Free The Awakening by K. E. Ganshert Page A

am small and physically weak.
    The man with the sneer clucks his tongue and creeps closer. “No need to leave so fast, not when you just got here.”
    He steps toward me.
    With terror clawing up my throat, I take a few more steps back, then turn around and sprint away. My suitcase clatters behind me. My short hair whips at my cheeks. I dash away faster than I’ve ever run—quick like a rabbit. I turn the corner, onto the busy street from which I came, and as I do I slam into something hard. Something warm.
    Strong arms circle my waist. A familiar heart beats in my ear. I could stay here forever, in this spot, against this chest. But the arms let go. Luka wraps his fingers around my bicep and pulls me away from the side street. I look over my shoulder. The two men lurk in the shadow, unwilling to come out into the light. Luka drags me toward the hotel I attempted to escape. He doesn’t let go until we stand beneath the awning.
    Heat emanates from his body—wave after wave of white hot anger. The wind molds his undershirt to his chest, which heaves as though he just finished sprinting the four hundred. The light from the street casts gorgeously frightening shadows along his face. He holds up the letter I left him. “What is this?”
    “A note.”
    He uncrumples it and begins to read. “ Dear Luka, please go back to Thornsdale before it’s too late. I will be okay. I can find the others. You can still have a normal life. Don’t waste it on me. Tess. ” When he finishes, his green eyes smolder. “Do you really think my life will be normal if I go back to California?”
    “It will be more normal than this.”
    He grits his teeth.
    “You’re not sleeping. You’re barely eating. Your dreams are getting worse. Something’s torturing you here. Something was torturing you on the bus.”
    “You’re right. The dreams are getting worse. But if you think going back to Thornsdale without you will make them better, then you don’t know anything.” He removes the hemp bracelet from his back pocket and wraps it around my wrist. “I’m not going back. I want to find these others as much as you. So please, do us both a favor and stop trying to save me.”
    *
    The next morning, Luka’s dark circles are worse. I want to help carry whatever burden he is carrying, but how can I when he insists I continue with the medicine? I suggest that I stop, but his no is so firm and unyielding, I put the pill in my mouth and swallow.
    We take our continental breakfast back to our room and decide to look for Dr. Roth’s three clients first. If those result in dead ends, then we will try finding Dr. Carlyle. No reason to drag him into it if the connection is a coincidence.
    “Who do you want to start with?” I ask.
    The three files sit in front of us on the bed. I expect Luka to pick up the one he’s been poring over the most—a thirty-four-year-old male named Gabriel. Recurring dreams of a girl he’d never met, but whose safety meant everything. The symptoms are eerily similar to Luka’s, only instead of the girl being me, this woman has light brown skin and dark brown eyes. At the time the records were taken, Gabriel lived in south Detroit.
    Luka, however, doesn’t pick up Gabriel’s file. He picks up Josiah’s—a man whose symptoms are much more similar to mine. At the time the records were taken, his wife, Dot, insisted that Josiah see a Dr. William Carlyle, who then referred him to Dr. Charles Roth. He would be sixty-seven now and lives, or lived, on the west side of Detroit.
    I have no objections to finding him first, so thirty minutes later we are in a cab heading west with a driver who speaks a lot of Farsi and little English. We drive past tenement housing and masses of chaos—blaring music, wailing sirens, street vendors selling illegal contraband, even an angry protest outside a fetal modification clinic that breaks into violence. More than once, I see money exchanged for bags of white powder or various colored pills