Free Protect Her: Part 10 by Ivy Sinclair Page B

back. I was to be a good little girl and wait for them. I wasn’t allowed off the porch. I was supposed to stay put.
    My parents were true to their word. They came around the side of the porch a short time later. In little girl time though, it had felt as if they had been gone a lifetime. I started to run toward Mom to give her a hug, but Dad grabbed me and swept me up into his arms before I reached her.
    I had been distracted back then, but my adult eyes now caught something I didn’t remember seeing or even registering then. My mom followed a short distance behind my father. Her face and clothes were dirty as if she had been rolling in dirt and mud. Her hair was disheveled, and I could see small splatters of something red decorating the front of her blouse.
    The image started up and came to life as if it truly were a movie in my mind.
    “Daddy! Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick.” Even at five years old, I was a precocious child. I repeated the phrase I had often heard from my mother’s lips.
    Dad chuckled. “We told you we had an errand to run before we could go to our new home. It’s all done now.”
    “Why’s Mommy carrying a shovel? Did you plant some new vegetables in the garden?”
    “We did have something to tend to in the garden. You are exactly right, sweetie.” My dad kissed my forehead as we moved into the house. Mom followed us a few minutes later.
    As I stared back at this scene seventeen years later, I started to think about some of the odd things that always happened before we moved on from a place. We moved a lot, and there was a pattern if one knew to look for it.
    We’d settle into our new home. My parents would join the local church. For a few months, maybe even a year, life would be normal. But always, things turned dark. I’d hear whispers around me. The stares in my direction grew longer. People would ask me strange questions, like what my name was even though they had met me before.
    Then my mom would pack our suitcases. I’d pout and say I didn’t want to go. My parents would leave to ‘run an errand’ which I always assumed meant they needed to empty the bank accounts or get gas for the car. When they returned, it was a quick jump into the car, and then we left. It was always the same.
    Only that one time, when I was five years old, did I see them immediately upon their return from their errand. If I was corporeal, I thought I would have shivered. My parents had been eliminating threats. I was sure of it. It’s what I would have done if I had been in their position.
    Another scene flipped in front of me. It was of my room on Calamata Island where I lived for the three years after my accident in the bay. That place had been my refuge after I left the hospital and accepted the fact I might have amnesia for a lot longer than anyone anticipated. I filled the room with things that I thought I loved in my previous life. As I looked at it now, I saw so many things that conflicted with who I had been before.
    One of the most glaring was the stacks of romance novels on the bookshelves. They were my guilty pleasure. I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, but I secretly wanted to be a princess in another time and place and have my Prince Charming come and save me. I realized with a start that my real life had taken a similar track even though I wasn’t a princess and didn’t live in a faraway land.
    Prince Charming arrived in my life in the form of Riley Stone. He saved me from a demon bounty hunter and took me in. He promised to help me find out who I was. Although he didn’t directly do that, it was during the fight with Bruno Proctor in the church with him that my memory came back, and I knew who, or what, I was.
    Bruno took me prisoner in Hell. Riley found a way to jump through time and space from the other side, and he pulled me out. When we took refuge in the commune with Abigail and Fernando and the other Disciples of Eva, they tried to call Eva forth to possess me.