A Girl Named Calamity (Alyria 1)

How could this decision have been left to me? I looked away when I felt my tranquil state morphing into something much more hopeless. I was going to be a disappointment to everyone. To my grandmother. To myself. I didn’t know how to get out of this, and I didn’t believe that I even could.

Tears swam in my eyes and one ran down my cheek.

Weston wiped it away with a thumb. “The whole world doesn’t have to be on your shoulders.”

Another side to him I’ve never seen.

“I hate you,” I whispered.

“I know,” he replied before he dragged me through the forest.

Sometimes things aren’t always what they seem.

The spider thought he trapped the fly. Little did he know, you can’t spin a fly with claws in a web.

* * *

Something disgustingly soft had passed between us. It was like the softness of a quilt against your skin before your grandmother ripped it off and told you to go clean the chamber pots.

He made some good points in his creepy frame of mind. But he was wrong.

The fate of Alyria was on my shoulders.

Everyone might not have been innocent, but I thought of that little girl outside Sylvia. She deserved the right to choose.

I never believed that opening the seal was the right thing to do. If it was opened there would only be death and destruction. The magic made human men insane. What Weston was trying to do was selfish. There wasn’t one good reason for opening the seal.

I could only hope Weston would believe my act in the woods. I would take any small wins I could.

Thank Alyria, I didn’t have Elian on my shoulders as well. The thought amused me. At least the whole universe wasn’t in danger of my failure. That would have been too much. Naturally.

What I now found funny was an odd thing. I hoped I didn’t lose myself in the blood, in the lives of others and become tainted like the Red Forest. I knew there were already some things swallowed up in the red.

But I wasn’t so much worried about the red as I was the . . . green.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

A WHOLE SPIDER’S WORTH OF TRUTH

Colors fell from the sky. The rain reminded me of the watercolors I used to play with as a child. Grandmother had always bought me paper once a year, and we made our own colors from the roots of her plants.

I was leaning against a tree reminiscing while watching the storm. Soft colors surrounded me in a veil. Pastel lightning shot across the sky.

This. Right here.

This was what everyone would be missing if I opened the seal. The beauty of it all lost to insanity, rape, and murder. I glanced over at Weston in frustration. He was leaning against his own tree, and I watched him through a shroud of colors. He must have felt my stare because his gaze came over to meet mine.

Staring was an interesting act. Almost intimate in a way. At least with Weston it was because I could feel his gaze searing into my soul. Hopefully, it didn’t end up as char in the end.

The past two days had passed in an irrevocable silence. I would never be getting them back to use my mouth for what it was made for.

It was made to talk, right?

Weston’s lips tipped up, announcing his presence in my head, and I almost smiled, except prisoners weren’t supposed to smile. I was sure that was a rule.

I listened to the pattering rain and lay down under the cover of the willow tree. I frowned as Weston invaded my tree. “W

hat are you doing?”