Girl Possessed (Book 1 of The Girl Trilogy) (11 page)

I had never kissed a boy, so my mind
went in a bunch of different directions. I felt self-conscious, but
the kiss felt sensual and loving at the same time which I liked. He
had the softest lips. I felt drawn to him like I was under some
sort of spell.

Before I knew what was happening, the
kissing became passionate reminding me of a love scene from one of
the dome cinema shows I used to attend before the economy crashed.
I wanted to breathe in his essence. This surprised me. He stroked
my hair. Wow! Was this really happening? His hands slid over my
body atop the cell robe I wore. I wasn’t expecting that.

He stopped himself. I wondered what
was wrong, but then he whispered breathlessly, “You smell like
paradise.” Still staring at me, he shook his head side to side with
the slightest movement like he was trying to wake up from a
dream.

From the way he acted, it felt like he
thought I was the most appealing girl in the world. This shocked me
because no boy had ever viewed me that way, especially not a boy as
gorgeous and mysterious as Shaul.

I could hardly catch my
breath.

Then he rolled onto his back and
muttered so softly that I wondered if he was talking to himself, “I
have understood you.” He grinned in the most charming way that
utterly confused me. My mind was floating on high, but it sounded
like he chuckled for a moment and then didn’t say anything for some
time.

I wondered what he was
thinking.

Then he shook his head again and
scowled through gritted teeth. At that, he pushed himself away from
me, stumbling to his feet. He had a pained look in his ravishing
silver eyes that I had never seen in a boy my age. Please leave,”
he begged. “You should stay away from me, Cordellia.”

“
But…” I sat up, searching
in his eyes for an explanation.

“
Just go,” he looked at me
coldly. But, something in his body language suggested that he
desired otherwise.

I was so overwhelmed and confused by
his odd behavior. I got to my feet nearly losing my balance, but I
managed to find a steady foot. In his presence, I felt so inferior,
like an awkward child. “I don’t understand,” I said in an irritated
tone.

To my surprise, he chuckled and then
grinned. “Believe me—it’s better that way.” He looked down at the
ground broodingly.

“
So, that’s it?” My voice
was filled with frustration. “You just want me to leave and never
come back?”

He looked up at me and said smartly,
“You got it.”

I shrugged my shoulders in anger. I
felt at that moment that I’d rather die alone in my cell than spend
another moment with someone like him. Who does he think he is—God’s
gift to the world?

“
Whatever!” I said, feeling
foolish about my choice of expression. I just wanted to get away
from him and straighten out my thoughts. I turned and crawled
through the hole in the wall. When I got to the other side, before
I had a chance to put the stones back, Shaul looked through the
hole at me.

“
Wait,” he said. “I mean
it, Cordellia. Don’t come back.”

I didn’t know what to say. My mind
raced with too many thoughts, so I just put the stones back into
the hole and slid my back down the wall as I fell to the floor in
astonishment.

16

The next couple of months were a
monotonous blur. Most of the time, I found myself thinking about
Shaul which really frustrated me. I couldn’t figure out how he got
that ball of light into his cell or how he got it to levitate in
mid air. And why was he surrounded in red light when he got angry
at me? That was really odd too. I had so many questions I wanted to
ask him, but at the same time I hated him.

At other times, I fanaticized about
kissing Shaul and lying in his arms. I thought about the way his
eyes bored into mine and found myself enraptured in lust. This was
a new feeling to me, something I had never genuinely felt toward
any other boy. I just wished I had feelings like that for anyone
else other than Shaul Hainsworth.

Many nights, I found myself leaning
against the wall that separated us imagining what he was doing on
the other side. Sometimes I could swear he was leaning on his side
in the exact same spot with only the stones separating
us.

I felt him in my thoughts and oddly,
it was such a loving exchange that usually brought me to tears. At
other times, I heard him cry out in his sleep, speaking in a
cryptic language that sounded so esoteric that I couldn’t even
fathom what he was talking about. I got the feeling that he was
suffering immensely. I never heard the animal sounds again. And the
female voice was gone. Sometimes he just cried and cried in his
sleep. Even though I hated him, when he cried like that, my heart
bled.

I wondered how I was able to cause an
earthquake from my crying. That was even stranger than the magical
things Shaul did. I would have tried to cause another one, but for
some stupid reason I was too embarrassed to let Shaul hear me
cry.

In my despair, I figured it was only a
matter of time before I got over my obsession with him, and then,
when I stopped caring what he thought, I would try to make another
earthquake. Maybe I could cry loud enough to collapse the building
and escape.

But even more so, the fear of being
sent to the torture box kept me from trying. What if I made all
that noise and nothing happened? Surely, the guards would punish me
severely.

I went to sleep dreading tomorrow. It
would be my sixteenth birthday, the day puberty started, whatever
that meant, and I would be spending it alone in this hell
hole.

17

When I woke up in the morning, Shaul
was making a lot of noise. It sounded like he was pacing back and
forth in his cell, grunting and moaning the way a stallion acts
when a mare in another coral is in heat. He sounded out of control.
And then the music sped up in my head. The melody was tantalizing.
I felt like he was luring me back into his cell. But, I knew there
was no way that was so.

It was my sixteenth birthday and, to
my surprise, I felt remarkably different. I felt oddly more sensual
and powerful.

The images in my mind were much more
vibrant and clear. I saw bright scenes like watching a cinema of
alluring landscapes and other captivating novelties. That
splendorous golden tree by the forbidden lake below the cliff
drifted into my mind. It was blossoming in elegant sashes, lace,
and dangling jewels. I saw the sparkle of the lake glistening in
the sunlight. Many petalled lilies bloomed by the shore. Shaul and
I stepped into the water hand in hand. We swam around playfully
splashing each other. The water tasted like the balsam of pure
cherries. He held me in his arms. I teased him seductively and swam
away tauntingly. He swam after me. Teardrops fell as red sparks
into the bottomless lake. Life was limitless. We would live
forever.

