Chapter Three

When I came to, my head was absolutely pounding like it had been hit by five thousand hammers. I sat up, grimacing, immediately sorry I’d made any sort of upward motion. I felt foggy, a bit off-kilter and almost seasick. Through watery eyes, I could make out a badly drawn picture of a wayward lighthouse and a low-hung dresser…no, no, it couldn’t be, could it?

I reached up, rubbing the water and sleep from my eyes (vaguely remembering a story told to me by my mother a long time ago, about the sandman and how all the children of the world are put to sleep), and blinked several times.

Yes. Somehow, I was in my hotel room.

And sitting in the rickety chair by the window was that guy from Boston Market…Daniel? Derrick? David? Damien. He sat there, staring out the window at the nasty, pouring rain, a somber expression on the part of his face I could see. The room was basted in shadows, and I could only make out the bare umbra of his turned-up mouth…he was actually smiling now, for one reason or another. I struggled with my throat, trying to force it to make words, although it didn’t seem too thrilled to do that for me at the moment.

“Damien?” I managed to croak out, and the figure at the window stirred, standing up and cracking its back with a soft moan. I winced. My father had cracked his back, and, well…I tried not to think about my father and focused instead on the present situation. The man moved his way toward me, and I scooted back involuntarily, sliding on the oily, token cheap hotel bedspread. He found his way to my bed and sat down beside me, his eyebrows raised a bit as if he expected some form or sum of money to be paid for his taking me here.

“Aara, you’ve awoken.” He said pleasantly, smiling at me and reaching over to me. I shrunk back, suddenly mortally terrified, but all he did was unhook a strand of hair from in front of my eyes to behind my ear. I sighed, still alive and painfully aware of the fact.

“How did you get me here? How did you get past the grease ball at the front counter?” I choked on the words, my throat not used to speaking just yet.

“I never said I’d taken you in through the front door.” Damien said softly, and I couldn’t help but notice that his gaze was suddenly glued onto my window.

I shuddered involuntarily.

“Well, thanks,” I said, folding my arms across my chest and shivering in the cold, wetness of my clothes. “I guess you can get on out now. I’d show you the door, but it seems you’d prefer the window.” It came out a bit more cross than I would have liked it to, but I couldn’t exactly help that, could I? Damien laughed, and it was a dark, throaty laugh that nearly swallowed me whole.

I shrank back even more on my bedspread, the nature disgusting qualities said bedspread enabling me to scoot back even further than I’d meant to, and I felt myself about to topple over…

…he was there an instant later, his hands bracing my back and pushing me back up onto my bed. I sighed, agitated: did he have to be so quick? He’d just been across the room…maybe I just was no good at detecting movements anymore…maybe now I saw everything like a wino or a drunkard saw it: slow motion replays of a live-action life.

Damien was back where he’d started, and a smug smile of complacence overrode his face, like a painting of a demon clown you’d expect to see hidden in the attic of your worst fears. “You really can go.” I said, swallowing my words with another shiver.

He reached, instead, under the bed, producing a bag filled with white-wrapped packages. What was this? Cocaine? Marijuana? I couldn’t possibly afford to peddle Marijuana, not with my current state with the authorities! I moaned into my hand.

“Here, Aara, go ahead.” Damien proffered the bag, and I realized upon gazing into it that the white-wrapped packages were a lot larger than I had previously thought: big marijuana packets? I reached in for the top one, hesitating before reaching in but noticing the sick clownish smile playing on his lips. I extracted it, popped off the scotch tape…

…and tore away the wrappings to reveal a gorgeous, flowing white nightdress.

“Oh.” My mouth could barely contain its excitement, and I felt my jaw lower. “Why?”

“Aara, honey,” Damien said, and I stiffened at the mention of my name and a pet name used in conjunction with each other by a man who barely knew me. “We need to talk. But first, I think you should change into that nightdress.”

I blinked. There was not much else I could have done even if the circumstances had been totally different and I really was talking to a clown.

“Go on,” Damien said softly, and I stood up, padding for the bathroom. Under any normal circumstances, I thought as I tugged my hoodie off over my head, I wouldn’t dare do what this man said…but the kindness in his eyes and the love that seemed to flow from his body despite his sick clown smile seemed to suggest otherwise about the marijuana and the scariness I’d associated this man with.

Off went the jeans, the t-shirt and the socks and shoes, all caked with mud, and on went this nightdress which, somehow, Damien had managed to get to fit my frame exactly. It cupped my breasts in a way that made them seem a bit larger than their dismally small size, and flowed down my frame to taper off from a streamlined pattern to a fanning sort of change at exactly the point my hips tapered off.

