all black, as though the lights are out. Had no one else heard the gun shot sound? I mean it was so loud how could it not have woken the whole building, let alone this floor?

“Hello?” The male voice says again, this time far too close for my comfort, sounding only inches away from my ear. I hold back a scream and step back into my room, slamming the door. “Can you hear me, miss?”

Through my door I shout, “What do you want? I’ll call the cops!”

The reply is a deep, eerie chuckle.

I bring my left hand up to tuck a stray strand of hair behind my ear, when I do this my hand lightly brushes my forehead. My forehead is wet, sweaty, like I’ve just ran a marathon. Gross. I use the sleeve of my shirt to wipe off the dampness. I reach for my phone on my bed and begin to dial the res security number which is on the poster behind my door. Before I can get all the numbers typed in, my door swings open, hitting me and knocking me down onto my butt. My heart pounds in my chest and I feel like puking.

I expect to see a big burly, scary man walking into my room but nothing is there. This time I’m not so quick to be fooled. I kick the door back as hard as I can and sure enough it seems to hit nothing and bounces back towards me. I hold in a scream. Am I seeing a ghost? Well, not seeing, but you know what I mean.

I feel something cold brush against my cheek and I begin throwing punches and kicks in every direction trying to hit
something
.

“Of course you can hear me. You’re one of them, aren’t you? You almost look like…but that’s….impossible.” The rough voice speculates with a tone of interest. “Ah…not impossible. Smart.”

Then everything goes black.

My eyes spring open, startled, and a loud ‘beeping’ fills my ears. My alarm clock. I cuss. Is it already morning? Did I really fall asleep for several hours? Great. It feels like I’ve barely slept.

I get up out of bed feeling groggy and stiff. I stretch and throw off all of my clothes. By now I’m as cranky as a mother bear. I’m not a morning person. At all.

Something then comes back to me. A terrifying dream about a ghost. God, I
had
to stop eating before bed. I roll my eyes. If I had a nickel for every nightmare I’ve had, I’d be the richest person alive.

I gather up my books and throw them into my bag. I go to grab my cell phone from my bed but it’s not there. Annoyed, I begin searching my covers and underneath my bed. It’s nowhere to be found. I do though, find half an uneaten banana that I don’t remember eating on the floor by the foot of my bed. I throw it in the garbage and check the bathroom for my phone. Maybe I’d gotten up in the middle of the night to pee and it somehow ended up in there. Nope. And yes, I do occasionally sleep walk.

A moment from my latest nightmare surfaces and I remember my door swinging open and falling to my butt, sending my phone flying underneath my desk. Before thinking, I glance under my desk and sure enough, there is my phone. But that was a dream not a memory. It couldn’t have possibly really happened. Suddenly, I realize that the half-eaten banana is also explained by the
dream
. I almost puke as I put the pieces together. There’s no way that I believe in
ghosts
. Do I?

I wobble sleepily over to my laptop and lift the lid. The article I was reading pops up just how I’d left it earlier in my
dream
. I sigh. I must be losing it. Wait until Geoff hears about this one. He might check me into the nuthouse this time. I mean, I’ve been known to sleep walk and dream while doing so. Once, for example, I dreamt I was making pie and woke up standing in the kitchen holding a cup of flour. This wasn’t so far off. But I don’t have time to dwell on it right now, it’ll have to be done later. I’m late for class.

Once I have my shit together I exit my dorm room and head down the hall that’s attached to the university, my backpack hastily thrown over my shoulder. In the hallway I meet my cousin and best friend Geoff O’Malley who meets me in the same place at the same time every morning before class. Geoff is four years younger than me, he’s a first year and obviously not a female so he lives in a separate dorm tower than me although all the dorms are attached by a single hallway.

When my family was in that tragic car accident all those years ago, we were on our way to meet Geoff, my aunt’s newborn baby. So I guess you could say that he isn’t just my cousin and best friend, but also my little brother. I’ve been around his whole life and even though we’re not blood related, we’re so alike that we could be twins.