My Hockey Alpha novel Chapter 108

Nina

After Enzo picked me up off the floor, I felt my vision begin to flicker before everything went black.

I opened my eyes a few moments later to find myself back in the forest clearing. Cora was no longer sitting across from me, but as I dug my fingers into the blanket of soft red fur surrounding me, I realized now that she was laying underneath me. I sat up, looking around. My body felt light and nimble, and I could see out of both eyes now. All of the pain that had overtaken me before from Edward’s beatings was gone. My stomach, which had just been full of searing pain from Edward’s claws digging into me just moments earlier, was now fully healed without so much as a scar.

“Am I dead?” I asked as I looked around.

Cora lifted her head and shook it back and forth. “No. You’ll be fine. You’re just here for now until they fix you up.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“Enzo, and that other woman,” Cora replied. “The nurse.”

“Tiffany?”

“Mhm. She’s patching you up as we speak.”

I smiled, imagining that Tiffany was deftly fixing up my wounds. If I was going to trust anyone to take care of my injuries, it would be her. I was glad that they didn’t take me to a hospital, where the doctors would have only made my trauma worse by locking me up in another room with fluorescent lights. I stood, then, and started to walk around the forest clearing.

“Do you live here all of the time?” I asked.

Once again, Cora shook her big red head back and forth. “This isn’t real. I just live inside your head, and it seems like you’ve subconsciously taken a liking to this particular place.”

I thought back to the night that I found Justin in the forest clearing -- the night that I discovered that he had been turned into a rogue -- but this clearing didn’t look anything like that. It took several moments of racking my brain as I tried to remember where I had seen this place before to finally discover where I was.

“Oh!” I finally said out loud. “It’s the clearing that we all went camping in.”

Even though that was the very place where K had tried to drag me through the portal, I supposed that I did make some happy memories with my friends in this very spot. As I remembered my time here, the tents that we slept in slowly popped up around me like a pop-up book, followed by the campfire. It quickly turned from a scene of a bright and sunny day to a cool and quiet night, with only the fire to illuminate the camp. With the firelight flickering, Cora’s fur looked almost like it blended in with the flames as she laid beside it.

I thought even harder then, remembering the time I spent with my friends here. Just like the tents, they, too, popped up around me like a pop-up book. There was Lori and Jessica, and Matt and James, and… Enzo. They were all sitting around the fire, frozen in time like a picture. The only spot that was empty was mine, so I sat there and shut my eyes, remembering how we had played spin the bottle.

“Hey!” Jessica said, coming to life and jumping up. She picked up an empty beer bottle and shook its contents out, then held it up for everyone to see. “Who wants to play Spin the Bottle?”

Everyone was silent for a moment.

“C’mon, guys!” she said. “It’s just a game.”

“I’m down,” Matt chimed in. Lori shrugged, while James and Enzo stayed silent.

“James?” Jessica said, shaking the bottle gently. “What do you say?”

“Oh, alright,” James said, throwing his hands up in surrender. “I guess it could be fun.”

“Well, looks like we have a majority vote here,” Jessica said, setting the bottle down in the middle of the circle, right next to the fire pit. “Sorry, Nina and Enzo. You guys don’t have to play if you don’t want to.”

“I’ll play.”