Bound by the Mist (Mists of Eria) Read Free Page A

important?
    Slowly, the events of her day came back to her. Remembering the mysterious fog that formed on the floor, she crawled on trembling hands and knees to the edge of her bed. No mist lurked in the air. Now for the floor.
    She took a deep breath and squeezed her eyes tightly shut before looking down. Nothing. There was nothing, nothing except the old harvest gold shag carpet and her bag.
    Cal’s hands covered her face. Her life was spinning from the path she’d carved. She didn’t know what anything meant, didn’t want to know. All she wanted to be was a college student in her last year, getting ready to graduate. That was her definition of normal, one she’d thought possible.
    Her mind sought solace by attempting to place these outrageous events into some semblance of a pattern. Any pattern that would tell her why control of her life, of her dreams, slipped from her fingers like too many grains of rice piled high.
    Could he be the same male—the one from the tree-lined clearing ten years ago, the one in her recurring dreams? Every part of her cried out he was. There was also the hair fetish thing. Two separate times the mist took her hair. Every time, it and her elusive hair seemed to work in tandem, actively seeking him out.
    She’d only been twelve during that first encounter with the mist, and therapy convinced her the occurrence was merely a manifestation of a psychotic mind or, at least, of an overactive one. But even that knowledge, along with a bevy of medications, had failed to stop the dreams and visions.
    Her mind had, over the years, created a fantasy world—one he inhabited. And these improbable thoughts painfully intruded when she least expected it. She’d come to believe she embellished upon her original hallucination over the years, making him more awe-inspiring than reality demanded. No being could be so handsome and so...not human. Admittedly, all the mythical beings in that clearing had been shockingly attractive.
    While she hadn’t quite understood his pull over her when she was young, she now recognized the feeling as an attraction. He drew her physically, even while dread repelled her.
    Her control of that intruding world had been fragile before, but now it was nonexistent. She no longer imagined she saw shadows of a world in the peripherals of her vision. Now they appeared before her like translucent moving pictures, astounding her with their reality. Human-like beings, all with pointed ears, populated this lush, green world. However, she only caught snatches of the images before they floated away. Surely she couldn’t imagine such a place, let alone fabricate the intricacies she saw so briefly. But memory always quickly drifted away like mist, making her doubt the veracity of her beliefs.
    Cal shook her head and withdrew her hands from her face before she straightened out of her slump. The parallels she’d drawn were neither helpful nor healthy. Madness would be her only companion down that road.
    She’d more important things to worry about such as school, her part-time job, and family. If her parents and brother suspected a relapse, they’d demand she transfer to be closer to them. Cal shuddered. Insanity, whether real or imagined, was not a priority on her list. Psychosis would just have to wait its turn like everything else.
    Throwing off the blankets, she pulled the sheets and comforter up and paused. Something was on her pillow, and the color of it tied her stomach into knots as she reached for it. Her hand paused before it reached its goal. No, impossible.
    With a shaking hand, she picked up the hair. In her palm rested reddish-brown strands that curved around longer black ones. She couldn’t be so crazy that she imagined what she held in her hand. The auburn and black strands behaved in a very peculiar manner, because no matter how many times untwined, they reunited moments later. Cal sat down with a thump on her bed, not moving for a very long time.
    Finally decided upon a