A Girl Named Calamity (Alyria 1)

The man sprung to his feet and stared at Weston with unease. He looked back and forth at us and probably noticed how I wasn’t standing and wasn’t alarmed that there was a large man in the camp. Though, he couldn’t see my heartbeat.

When Weston stepped forward, and the fire lit up the angry storm in his eyes, I realized then, the terrible mistake I made of involving someone else. Without another thought, I stood up and grabbed my bag while they both watched me.

“Listen . . . the woman doesn’t want to be with you anymore. Just be a man and let her go.”

I cringed at the man’s words. The tension in the air almost suffocated me while I looked at Weston with pleading eyes. He kept his angry gaze on me, and I was sure it was because if he looked at the man, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from tearing him apart.

Whatever needs to be done to keep the demons at bay.

There was an evil glint in Weston’s eyes when he held his hand out to me. His body was tense, and I imagined there was a tiger under his skin pacing to get out. Barely contained.

He wasn’t hauling me over his shoulder. He was giving me a choice. I shivered as I read his eyes and saw what he really wanted. He wanted me to defy him. So he could kill the man for taking his prisoner.

His. The word had my blood heating with anger.

“You don’t have to go with him,” the man told me, with some kind of impressive courage behind his boyish appearance.

He was so wrong. I was trapped between two silver cuffs on my wrists and an assassin.

The cuffs were the side of me that everyone wanted, the part the assassin wanted. I had never truly despised them until this moment. They were supposed to protect me, but instead, it felt as though they were shackles I could never remove.

“Sorry for wasting your time. I made a mistake, that’s all,” I blurted while slipping my hand into Weston’s rough one. If I got this man killed, I couldn’t forgive myself. When he shook his head in disgust, I felt disgusted with myself as well. I had to appear as a weak woman who wanted to stay with her abusive husband. I felt pathetic, even if it was a guise.

We held hands on the way out of the camp like a loving couple, when in reality, I wanted to stab him in the heart. When we walked far enough away, I ripped my hand out of his grasp.

“Why don’t you just go ahead and hit me? This disgusting charade might as well be real!” I shouted and shoved him. When he didn’t do anything but look at me, I shoved him again.

I was so angry with myself for feeling what I felt.

So angry that I felt relief when the enemy showed up; relief that I didn’t have to travel this scary world alone.

So angry that I threw my knee up to hit him in the groin, but he blocked it with a knee of his own.

So angry that I punched him in the rock he called a stomach.

So angry that I threw my knee up, just to have it blocked again.

That was when he had enough. He grabbed my wrists with one hand, while his other spanned my throat to tilt my head up to look at him. “I told you I could find you anywhere.”

Emeralds looked back at me. The stones of truth and tranquility.

Those two things hit me with force and I stopped fighting. I was sucked into his green web, which I was sure he often used to trap his victims. I was too tired to care that I was just another fly.

Tranquility was easy; the relaxation of muscles and mind. Truth was harder for me to swallow.

The truth of my life. My mission. And my failure.

All I wanted was to do the right thing. The right thing for Alyria.

“There is no right thing, Calamity.”

“There’s good and bad, Weston. Opening the seal . . . it’s bad,” I breathed.

“No one in Alyria is innocent. And if they are, they won’t always be. They don’t need you to protect them.”

Maybe good was never supposed to win. Maybe humans . . . and non-humans were never meant to exist. Maybe we were only killing Alyria, and it would be better off without all of us.

Maybe opening the seal would do it a favor.