I stared at myself, my bewildered brown eyes, stringy brown hair, and huge, gigantic purple plots of skin under my eyes. I shook my head, appalled at myself, and went back into the bedroom, sitting back down on the bed under Damien’s watchful eye.

“Aara,” he started, and somehow, even though there was absolutely no reason for it, I began to cry. Tears, huge fat ones, began to roll down my cheeks, and I quickly felt my hands rush up to stop the flow, embarrassment flooding my cheeks. “No, no, don’t stop it,” His hands grasped mine and lowered them from my face, and I felt my cheeks redden even further and the tears begin to course down my cheeks like a bawling infant.

This was absolutely horrible.

“Go ahead and cry, sweet girl,” he said, and I sniffled loudly. “It’s obvious you’ve needed to do so for quite some time.”

“Your voice…” I said quietly, barely able to talk about a tremor. “It’s so kind…that’s…that’s the only reason why I…I broke down…” Damien nodded sagely and I sat there on my bed, a strange man holding my hands at my side so I couldn’t dam up the tears that wouldn’t stop coming no matter how much I willed them to, completely and utterly confused.

The tears eventually tapered down to nothing but a trickle, and he released my hands so that I could reach up and blot my cheeks. I peered at this man, terrified but not sure how it would be best to run: it felt like he could apparate and could quite easily catch up to me no matter how fast or far I ran.

“Aara, honey,” Damien said, taking one of my hands in his absentmindedly. I shivered again, and he waited for me to be able to hear something other than the sound of my heart’s frantic beating in my rib cage before continuing. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

“I don’t know you!” I shouted, much louder than it should have been under the current circumstances which included but were not limited to paper-thin walls in a ramshackle hotel.

“I know, I know,” Damien assured me, “and I know you have no reason to trust me except for what I say. But please, Aara, please believe me when I tell you that I know you much better than you apparently think.” I furrowed my brow.

“My dad is dead and my mom…” I trailed off, sighing into my arm. “You don’t know me, because I don’t know you. It can’t be.”

“But it can,” Damien insisted. “Because I’m your guardian angel, Aara.”

Stunned.

Silence.

“What the hell are you smoking?” I screeched, yanking my hands out of his and desperately searching for a fire escape or something similar. “You’re not my guardian anything, freak show! Get this off me! Off me!” I began to tug at the nightdress, frantically looking for a button or zipper…I hadn’t remember any when I put this accursed thing on.

“Aara, Aara,” Damien said, so softly I could barely understand him over my loud, gusty breaths. “Shh, Aara.” He reached forward, seizing me and pulling me to him so hard I had the breath knocked out of me momentarily. His body was like a rock, and I braced myself against him, pushing hard and finally being rewarded by a push away. I stared into his face, as serious and clowny as ever.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said, my voice husky and my eyes filling with tears yet again.

“Absolutely nothing, Aara,” Damien reached for me, stroking a strand of my hair. I was so stunned that I let him, which was vaguely worrying. “I just came because you needed me. I can go if you want me to, but I have a feeling you don’t want me to.” I pursed my lips, and he laughed softly. “You look like a fish, honey.” I scowled darkly and he laughed even harder.

“Oh, Aara,” he said, his voice so soft I could barely notice his speaking. “I’m so glad you’re safe.”

“Safe?” I echoed.

“Yes,” Damien said quietly. “I’d had a vision that you were…you were…not safe. Not safe at all. So I came to protect you. You just have to trust me on this one.”

I was sitting on a bed in a foreign hotel room in a white nightdress given to me by a crazed man who claimed to be my guardian angel.

Trust this? Somehow, something inside of me told me with an uncertain verity that yes, I should trust this. I sighed, defeated.

“Okay.” I said desolately. “But what was going to hurt me, Damien?” He shook his head, standing up so that I was the only one on the bed.

“Don’t worry about that,” He said, bending down to turn back the covers. “All that matters is that you’re safe now. I’ll let you know more when the time comes. Now it’s time for sleep, Aara.”

“I just woke up!” I protested. Damien shook his head again, a firmness that it seemed only a parent could use on their miscreant child coming into his eyes. I scooted to the head of the bed, getting under the covers and trying to ignore the niggling feeling in the back of my mind telling me I was crazy.

This is all a dream, I decided. If I fall asleep in my dream, I’ll wake up in reality and there won’t be any scary men. Satisfied by my thoughts, I rolled over and shut my eyes, falling asleep almost instantly.

“Good girl,” I thought I heard Damien say yet again, just like that time in the restaurant, but I wasn’t too sure. And then sleep overtook me, and I realized, on the fringe of sleep and awareness, that I was actually awake and not asleep.

A scream overtook me, but it transformed into a sigh and then I was gone.