Fearless The King Series Book One - By Tawdra Kandle Page 0,62

nursery with me?”

I smiled against his lips but shook my head. “First, my mom is still a little jumpy after yesterday. She’s going to insist on an after-school nap, I just know it. And second, you know I’d only be a distraction if I went home with you. That’s not fair to your parents. I want them to like me, not resent me.”

Michael chuckled softly. “No way they could resent you. They might harass me, but they think you’re perfect.” He caressed my neck and rubbed his nose against mine. “Of course, I tend to agree with them.”

The glow of happiness and contentment that always appeared when I was with Michael surrounded me. I could sit in the car with him all afternoon… but reluctantly I pulled back. “You’ve got to go to work,” I reminded him.

He sighed. “I know. I’m going. I’ll call you tonight, okay?”

“Yeah…” I moved to the door again, and then turned back. “I haven’t forgotten that you owe me a conversation from yesterday. About the occult in King, and what you didn’t want to say when we were out.”

Michael nodded, his smile fading slightly. “I haven’t forgotten either. Can it wait until this weekend? You could come out to the nursery with me, and we could talk there. I’d rather it happen out of town.”

“Now you’re scaring me,” I said.

“Nothing to worry about. I’ll talk to you tonight,” he repeated. “Have a good nap.”

I rolled my eyes at him as he drove away.

My mind was racing, and I tried to calm down. Where would Amber be right now? And would she believe me even if I did find her?

The first thought that leapt into my mind was: find Michael. He’d know what to do. Where would he be? What class did he have this period?

And why was it so dark if we were in the middle of the school day?

With a jerk and cry, I came awake, still breathless, my heart racing. It was a dream. Just a dream. But it had seemed so real. I tried to remember what I could of the content, beyond the terror that had overtaken me near the end. There was something to do with Amber. Somehow in the dream I knew she was in grave danger, and no one could help her but me. I recalled feeling helpless as I tried to figure out what to do.

The bedside clock read 3:17. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and tried to stop the shaking in my arms.

Could my subconscious be trying to tell me something? It wasn’t strange that I would be dreaming about the Amber situation, given that Michael and I had spent a good part of the day discussing her. But what I had dreamed seemed not so much a memory or the jumbled flotsam of the day as it did… something else.

I was wide awake and not a little spooked. Jumping out of bed, I turned on the bedside light, which instantly comforted me a little. My room was exactly as it should be, everything in place. I grabbed my laptop from the desk and climbed back under the covers. It was too quiet, I decided, so I found some headphones in the drawer next to my bed, plugged them into my computer and flicked the music onto shuffle. Perfect.

The music reminded me of the chant that I had heard coming from Nell’s head, right before the scary stuff started. Michael had suggested it might be helpful to know more about it, and I hadn’t followed up on that yet. I opened the Internet to my favorite search engine, and then paused. What to enter? Weird chanting? I thought about it for a few seconds before I typed in, “Chanting and the occult”.

Over two hundred thousand options appeared. My eyes widened. Most of the links were new age information pieces, which of course it might have been… maybe Nell was into crystals and all that? Somehow it didn’t seem likely to me. These seemed to be mostly innocuous articles about lightness and goodness and peace, and none of those applied to Nell.

About halfway down the first page, I saw a simple line reading “The Occult and Music/Chanting”. I clicked on it, scrolled down through several pages of musical history, skimming it to see that nothing related to what I had heard. Finally, a line caught my eye: Chanting can be an integral part of spell casting and the working of magiks. Most spell chanting