Twisted

My shaky fingers gripped for my phone after a few stunned, silent moments. The time read 1.17pm and I knew that meant school would be having lunch right now. My sister wouldn’t be in class. Dialling her number, I bit down on my lip – just to see if I could still feel.

“Rayna? Are you okay?” she cried almost immediately. “You had some kind of fit and just ran out of school!”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I don’t know what happened.” I almost breathed a sigh of relief the second I heard her voice. It was normal, blissfully normal.

“Was it because of…you know…him? He didn’t come back to school like you, did he?” Fear edged into Kalista’s voice and guilt and sadness rushed through me.

Closing my eyes, I whispered, “No. No, I think he’s gone.”

“Oh, good then.” Her trust in me made her fear blossom into belief. She still trusted me and that made it all the more painful.

“Yeah, I know. Don’t even worry about it, alright?” I heaved myself from my groaning seat and scuffed my feet along the ground. I needed to move, needed to rid myself of the restless energy bouncing around in me.

“Alright.”

With my eyes locked on the ground, I still managed to trip on something. A hand reached out and grabbed my elbow to steady me, causing a yelp to tumble out.

“Rayna?” Kalista asked, hearing my alarm.

“It’s nothing,” I replied, eyes still fixed on that hand on my arm. I raised them to connect with his green ones. A warmth spread from my head to my toes and I choked out another sentence. “Listen, Listy, I’ll call you back. Bye.” Without even waiting for her response, I hung up and turned my body fully towards the boy – who wasn’t really a boy. He looked about my age.

I didn’t know where he’d come from or how he’d been able to sneak up on me without me noticing a thing. Alarm bells were ringing. It made my head spin and I backed away, remembering how he’d starred in one of my hallucinations – if that was what they even were.

He whispered something and I stopped backing away, instead deciding to lean in to catch what he was saying. “She, whose eyes hold the fire of the present.”

Time froze.

I stared at him and he stared at me and all I could hear was the frenzied beating of my heart. All I could see was green, beautiful green eyes that held a century’s worth of secrets in them.

That was when I remembered: he could be a hallucination. God, how many could you have in one day?

I reached my hands forward and pressed them against his skin and that was what I could feel – real human skin. His eyes widened and heat made our cheeks blush and all I wanted to do was –

My phone rang.

I snapped out of it and answered it – it said it was Kalista which was strange since I’d only been talking to her a minute ago. Maybe she was ringing to see what the abrupt goodbye was all about. “Kalista? How come-”

“Be quiet,” a voice snarled. Definitely not Kalista’s. It sounded dark and smudgy and like something about it was off. “Your sister will be fine if you stop messing with visions. She’ll be safe if you do that.”

“What? Visions? What are you talking about? Where’s Kalista?” Panic gripped me with a force I’ve never felt before. The green-eyed man beside me stiffened and looked as shocked as I felt. I didn’t know how much of the strange phone conversation he could hear.

“Did I not tell you to be quiet?” whoever it was growled – it sounded like a male but maybe it was just a deep-voiced female. I didn’t answer. “Your sister will be fine, as long as you stop engaging in the visions. That’s all you need to know.”

The beeping signalled the caller had hung up.

I placed my phone back into my pocket and turned with wide eyes to see the man still there. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but all that came out was a strangled, “Oh.” My legs gave way and I ended up in a sprawled heap on the ground.

He knelt down beside me and laid a reassuring hand on my arm. “Tell me,” he said gently, “is your birthday tomorrow?”

“I…” I gasped out, still reeling from the phone call and then the discovery that this man could possibly be my stalker. “Yes,” I stumbled out, knowing he already knew. And some small part of me told me to trust him.

He nodded and fixed his eyes on the ground, as though the answer was expected and unwanted. He stood, yanking me to feet – definitely trying to win my heart, he was – and asked another question. “What is your name?”

That was when I fainted, for the second time that day.

Or at least I thought I’d fainted but in a way, it was completely different; the dark seemed to be suffocating me, grinning at me as it watched me slowly drown.

I felt drips upon my face and I looked up and saw light – light that was crying, for me, for death and for the darkness of all evil. I wanted to reach up to the light, stretch my fingers and grow so tall as to touch it but I was falling. Down, down, down into more dark and the light grew smaller and smaller until it was but a pinprick.

And I screamed. My lungs were squeezing in on each other and my eyes could see nothing and my body was dying, aging in rapid pace.

But a whisper broke through.

It was a pleading whisper, one full of softness and pain and begging and fear. It stopped my fall until I was just hanging there, suspended in a shadow world where everything was reversed and nothing worked the same. The pressure was overwhelming; the pain worked its way into my chest; the disease was forcing every bit of air out of me. The darkness was taking me. I didn’t want it to.

I struggled in a gasp of breath.

Light flooded my vision, bright and blinding, shocking me and paralysing me for a moment. After my eyes adjusted to the brightness, I saw the man with the green eyes hovering above me with concern creased in his eyebrows. I groaned, my head pounding something terrible, before I pushed myself up – which, I quickly found out, was not a good idea. Dizziness crept through me and dotted my vision.

“Take it slow,” he said softly, pushing me back down into the grass – that was what alerted me to the fact that we were still at the park. And it was clearly still deserted; there were no children screaming or crying or laughing. “Don’t make yourself faint again.”

I just stared at him. Finally, I managed to form an understandable sentence. “Why do I keep seeing you?” Okay, so seeing him three times in one day wasn’t exactly stalker-ish creepy, as I was implying – but what was creepy was the fact that he appeared once in what I was assuming was a hallucination. He just shrugged.

“W-what happened?” I stuttered, my voice weak and kind of pitiful.

The confusion in my eyes was mirrored in his. “I’m not sure,” he admitted, as if he didn’t like not knowing things. “You had a phone call, it sounded really strange. And then I tried to talk to you and you fainted.”

I nodded slowly, remembering the scary call. They had Listy – whoever they was. Most likely a man, from the sound of the voice, but there was probably a group of people holding her hostage. Simply to get me to stop having visions – whatever the hell they were talking about.

But then it clicked. My hallucinations were what the dark person called visions. I didn’t know what they thought I was – maybe some future-seeing psychic or something – but how on earth could I control something I didn’t even understand?

And yet I had to. Because they had my sister.

“Look, you need to leave me alone,” I muttered, pushing myself up from the ground again, this time ignoring the dizziness. I stood up and stumbled to the side, steadying myself against the pole of the swing set. He stood next to me, neither leaving nor replying.

“Please...just...” I struggled, my voice just above a whisper. “Just leave me alone.”

“But...” It sounded like he was struggling with words too. “Why?”

“I just need to.” With that, I turned around and walked away, only pausing to shout over my shoulder. “Oh, and my name...” I hesitated for a second. “It’s Rayna.” And then I left the park, my mind whirling with thoughts of ‘visions’ and a consuming worry for my sister.