‹ Prequel: In an Instant
Sequel: Delilahs Darkness
Status: 2017 Nanowrimo Project!

City of Dark Angels

Returning the memories

I am frozen solid where I stand. Raviera watching us with dark black eyes, a group dark angel minions next to him.

"I have no idea what you're talking about." I say to him, holding my stance and playing it all of in a form of denial.

"You're going to regret lying to me." He says, snapping his fingers and the dark angels step towards us, I try to turn and to run away but a force in the room keeps me from doing so. They grab Travis and I by the arm and inject a cold liquid into my neck, everything around me falls into darkness as the liquid disperses throughout my veins.

***

I awake only moments later, strapped to a white chair in a blank white room. Travis next to me, still out cold. I try to move, but find myself strapped to the chair with cold restraints. An IV in my wrist, injecting me with a cold black liquid. I feel different, like I am changing in the worst way.

"Delilah...?" I hear Travis call out weakly in my direction. I try to sit up, to look his way, but the restraints also cover across my neck. Holding me down, and I can only call out to him, to hear his voice but not see his face.

"I'm hear Travis." I say, just wanting to have a quick glance at him just in case it happens to be my last.

"It's going to be okay Delilah, whatever happens, no matter the outcome; it's going to be okay." He reassures me, but I still feel frightened; I have the sense of doom inside me like the one I felt waking from my coma, when I first entered the brink and learned of my fate. The fear of the unknown.

"Where is Riley and Erika?" I ask, worried of the fate of my little brother and Travis's little sister.

"They took them too." He tells me, and my heart drops. "They're going to be okay too, just like us."

I hear sharp and hardened footsteps ascend towards us in the hall, my heart beats fast the closer it approaches us. The door squeaks open softly and from the corner of my eye I can see in walks a man in a white coat, the same one from the laboratory. Raviera is also at his side, with a grin of evil intentions plastered across both of their faces.

"I can sense your fear you know, and you have every right to be scared."

"What do you want from us?" Travis asks, I still can't see his face but the fear in voice tells me all I need to know about his facial expressions.

"I want that stone." He says, removing a tool from the table in front of him and inching towards me.

"I told you, we don't have it!" I say, remembering clearly that the AI took it right before she vanished.

He takes the tool that's in his hand, and slices the skin on my chest open slightly. Even with the slight cut, it still stings worse than the most painful papercut.

"Leave her alone!" Travis shouts, trying his hardest to escape from all of the restraints that cover his body.

"The more you struggle, the more it will hurt." Raviera says towards him. The man from the laboratory walks towards me, and jabs a needle into my veins taking out the blood from my body and putting into a small bottle.

Raviera takes it and puts it up towards the light and shakes it, he frowns at the results he receives.

"Still not out of their systems, Jerry run one more retrieval and see what happens." Jerry is the guy in the white lab coat I assume and he presses a button and another round of black liquid flies into my body.

"What are you doing to her?!" Travis asks, the fear shaking his voice and the room around me getting foggy the more liquid that fills my veins.

"I am making her into what she is meant to be." He says.

I close my eyes, to fight the drowsiness that is beginning to consume me, and I am given a vision of terror behind my eyes. The accident, the pain I felt as I crash into the pole, the truck hitting my car and flying from the window. The fear I felt waking up in the brink, not aware of the state of my body yet. I open my eyes and I am still in that same white room, on that same white chair. Everything happening to me in slow motion, and so far away.

"Travis!" I call out to him, just wanting to hear his voice one last time before the darkness and the memories consume me.

I feel his hand reaching out and grabbing mine, squeezing softly and his thumb rubbing across mine, his touch soothes me as I close my eyes.

"Fight it Delilah," He says, his words comforting. "Don't let the darkness take you, don't let it swallow you hole. We're going to make it through this, I just know."

"Travis... I can't fight it." I say, wanting to give up; and I know in my heart the outcome that Raviera wants. I can't fight it, no matter how much my head says to, it's so hard and the dark memories consume my every thought within me.

He wants me to turn into a dark angel.

"No, Delilah I won't accept that. And neither should you. After everything you've been through, not just the accident and the coma, you and Stephan, your father. Don't think about the bad Delilah, think about the good...waking up, still being alive on this earth even though its in chaos, your art, the progress you've made, getting into your dream university, think about that." He says, and the more good memories he brings up, the faster my heart beats and the easier it is to shut the bad memories out.

"Think about meeting me, think about when I first met you in the brink when I told you your shoe was untied, you were wearing flip flops Delilah, but I had to say something to you, because you looked so distressed and scared, I had to get you out of that some how. You thought I was a jerk, but here we are; still fighting the darkness together. That's what you have to do now, fight the darkness." All of those memories swirl around in my mind, and I try to have it block out the bad but whatever Raviera has inside me doesn't let me. I close my eyes one last time, as I hear the world around me crash abruptly. It's dark for a moment, but my vision returns. I feel pain in my upper back as something crawls out from the sides and falls down around me, I reach my hand out and wince as I pull something out from the object and place it in front of me.

It's a black feather.