Cursed (The Spellbound Series, #2)

19 | Rest is for the Dead

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Chapter 19 – Rest is for the Dead

It was cold and dark.

Landon reached forward with his arms, but he could not see them. The darkness enveloped him entirely, making his skin crawl with its icy grip. The sweaty cold and the unnerving feeling of being unable to see drove him into a sense of panic. He began to struggle, and suddenly felt that not only his arms, but also his legs, were able to move without restriction. There was no solid ground below him.

He tried to stay calm, realizing that thrashing about wildly wasn't getting him anywhere. Not to mention he had no idea where exactly anywhere was. He ignored for a second the sickening sensation that was all over his body, and quickly realized that, wherever he was, he was in some kind of suspension, like underwater. Unfortunately he wasn't much of a swimmer, and as a result his only instinct was to claw and frog-leg his way in one direction, in the hopes that he was headed toward the surface.

After a dreadfully long spell of this clumsy, wading process, Landon felt a break in the surface of whatever it was he had been trapped in; his hand had felt cold as he'd swung overhead. Not the night-sweat cold of this black abyss, but the biting cold of winter's snow. He immediately gathered his limbs up, like a grasshopper spring-loading its legs for a jump, and then pushed off below himself with one great thrust. Without warning his face was blanketed with cold wind, the darkness disappearing instantly, and his body became suddenly aware of a previously absent force: gravity.

He hit the ground with a painful jolt to his abdomen, his arms and legs splayed out around him. He groaned loudly – he was sore, but he was alright. At least, he thought he was. He pushed himself off the ground, green grass under sheets of snow, and looked about as he dusted himself off. The snow-topped grass seemed to carry on forever ahead of him. But even more alarming was the black-and-gray smoke that swirled before him like a small storm.

So that's what he had been trapped in. Landon frowned at the mass of smoke, and then began to step back slowly as it started to spread out. It expanded quickly, dispersing in all directions and thinning out as it did, until it was nothing more than vapor in the wind. When the smoke had fully disappeared Landon saw that, not more than twenty feet away from him, there was another large cloud of smoke. And as soon as he saw it, he knew that there was someone inside.

Sam.

He set off towards the smoke, his feet treading heavily and sinking into the snow as he ran. He realized he was wearing his favorite shoes. Sam had warned him not to pick them instead of boots, he thought bitterly. He fought through the pull of the snow, and ran as fast he could, his warm breath swirling before his face in white puffs. He covered the distance between himself and the smoke, and then stopped abruptly as he slammed into an invisible wall.

Landon pushed against the force with all the strength of his body, but it would not give. The smoke was only two or three feet away from him now, and he could see clearly the large wisps of the smoke as they circled and overlapped and ran through each other. He narrowed his eyes at it and, in the gray amongst the black of the smoke, he caught a flash of warm olive skin and dark brown eyes.

Sam! he tried to yell as his heart rattled in its cage, but his voice froze in his throat, and his words remained a thought. He pounded his fists on the invisible force, desperate to break down the only thing that kept him from the man that he loved. Come back to me, Sam! Come back to me!

"Come back to me... Come back to me..."

"Landon!"

His eyes flew open, the world around him hazy, and he bolted upright, knocking into something hard. He heard a loud yelp and, as his vision settled into focus, he saw Hayley leaning over him, rubbing her forehead with a relieved expression. "Thank goodness," she sighed, and it sounded as though all the worry she'd ever felt was expelled in that one breath. "For a while there, I thought..."