Free Protect Her: Part 10 by Ivy Sinclair Page A

all.”
    Adam shrugged. “I’ve always said I don’t like competition. Our other siblings didn’t believe me. They paid the price.”
    “You cursed me,” Eva said. “You took away my Protector and let that dark magic drive me mad. I killed…too many to count in my grief. Angels, demons, humans, it didn’t matter. My good judgment eroded into thoughts of jealousy, pain, and revenge. Then I was tortured and banished for a thousand years.”
    “Yet here you stand,” Adam said. He shook his finger in her direction. “See, dear sister, I have never underestimated you. Not even for one second. I knew that someday, you’d find a way to come back. In fact, I’ve been counting on it. You needed some time away to gain some valuable perspective. What I did wasn’t curse you. I gave you everything you needed to have an epiphany like I did. What I gave you was a gift.”
    I wasn’t sure what in the holy hell was happening, but it was pretty obvious that things were about to go sideways for me once again.
     
     
     

CHAPTER EIGHT – PAIGE
     
    Eva assured me that everything would be better once I relaxed and accepted her, and she was at least partly right. I was left to my own devices after that. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but it wasn’t the sense of floating nothingness that seemed to overtake all of my senses save for the part of my consciousness that still carried an awareness of myself.
    I knew I wasn’t going anywhere else. There was no Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory decision point for me. In a way, I just ceased to exist to the outside world, but I wasn’t crossing over into death. It should have felt a lot scarier than it did, but after a lifetime on the run, I was ready to be in one place. I thought I might finally be able to be content.
    There was a part of me that was a bit off-kilter though. That was until I found myself in a place where a rotation of images floated in front of me. I cast myself toward them. It wasn’t unlike walking toward a sparkle in a pane of glass that catches your eye, except I no longer had feet to take me there. I saw the colorful images and realized with delight that these were my memories presenting themselves back to me.
    If I had a bucket of popcorn, I would have felt like I was at the movies. I settled into this place that I assumed was deep inside my mind and let the images slowly scroll past me. If this was my fate by being possessed by Eva, then perhaps it wasn’t so bad.
    I had no idea how long I watched the images of my childhood flash before me. All of the happy memories of my youth had been retrieved and were on a feedback loop for my enjoyment.
    That was when I saw an image of my first and only dog. I named her Ruby. She was a stray that wandered onto our porch in the first commune I was old enough to remember. Ruby was a beagle mix who had warm brown eyes that made me melt. She was super sweet and snuggled up with me in my bed every night. Ruby followed me all around the commune every day. We were inseparable.
    When we moved away from that commune, Ruby hadn’t been able to come with me. I was inconsolable for days. I recalled hearing my dad tell my mom in hushed tones that under no uncertain circumstances would we ever have a pet again. That was that. My father decided, and everyone in the household fell in line.
    That thought pulled me up short. I had been so focused on all of the happy memories of my childhood that it seemed like my mind had tripped up over the others. Another image flashed up in front of me then culled from my memory banks. I was five years old, and I sat on the porch step looking forlornly up at the night sky. I had a small bag sitting next to me. It was my old suitcase. It served me well as we moved from house to house, commune to commune and then into small towns. We were always moving.
    I remembered that night because it was the first time Mom and Dad left me alone in the house. They told me they had an errand to run, and they’d be right