Free Light by Adrienne Woods Page B

there was no sign of anything alive.”
    Mom’s facial features changed and she looked sad, defeated. “It’s the Oblivion.”
    A small smile played on the corner of my mind. “Yeah, I know. Leigh told me.”
    “Leigh?” she asked. “Who’s Leigh, sweetheart?”
    “The guy, in the dream. He helped me escape, kept a lot of Shadow dogs from me.”
    “No,” Vinique shook her head. “The Initiation dream is something you have to go through alone.”
    “Mom, if I had to do that alone, believe me, I wouldn’t be here today.”
    Creases between Mom’s eyebrows appeared. She thought really hard about something. “It doesn’t make any sense. Did he tell you who he was?”
    I shook my head. I wanted to tell her he was hot, but it didn’t seem like the right time.
    “There were Nimgolians?” Mom asked another question.
    “Are those the animals that turns into heaps of black sand when you shoot them?”
    Mom nodded.
    “They weren’t the friendliest puppies either.”
    “Tell me about the dream.” She didn’t smile or giggle at all.
    I closed my eyes and started to tell my mother everything. It was so vivid, I could still see it playing like a movie behind my closed eyelids. I stopped with the white light that appeared in the middle of a deserted square with millions of Shadow hounds that tried to rip out your flesh if they could. “My leg was badly injured when I woke up. I tried to clean it but my linen was soaked with a lot of blood. It’s why I chucked it in the washing this morning. When I woke up again, it was gone, which only freaked me out more.”
    “Why didn’t you wake me up, sweetheart?”
    “And tell you what?”
    “The truth. I would’ve never sent you to school this morning and Beavis and Butthead wouldn’t have found us either.”
    “So why is it bad that they know about us?”
    “They’re like your father, good. Their dust is golden and they’re the only ones welcomed inside Revera. The Oblivion is no place for a Dream Caster, it was no place for a baby either.”
    “A baby?”
    She smiled. “Seventeen years ago a Shadow Caster fell in love with a Dream Caster. She almost killed him, and he would’ve died if it wasn’t love at first sight for him. His friends took him to a healer, and they saved his life, but he couldn’t stop dreaming about this girl.” She got up and went to the kitchen as she kept telling the story.
    “One day, he got his chance. She, on the other hand was surprised that he was still alive, but there was something about this guy that took her breath away. He wasn’t like the other Light Casters. He was kind and thought twice about who he killed.” She came back with another drink in her hand and looked at me. “In Revera, they teach all the Level One Light Casters about what they should do when they come face to face with a Shadow Caster. Destroy.” She looked back at the ground. “It’s been a war that will never be won. Still this Dream Caster went out of his way to be with the Shadow Caster. They would meet in secret and they fell in love. She fell pregnant and was scared of what Selene and her father would do with the fetus, so they tried to escape Revera.” She had tears in her eyes, something Chastity didn’t understand. “He didn’t make it, but she found a way out. He made sure of it, before he died.”
    A tear rolled over her cheek and a horrible feeling made me feel as if my air pipe was going to close. “Mom, what aren’t you telling me?”
    Mom looked at me. “Remember when I told you that your father was the saint?”
    I nodded.
    “I was the Shadow Caster.”
     
    OKAY THAT WAS SOMETHING I SHOULD’VE SEEN BUT for some reason I didn’t. The story about my parents was a typical Romeo and Juliette story, the only difference was that Juliette fell pregnant in this one and she couldn’t die with her love because of her unborn baby.
    We sat at that table, just staring at one another. I tried to make sense of this. Mom was a Shadow