1 Chapter 1 - The Voice

GOOSEBUMPS WEBBED ALONG the lengths of Aubrey Meade's arms as a shiver trekked down her spine. The pounding in her temples paused, then resumed tenfold, reducing her to broken sobs and desperate gasps. Never had the attacks been so intense.

She drew her knees up to her chest, an anchor to hold onto as another wave of skull-splitting pain crashed over her. For two hours, she laid there curled in on herself, the newly washed sheets soaked in sweat, waiting helplessly for the monster of a migraine to subside. Earlier, when she'd felt the first tremors pulse in her skull, she swallowed three pills of Motrin in an attempt to dull the pain before it began. It worked, if but a fraction.

'Let me out!' the voice hollered, ramming at some invisible wall inside her head. Aubrey groaned, gripping her knees tighter as her body rocked with the force of the invisible blow.

It would be so easy, to give in to the madness. She imagined it'd be like leaping off the high-dive: simply letting go and diving head-first into an abyss of insanity.

When she first began to hear the voice she'd merely regarded it as an unfortunate side-effect from her abduction. However, as the days turned to weeks and the weeks to months, she soon realized the error of her misjudgment. It began as a murmur, tentative at first, as if testing the waters for danger, whispering single phrases that would echo in the recesses of her mind. As the weeks passed, the voice grew stronger, bolder, moving from one-worded phrases to complete sentences, asking questions Aubrey had not been inclined to answer. Yet, as she'd later discovered, ignoring the voice had been a mistake.

Once emitted from the clinic, and she was free to leave Clan Blackstone, the voice had retaliated, demanding release whilst pressing down on her brain that Aubrey had been certain her skull would split. She'd nearly gone back to the docs but had decided against it—the last thing she needed at the end of her recovery was to be put back into rehabilitation. Instead, before she left Clan Blackstone to return to the States, she'd asked the lead physician, Dr. Ahlbrand, if she could prescribe Aubrey some painkillers for her newfound migraines.

Now here she lay, five months later—six months since her abduction and immediate rescue—already wishing she had swallowed her pride and told the good doctor of her affliction.

As the pulsing began to subside, the voice losing its bluster, it murmured, 'You can't get rid of me... We are one and the same... I am already a part of you...,' before vanishing into the recesses of her mind.

Aubrey lay there, catching her breath, suddenly cold. Her body trembled from the aftershocks of the mental attack. All at once, she felt dizzy and sick, the contents of her stomach gurgling at the back of her throat. When the shivering finally ceded, her body still in the growing darkness of the evening, she rolled to her back and stared up at the ceiling fan above. Then, as if the flood gate had been lifted, she cried, loud, gut-wrenching sobs that reached down to her chest and squeezed.

God, she was stupid! She couldn't live like this, day by day awaiting another attack from the voice only she could hear. Why hadn't she told them?

'Because you couldn't bear their pity.'

It hadn't been Aubrey the rogues were after those months ago back in March. Having traveled to Northumberland, to the Blackstone Clan, to celebrate the mating ceremony of their brother Jonas, Aubrey and her sister Lila had shared a cabin with the clan leader, Graham. It hadn't taken long for Aubrey to realize that the closeness between her sister and the clan leader was more than mere courtesy and cool politeness. In fact, she'd like to forget just how close the lovebirds were, the memory of their intimate embrace still fresh in her mind.

While she'd known there was a percentage, though small, of dragon-shifters and humans who despised the intermingling of both species, she hadn't realized how much of a threat they stood against the majority. Call it naivete or a false sense of security but, until she'd been taken, she hadn't thought anything could—or would—happen to her.

It had been a blitz attack. All she could remember of the actual occurrence was: one moment she was reaching for a glass, the next a sharp pain to the back of her head before she'd succumbed to the blackness. When next she woke, she lay strapped to a gurney, multiple tubes attached to her arms. Even now, whenever she closed her eyes, she could hear the faint ringing reverberate through her ears, the dank wet smell of the underground facility she (and the others the rogues had captured) had been held in. There had been voices on the other side of the screen, loud and angry. Through the haze, she'd only been able to catch snippets of the angry exchange: "got...wrong sister..."

To this day, Aubrey knew not how long she'd been held captive there and even less on how she'd been rescued; it had been hard to keep track of the days when one moment they were draining her of blood, then the next giving her a transfusion. On and off, it had been a ritual of sorts: drain her in the morning, only to pump her back up in the evening.

All she remembered the night of her rescue—had it been it night? She'd always assumed it had been night—was a roar and a pair of murderous silver eyes glaring back at her.

As the pulsing ceased in her skull, the aftermath of the attack began to take its toll. Her eyes grew heavy until she could do nothing more than allow sleep to take her.