Me, swallowing but trying… trying to be brave: “See, Nay, it’s already all decided. I’m going with you.”
“Okay, then, we’ll be on our way,” says the feral growly one. “If you’ll put down the pokey stick and step aside, Defender.”
Back and forth the voices of Naomi and Alban go until finally he concedes with an… “Aye, give her to me, then.”
The new first-place scariest wolf: “Alright, enough of this drama... We’ve a mission to carry out.”
The Feral Growl wolf: “Ye’re going to need both our jabbers for sure to know The Potential is out. Here, take mine. I’ve got some other stuff to give to our banreen.”
Banreen—not banrigh, the word in Scottish Gaelic for queen, but close. Are these random Irish Wolves referring to Naomi as their queen? What will happen to her? To us?
Fear, like nothing I’ve ever known, consumes me as I’m stabbed with not one, but two needles at the same time. I whimper in the black.
Naomi’s voice: “It’ll be alright. Everything will be alright... No matter what happens, we’ll be all right, and I’ll figure out how to get us out of this—mmfph!”
Black.
Black.
More black.
Then, suddenly, I heaved awake with a huge inhalation… to find myself inside a glass coffin surrounded by white.
I was dead!
But I wasn’t!
I was alive!
But in some kind of heaven, enclosed in a glass box.
“Help me! Help me! Help me!”
Someone was screaming the words in my ear with a heavy THWUMP! THWUMP! THWUMP! in the background.
It was me. My screams for help hit the glass walls and echoed right back at me inside the box. And the thwumping sound was coming from my palms. Slamming against the coffin lid… to no avail.
Everyone in the new St. Ailbe village thought I was so strong. But the lid didn’t budge—not even a tiny bit.
Oh heavens! Oh heavens!What was I going to do? I’d die in here. I’d never get out?—
The sound of something popping. Like the vacuum seal on a canning jar releasing, but one hundred times louder.
Then air hissed all around, and the glass cover raised—just popped right up, like something on a spring hinge, though I could see no metal in this coffin… box…whatever it was.
The air filled with a crisp citrus smell. Lemons, ripe and ready to be picked in a space flooded with heavenly light.
I sat up, expecting to find myself in some sort of celestial lemon grove, but no…
All that sparkling white I’d woken up to turned out to be a chandelier dripping with crystals, hanging down from a high ceiling of white plaster.
I was sitting inside the coffin, on top of a long table. In some sort of modern dining room, framed by several picture windows, flooding the space with daylight.
What in the world?I began to ask myself.
Right before I saw Death himself, looming above me with a whiteboard sign in his hands that held two words:Don’t Scream.
I didn’t scream.
