Destiny's Revenge (Destiny Series - Book 2) by Straight, Nancy (novels in english .TXT) 📗

again. I was with you day and night for a year. I pleaded with you to come back, I prayed, I would have done anything. Then I saw an old man crying in the nursing home because his grandson had been killed in Afghanistan. I felt if I couldn’t help you, I could at least help someone. I had been a reservist in the Navy for a few years after high school to help pay for college so I called the Navy recruiter and asked if I could go active for a little while. I signed on for a year thinking I could get past some of the guilt if I could help someone.” He bowed his head, “It turns out it didn’t matter how many people I helped, the guilt still consumed me. So I finished my time and came back. The last thing I expected to see was you up and moving around like nothing had even happened.” He took my hand in his, “You have to know I never would have left if I had known there was even a remote chance that you would recover.”

I squeezed Max’s hand and nodded. “Everyone told me the same thing. Max, I don’t blame you for anything. I want you to know there was absolutely nothing you could have done.”

We stayed silent for a long time. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and I could feel my pulse picking up speed. The last thing I wanted to do was relive the incident again. As bad as it was for me, at least I don’t remember what it did to me, not really.

He finally broke the silence, talking but more just to get it off his chest, not really talking to me. “I had caught Ursula, and I was on my way back. I couldn’t have been more than a mile away. I could hear you screaming.” A tear rolled off his cheek; he wiped it away hard. “I heard you calling for me – screaming for me to help you. I knew you were in trouble. It was the most terrifying, blood-curdling scream I’ve ever heard. I let go of Ursula and rode as hard as I could. You were screaming for a couple minutes solid, then just as I was approaching the clearing to the campsite, nothing. You went silent. It was so dark I couldn’t see you. I called to you. You didn’t make a sound, not a word. When I finally found you, it looked like you had been stuffed behind a bush. I could hear blood in your lungs. Your body was ripped to shreds, deep gashes everywhere with blood oozing out.” Max put his face in his hands, not speaking for several minutes, just sobbing silently. I leaned over to put my arms around him, but he wouldn’t lift his face, needing to hide his grief from me.

After what seemed like forever, he continued. “You must have put up one hell of a fight. By the time I found you, it’s like you were just gone. Your eyes were glazed over. I was pretty sure you wouldn’t make the life flight to the hospital. To this day, I still don’t know how you did. The fact that you were alive was more than I thought I deserved. I prayed to God, to Allah, to Jehovah, heck I may have even sneaked Buddha in there. I prayed that if you could just live, I could make it up to you. You lived, but I wasn’t strong enough to stay with you. I told myself it was better to help strangers than to sit and watch you die, so I left. Then you were awake and alive, and I wasn’t there for you again. I guess what I’m trying to say is I failed you twice; I don’t ever want to fail you again.” His quiet sobs turned into loud uncontrollable wails as he pressed himself into me.

His guilt was deeper than I could have imagined in my worst nightmare. I tried to comfort him, telling him it wasn’t his fault, that there was nothing he could have done, but nothing I said could ease his regret. Every kind word I had only made him cry more. I sat there on the ground with my arms around him, trying to think of a way to ease his pain. I knew no matter what I said, it wouldn’t ease the ache he was feeling, so I just sat there crying with him.

After the sorrow seemed to subside a little, I said flatly what Rewsna had told me. “I was targeted by a beast. He was waiting for an opportunity for me to be alone so he could attack me. If it hadn’t been on the mountain, it might have been in a park or my parents’ back yard. The circumstances aren’t all that important: he was going to attack no matter what.”

The torture was still evident on his face, but he was finally composed enough to speak, “So this thing, Rewsna told you it was targeting you? Why?”

“I’m not a hundred percent sure, but Rewsna said it saw me as some kind of threat.” Max looked at me as if he needed to process, and I didn’t wait for a question. “I know you’re pretty decent about my weird stuff, but I do have something else to tell you. I guess when I escaped from this Beast, I took a piece of it with me, kind of.”

Max’s eyes got wide and a confused expression flashed across his face. I continued, “You know how I can tell when someone is lying to me, and I get weird vibes from people sometimes?” Max nodded. He had witnessed these skills first hand. “Now I can kind of see things. I know I told you about dreaming about you before. It’s a little hard to explain, but I can project myself away from my body now.”

He didn’t say a word. I could see