Legacy of the Defender (The Defender Series Book 1) (36 page)

The Sergeant droned on as the doctor used to in my sessions.  I was unaware how long I zoned out again and wondered what type of nonsense he spewed.  What typical cop lingo did he throw at me?  Was he going to preach to me about civic duty to try to find who did this to me?  It was hard not to laugh inside while looking myself over for he was still giving me the cooperation speech.  I had to admit, my body was amazing.  Each day when I looked in the mirrored non-glass surface they gave me for grooming myself, I thought about what it would be like to be normal size again.  It seemed rather boring to me to not be the way I was.  Freak or not, it was beginning to grow on me as well. 

Silence.

I looked over at the officer sitting in the chair.  He was staring at me.  A look of impatience crossed his face.  “Well?” he said, drumming the pen a bit more furious this time.

“Fine!”  I said, “Repeat the question.”

“You're kidding, right?” 

“Yes, well no.  You lost me at the part where I am supposed to help you with something you have no idea how to handle.  Something that you think I know…which I do not.  Do I need to remind you that when
they
took me, they doped me and tied me down?  So you ask me what I saw right when I just woke up and hit my head to the point of needing stitches.  I am just as lost as anyone about this,” I said.  For just a moment, it almost appeared as if the Sergeant felt bad for me.

“You never actually got stitches.  I checked the records.  There was no wound,” he said.

“Hey, you saw the blood right before you punched me in the face.  I know you saw it because I was on my knees and looked you right in the eyes.  If the wound healed as you say it did, then you know that when I was in a coma, my body was healing at an insane rate.”  I paused and looked at him directly...looking for some hint of him getting it.  “So, Sergeant, with all due respect, I was abducted.  Perhaps you should be asking the staff that was here that night questions.”

He glared at me for a few seconds.  I could tell he was looking for any facial twitch or nervous tick that would tell him something.  Having seen cops in movies before, it was obvious to me what he was looking for.  A lot of Hollywood drama over did interrogation scenes, but the reality of them and the goal held true.  This might have been a very loose version of it, but he was digging for anything he could use and it made me mad.  Anger crept up inside me and a low guttural growl rose up in my throat.  He heard it and shifted a bit uneasily in the chair a few times... then looked nervously at the door a few times before standing up.  A good rule when fighting is never to be caught sitting down.  Jason taught me that. 

He began to pace towards the door.  I did not move.  My anger was apparent and the desire to smash something with my fists was obvious.  Images of me pummeling him into submission began to play over and over.  He had nothing that could stop me, I could get to him before is gun even cleared the holster.  The urge was getting unbearable.  I felt a moment of clarity open a small clearing in my head.  “You had best leave Sergeant,” I growled.  “You are really pissing me off, and I would rather not hurt you.” 

He moved towards the door and knocked loudly.  It opened and he exited at a rapid pace.  For a moment I heard the buzz from the hallway while the door opened and closed.  The locks fell back in place. 
Alone with my rage
.  I was growing tired of feeling this way after seeing someone who refused to see beyond the outside.  My self-control was the only thing keeping him alive at times.  As a child or teenager no matter how much my parents mistreated me, control was never an issue.  I was having a hard time with rational thinking as the window in my mind closed and the rage began to build.  My desire was to hurt something now. 

An image appeared in my mind of a cave entrance; it was giving off a faint light as if I was in the cave and the outside awaited me, beckoning me forward.  I could hear strange cries in some language that were calling to me, almost taunting me to come out.  I heard a sound like scissors opening and closing in rapid succession, like a child furiously going at a news paper.  I imagined making snowflakes with folded paper and a large pair of shears.  The shears dripped with blood, and the paper was actully leather hide of some creature in the process of evisceration.  I fixated on this image of these shears in my hand and was furiously carving on this leathery hide.  Droplets of blood flung everywhere as the shears tore into the material.  A sick sort of satisfaction surprised me as blood splattered all over my skin.