As I walked to the bathtub to fill it
with water, my legs felt much stronger. When I looked down at them,
they were more shapely and feminine. And my breasts, I noticed,
were much fuller, perfect in shape and size. Puberty is so odd. I
laughed. The ugly duckling was turning beautiful.

I eased my way into the refreshing
water of the now full tub as I do nearly every morning. The music
was a heavenly welcome in my mind. I slid under the surface. New
mesmerizing images of vibrancy danced in full, spellbinding color
like poetry come to life.

But, then, terror struck
me.

When I lifted my head out of the water
and laid my neck back on the edge of the tub, I felt different.
Something seemed wildly wrong.

I sat up with a start and looked at my
legs beneath the water. They had fused together into the shape of a
red fish tail! I let out a wailing scream. The walls shook. In my
puberty, I had transformed into a mermaid!

I tried to climb out of the bathtub,
but I couldn’t get out of the douse without my legs. I propped
myself up with my arms and got into a sitting position, but my tail
flapped in the wash trying to pull the rest of my body
under.

After a struggle, I eventually had no
choice but to give in. I slid completely beneath the water. And
then, after a few minutes of trying to gather my senses and now in
desperate need of air, I struggled to surface.

But, I couldn’t get my new tail
positioned right and every time I tried to sit up, it flopped
wildly, keeping me submerged. Shortly thereafter, I started
choking. My eyes bulged in terror. I couldn’t believe my surreal
fate. I was a fish drowning in a bathtub. But, after a minute of
gagging and thrashing, the pain so great that I thought my lungs
were going to explode, I began to breathe on my own
underwater!

I didn’t know what to do, so I just
laid there at the bottom of the tub and tried to get a grip on what
had just happened to me. I guess this is what my mother meant when
she said that changes might come upon me when I turned
sixteen.

How did she know I was a mermaid?
Mermaids aren’t even real! Then I started to wonder if she was a
mermaid too. But, my mother’s legs never turned into a tail in the
water. That answered my question. She was not a mermaid.

But, then, how did she know I was? I
knew nothing of my father. My mother always changed the subject
when I asked about him. Maybe he was a merman. Oh, it all just
seemed so crazy. If this all didn’t seem so real, I would swear I
was hallucinating.

I decided not to struggle again to get
out of the water. Maybe I could sort of trick my tail and just pull
the plug to let the water drain. I did that. Once the water
emptied, to my dismay, my tail remained. I had hoped that it would
turn back to legs once out of the water.

Now, I didn’t know what to do. The
music in my mind got louder and more varied. It was really
irritating me. Was I going to be stuck in this bathtub
forever?

I must have laid there for hours,
struggling to get a comfortable position and feeling devastatingly
hopeless. It might have been fun to be a mermaid in a big lake or
in an ocean, but a mermaid in a bathtub was a sick joke on me. As
if it wasn’t bad enough being locked away in a dungeon! Could my
life get any worse?

Then the hump on my back started to
really hurt. Usually, it only hurt if someone pressed down on it.
But, now it was hurting for no reason at all. It felt like I was
laying on a tree stump and the stump was growing beneath
me.

Was this the biggest nightmare in the
world or what? I couldn’t get my arms wrapped around my back far
enough to touch the growing stump because my new big breasts kept
getting in the way. I felt hopeless and like a real
freak.

The stump kept growing and I started
getting really scared. Then it began to fan out. I didn’t know what
was happening.

Now I could touch the growing
abomination sprouting from my back because it was spreading out to
the sides of my body. It had a sheer, gauzy quality with a thin
bone frame around the edges and throughout like a skeleton. I’m not
kidding—I was beginning to think I was growing wings out of my
back.

The thickness of the frame
propped me up and after a moment the darn things started
fluttering. From my peripheral vision, I could see that they were
red like my tail. I had no idea how to control them, but with a lot
of concentration, I was able to get them flapping. They
were
wings!

After several minutes they were
fluttering so fast that my body started lifting out of the tub.
There I was like some sort of fairy tale monster, fluttering above
the bathtub with a big fish tail dangling in the air. That’s when
Shaul burst through the hole in the wall right into my
cell.

18

Extending from his ankle, Shaul
dragged the chain behind him with a block of the stone wall
attached. He must have pulled the chain right out of the wall and
then rushed through the hole into my cell.

He looked up at me and had a big grin
on his face. He was trying to hold back laughter, but wasn’t very
successful at it.

I scowled at him from mid air. How
could he think this was funny? Why wasn’t he shocked out of his
mind like I was? There I was bare breasted with a long mermaid tail
and wings fluttering from my back like a retarded
faerie.

“
Here, take my hand.” He
sounded amused as he offered his hand up to me. “I’ll catch
you.”

“
You can’t hold my weight,”
I called down. “What if you drop me?”

“
Oh, please,” he
smirked.

I was exhausted, my long hair was
getting tangled in the wings, and I didn’t know how much longer I
could hold myself up in the air, so I thought, the heck with it,
and let myself drop from suspension.

Thank God, he actually caught me. And
there I was—a sideshow freak in the most gorgeous boy in the
world’s arms. He had a wry smile on his face that made my mind
swoon.

“
You can’t really set me
down because I don’t have legs.” I covered my breasts with my
hands.

He laughed again. “Look,” he said.
“Just command your legs to take over.”