Facebook? She opened her eyes. Something about Facebook. What about it? She didn’t check the site a lot and hadn’t thought about it much over the last week. She tried to recall if she’d seen anything from Wil on Facebook that night but an uncomfortable sensation in her chest distracted her. It felt tight. She shifted absently and tried to focus. Facebook. She’d probably been checking anything she could think of to seek clues to his whereabouts.
Her chest tightened further, her breathing becoming difficult, and she stood up in alarm. What was going on? She’d had a couple of episodes of passing out soon after the last weekend but hadn’t felt any discomfort since. She breathed deeply, trying to dispel it.
It didn’t work. She was beginning to feel light-headed. A rush of panic assailed her. Was she losing her powers? If so, would reality notice her again and kill her properly?
The last time she had passed out she’d been in bed. Now the panic and crushing feeling in her chest brought back the frightening moments before she’d succumbed to the unconsciousness that was again beginning to darken her vision. She’d been searching her memory that time as well in an attempt to recover her lost memories.
She fought against it, reeling into the living room where she clutched the mantelpiece and desperately willed herself to stay awake. It was some kind of panic button that her ‘friend’ had placed on her. It had to be. If she tried too hard to recover her memories she was stopped.
Rebellious anger blasted through her panic, a hot flash of it that pushed back the dizziness and gave her a few moments of clarity. She felt it like a loosening of a fist that had clenched her lungs; as if her will had startled it into letting go. Triumph rose in her but for only a few brief seconds. The tightness returned, implacable, and the surge in her power was lost, a sense of depletion replacing it.
She felt her knees begin to buckle and she crumpled to the carpet, desperately casting out with her mind in a last-ditch effort to feel anyone focused on her in that moment. The thoughts of strangers filled her mind like a thousand symphonies playing at once, no sense or reason to any of it, but as everything darkened she felt someone react to her, a flicker of surprise and confusion. It was all she felt, though, as the world went soft and blank.
Tags: Chapter Five