Darkside Sun by Jocelyn Adams Page B

Nervous or excited? I didn’t know her well enough to tell. “What are my orders?”
    Orders? She did call herself a soldier. Still, it seemed so strange and formal and … military.
    “You will stay with Plaid at all times when she’s not with me. Never leave her for a moment, for any reason, unless I tell you to.”
    I wanted to ask what concerned him so much that I needed a bodyguard, but Sophia spoke before I could. “What if Marcus orders me away from her? He outranks you, so I have to obey him before you.”
    Well, color me intrigued.
    Asher went visibly stiff, arms steel rods at his sides. Inch by inch, the starch went out of him. More and more interesting. “You let me worry about Marcus,” he said as if each word had pried his teeth open. “If he interferes, you come straight to me. Understood?”
    She bent at the waist. It wasn’t a full bow, like an actor after an encore, but the half-bow a martial arts student would give the sensei after a lesson.
    “What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “I need to know what’s going to happen tonight and why I’m wearing white.” I’d be an accountant before I’d be some sort of virgin sacrifice.
    “The white’s traditional,” Asher said. “And what you’re supposed to do is whatever I tell you.”
    Well, there you go. I saved my breath for an argument I stood a chance of winning. “And you’ll let me go home after?”
    He faced me head on, and the serious look he slapped me with sucked the air out of the room. “This is home. The moment you opened the bible, there was no going back.”
    My shaking started up again, beginning in my knees and rattling upward. “But you threatened to hurt me if I didn’t read it. I tried to give it back, but you didn’t give me a choice. Now you’re saying because I read the book, that’s it? I’m one of the goddamn freak brigade?”
    Turning to Sophia with a smile, he said, “I believe she’s starting to catch on.”
    “You bastard,” I ground out. No, hell no. I would find a way off Asher’s crazy train. “I have plans, things I’m going to do with my life. This, whatever it is, isn’t one of them. I’ve spent my life trying not to see, in blissful denial that none of it was real, and I’ll go back to that. I won’t let you take my life away from me because you’re used to getting what you want. I’ll go to this thing, whatever, and then I’m out of here.”
    He reached for me, and we were done arguing.

Chapter 10
    We stood within the great beating heart again. Distantly, I noted Asher’s crushing grip on my satin-covered wrist and another presence with him … Sophia. Her presence carried like an echo across a vast distance, but nothing I could hear. Sense, but not a sense I could name, some combination of sight, sound, scent, and taste that went beyond my comprehension, something that hit me in the soul instead of the outer parts.
    What happened to the no-touchy rule? She’d mentioned skin-to-skin, so I guessed touching through clothes didn’t count. Or hair, since he’d touched mine twice—I thought—and hadn’t croaked.
    Shadow images layered thicker and thicker until the room appeared to be a faded replica of a Rorschach ink blot. Furniture, some foreign and some from the kitchen we’d been standing in, trees and buildings, people walking down city streets, what I thought might be a sunset peeking over a distant mountain, all blended together like a bunch of slides piled up on top of a light source.
    They had to be the false layers of reality that made up the Shift. How many were there? A dozen? Hundreds? Thousands?
    Pressure built in my chest. Was I breathing? I didn’t feel real, the way dreams screwed with your head when nothing worked right, leaving you all discombobulated. Other than the throbbing heartbeat and the sense of the other two at my side, a full, heavy silence draped around me. So strange, so complete, I wondered if I’d gone deaf. I opened my mouth to shatter that