Page 208 of Hunters and Prey

Skin To Skin

IJERKED AWAKE, gasping.

This time, it was dark.

My heart thudded in my chest, like I’d been running, like I’d been sprinting somewhere, maybe even running for my life… but my mind was blank, completely devoid of any feeling.

I couldn’t recall anything that even resembled a memory.

No images came to me, no flickers of presence or light… much less any concrete information or detail on what came before I’d opened my eyes… or who I may have been with.

I’d never been one to remember my dreams.

Then again, I had my doubts I’d been dreaming.

I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever dreamed.

Maybe my whole life, my dreamlife had been this.

Maybe they’d been these black dreams, as Black called them. Waking voids where my body went, along with my mind, my light, every part of me.

Black said, more and more, it felt like I was dead when he found me missing.

It felt like I had left him for good.

I heard the subtext in that, the stress it was putting on his light, but when he told me, his voice was clinical, stripped of emotion. He described his reactions to my leaving him, leaving this dimension possibly, the way he would describe any Barrier phenomenon that was affecting him, for good or for ill.

Even so, I knew it was wearing him down.

It was wearing him down almost as quickly as it was me.

I knew I’d likely returned from one of those black dreams again.

The sheer fact that I was covered in sweat, that I was breathing so hard, made me think it had probably happened again.

Then the light came on… and I heard him.

“She’s back,” he growled.

He wasn’t talking to me, but to someone in the room behind him, or perhaps in the hall. My mind took in that much, that there were people in our apartment again, but I was still trying to slow the thumping in my chest, the heartbeat that seemed to want to crack a rib as the organ slammed up against the walls inside me.

I fought to calm my mind, to slow my breathing.

Calm…I heard a voice in my head murmur. Slow, Miriam. Feel every increment of the breath, from the top all the way down into the deepest part of you…

It wasn’t a voice I heard with my ears, or even my mind.

It was a memory.

I had a memory of that voice, of someone trying to teach me to calm myself, to breathe, to blank my mind and go fully into my body. As I lay there, I couldn’t see his face at first, but the longer I lay there, the more I made sense of his features, his calm, pale blue eyes, his soft, patient voice.

Remembering with a start that it was my father, that my dad had tried to teach me that, even when I was really young, I tried to fall into those lessons now, to remember how I felt when my father would breathe with me.

He’d used his light, I realized now, along with his voice, infusing one with the other, using his aleimi and breath to bring me slowly into a meditative state with him.

I closed my eyes, slowing my breath, filling my lungs with as much air as I could.

Black was already halfway across the room to me.

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