AH1 Awaken Me Darkly by Gena Showalter

Author:Gena Showalter
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780743497497
Published: 2005-05-30T22:00:00+00:00

I didn’t allow myself to think about losing Atlanna or kissing and losing Kyrin as I drove home hours later. I didn’t allow myself to think about the strange…thing that had come over me and slowed down the world around me for those brief seconds. Thinking about it brought fear, waves and waves of fear because that kind of ability was unnatural.

Fear made a person weak. Made her lose focus.

I trudged inside my apartment and checked my messages. There were six from my dad.

“Where are you?” he asked in the first message. His voice was pleasant, almost like I remember it being when I’d been a little girl.

“Why aren’t you here?” he said in the second.

“Is this how you treat family?” he said in the third.

Pushing a series of buttons on the wall, I skipped the other messages, yet I couldn’t halt the deep pangs of regret already working their way through me. I shouldn’t care what he thought about me. He was an old, pathetic man, and I was a grown woman. I’d been on my own since the age of sixteen.

A small part of me, however, a part I despised, desperately craved his approval. Always had. I wanted the kind of approval he’d given Kane. The kind of approval he might have given Dare, if my brother had survived. The kind of approval I’d once had from him, but lost for some reason I’d never understood.

He liked to toss me a bone every now and then when I killed an other-worlder, but that was about it. Even then I only received a weak smile and an unemotional, “You did okay.”

“You need your head examined, Mia,” I muttered to myself as I picked up the earpiece. “Dad,” I told the speaker and listened as the systematic ringing began.

My stomach churned with dread as I placed the small, fitted receptor in my ear. I could face a group of treacherous aliens and smile. Sometimes I even anticipated a fight. But I could not face my father without becoming a little girl again: nervous, desperate. Sad.

On the seventh ring, he barked a gruff hello.

“Hey, Dad. It’s me.” I winced at the neediness in my tone.

“Where have you been?” he asked, his unemotional self.

“I had an emergency at work.”

“You disrespected your brother by not attending his memorial. You know that, don’t you?”

“I know, but I’m trying to hunt down an alien serial killer.”

He paused. “Any leads?”

I couldn’t discuss the case with him, so I said, “Not yet.”

“Then we have nothing left to talk about, do we?”

Abruptly, the connection severed, and the dial tone buzzed in my ear. I held the small black earpiece in front of me for a prolonged, silent moment, blinking down at it. I shrugged off my hurt. Overall, not a bad conversation. He’d taken it better than I could have hoped. Pushing out a breath, I replaced the receptor back on its wall hook.

I padded a perfectly straight course to the kitchen. No obstacles slowed my progress. Instead of a couch, I had a desk in the middle of my living room, cluttered high with papers and books.

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