The leathery hide began changing shape and started to grow larger but had no form yet.  It grew taller and taller by the second.  In mere moments, it was taller than I was.  My hands slowly stopped the scissoring on the shears.  It simply kept growing and forming some hideous shape that was not recognizable.  My fear started to rise.  I could not identify my enemy.  Logic hit me.  I have fought things larger and meaner in my dreams. 

In previous dreams, there was always a distinct feeling of overwhelming or over bearing by multiple enemies.  They surrounded and outnumbered me by such odds that any normal warrior would have either perished or fled.  Even a seasoned warrior would have counted the odds and decided whether an engagement was fool hardy.  This time it was different.  It was only one daemon and I was unarmed.  In part, the surrealism of this dream was really starting to gain momentum, yet the logic side of it made no sense that I would be attacking a daemon with large shears.  No matter how effective the tactic might be it made me laugh at the thought of it.

I watched in sheer horror as it grew taller and was now at least a hundred feet tall, towering over me.  The shape began to form itself into a humanoid mass, but the surface of it was almost bubbling and boiling on its surface.  Faces coalesced in the skin.  They would scream out in pain then dissipate as fast as they formed.  These sounds created in me fear and anger.  I was not sure.  They grated my hearing and caused me pain.  Something popped in my ears and fluid began to spill out...running down my face.  It dripped onto my shoulders.  Anger and fear turned to rage as I started to back up, and the sheers fell from my hands and clattered on the cave floor. 

Moments passed.  My feet retreated from this enemy that defeated me without even attacking physically.  I finally understood the concept of chess and the psychological aspect of defeating your opponent with your mind.  I fell back in fear and watched the shapes continue to form on the surface of the skin as the whole mass started to solidify in a final state.  Looking up, the face of this monster stared back at me.  We locked eyes.  To my horror...it was my own face.  In its largeness, my mind failed to recognize that I was looking at a demonstrated evil version of me with thousands of daemon faces imbedded in its skin.  Each face cried out to me in a chorus of voices in different pitches and tones.  Some of them I actually recognized as foes I had faced in my dreams at one point or another.  It was as though their very essence was a part of me now, writhing below the surface of my skin, and trying to exude influence over me.

My skin suddenly itched and then I felt pain.  To my own horror, I looked down to see that a face was splitting my skin slowly as it was pushing its way through on my forearm.  It began to shriek at me as it tore its way through my flesh.  I felt a burning feeling as its teeth broke the skin and started to eat my flesh.  Tearing at my own skin, I found myself screaming at the top of my lungs.  The tall form in front of me was laughing in a deep guttural tone.  I could hear and feel its mockery as the fight with this aberration forming on my arm continued.  Tears formed in my eyes and began to run down my cheeks as my panic grew.  I knew it was only a matter of time before this thing spread and infected another part of me. 

Despair formed in the back of my mind and crept forward like some sort of sludge in a gutter filling with rain.  Slowly it moved consuming my thoughts and I felt myself getting weaker by the minute.  The strength in my hand began to fail as I started to lose control of the motor functions of my fingers.  My heart pounded in my chest and the pressure drove up into my skull like a water hose spraying at full capacity at a fire that it could not put out.  The strength in my hand waned, and I sank to my knees caving to the despair of failure.  Eye sockets with malformed daemon eyes stared at me.  Drool flowed out of its disgusting maw.  The spittle ran of my forearm in a viscous blob that fell to the ground with a terrific splat.  The large form in front of me faded from view, and I was on my knees looking into the eyes of this disgusting face on my arm. 

No sound came from anywhere.  Total silence enveloped me so my location faded from concern for a moment.  The face coughed and showered me with its drool, creating irritation from the saliva that started to eat my flesh.  Then it spoke but not in a guttural voice.  It was clear as I could speak...and sounded like me. 

“You think you have problems, wait till you’re growing out of someone’s arm.”  The look on my face must have been one of disbelief because it started to cackle a bit as it choked on more of its own drool.  “What, you’re too good to talk to me?  Idiot, I am you or what you will become if you stay on this path of anger.”  My arm was speaking to me!

“You are not me,” I said.  “This is just a bad dream.”

“Am I now?”  I felt a stabbing pain in my arm and opened my eyes.  The face rose out of my arm and sunk its teeth into my forearm to its gum line, if it actually had one.  Instinctively I smacked it in the face.

“Hey, that hurt!” it yelled as it let go of the meat on my arm.  “Do that again and I won’t let go.  I’ll swallow it and you can feel what it is like to eat yourself for a change.”  The very thought made me ill.

“Why are you torturing me?”  I asked, not expecting an answer.

“And here I thought I was smart back when I was you.  I let hate consume me and I started enjoying the people around me getting hurt since I had endured so much.  I got my wish, consumed by my own pain.  It was only a matter of time before they killed me in battle after I failed to stop a breach.”

“What are you talking about?  This is a dream and you are not here.  This is all in my own head.” I closed my eyes and repeated these thoughts again and again.

“Stay on this path of self-destruction and you will find out soon enough, Tathlyn.”  It spat vileness at me as it choked my name out.  I could not believe what I was hearing.  As much as this cave brought its own disparity, seeing this thing growing out of my own arm was more than I could handle.  Something inside my mind burst and tears flowed freely.  I wept.

“I refuse to give into my own self-doubt now,” I sobbed.  “There are too many questions unanswered.”  I managed to choke out the words in between swells of emotions.  I did not think I could feel any worse in a dream than I felt at that moment.  My face tightened up so much that the muscles began to cramp up.  I could not imagine my life going so wrong that my lack of faith would consume me.  A maze of darkness seemed to surround me.  A deadly circular cycle of self-doubt and fear trapped me.

Something pressed on my cheek; warmth.  I opened my eyes and saw the floor below me.  It was close so I must have been sitting down.  I could still feel warmth on my cheek, and I noticed tiny feet in white shoes in front of me and looked up.  Eryn stood with moist eyes and a solemn look.  She had her hand on my face and was gently rubbing my cheek.  I looked her in the eyes and saw more tenderness than I could imagine.  She had a softness about her that could calm the strongest storm yet strength to take it head on if she had to.  Something told me she had wells of untapped energy.

“Hey you, I came to check on you,” she said.

“Hey,” I echoed.

“Why are you sitting like that?” she asked.

“Like what?”  I looked down and noticed I was on my knees in a meditative pose.  I shook my head, still feeling fuzzy from waking up.  I suddenly realized that I had not been asleep. 

Eryn gasped!  “What did you do to your arm?  Let me see it!”  She grabbed my right arm.  I looked down.  My forearm was rather stiff and felt numb.  The shape of a skull was now a scar carved so perfectly it was as though someone had used a scalpel like a detail knife.  Its shape had a sunken eyes version of my face, but there was no color or ink.  Simply a face representing mine in some twisted fashion.  She was tracing over it with her fingers and I could feel the warmth of her touch transferring into me.  The glow of her spirit as if it moved within me now became apparent.  Such tenderness commanded my attention.  

How could I sense this?

I sat there soaking in her attention but feeling confused by my growing affection for her.  Meanwhile, my mind tried to imagine the ghastly image on my arm and where it came from; when suddenly chills ran down my back.  An image popped into my head of a daemonic face that spoke to me.

“Do not forget.  If you hold onto your past, those you love will die!” it said.  It vanished as fast as it popped up.  I shuddered head to toe and jumped to my feet. 

Eryn stepped back.  “What’s wrong Dieter?”

“Dieter is no more, my name is Tathlyn!”  I said.

“Okay, Tathlyn, what’s going on?” she said, noticing a touch of the strange.

“I had a really messed up dream, better yet, call it a waking nightmare.  It was so real and I cannot even begin to explain it.  It was surreal, almost too surreal.”  Her hand found my cheek.  She felt like home, unlike any other feeling I had felt about living somewhere. 

A very concerned look crossed her face.