Somewhere Over the Freaking Rainbow - By L.L. Muir Page 0,11
plants’ tassels tangling five feet above her head. Even someone looking down would have a hard time finding her, which was just what she wanted. For the first time in her existence, she was hiding.
For some reason, talking to Lucas or Jonathon was the last thing she wanted to do. There was only one other female on the Flat Springs farm, and it only took a few quick questions and a frown to know she hadn’t a clue what Skye was talking about. Whatever emotional malfunction she was having, she was having it alone.
And since when had ‘alone’ been a problem? Never, that’s when. But it was now.
She felt a sob welling in her chest, but there was no place for it to go. She even pretended to cry, making the motions, making the noise, distorting her face, but no tears came. She lifted her face and glared at what little bit of Heaven she could see.
“Why give me the feelings and no way to get rid of them?” Her whisper was eaten by the corn.
No one answered.
Suddenly, that odd loneliness eased a little as she sensed Jamison nearing—he was almost home. More proof there was something terribly wrong with her. How she wished she could run to him, tell him her troubles, let him comfort her as she knew he would...for a mortal girl. At least that weight in her chest would be shared. She wouldn’t have to carry the burden alone.
But Jamison had burdens of his own, and more to come. How could she even think of distracting him with her problems? At least that’s what the logical Skye would have said. The Skye she was at the moment screamed, “Tell him!”
But tell him what? Tell him the truth about her and she’d be telling the truth about the Somerleds—a secret well-kept for thousands of years. What right had she to tell it?
But rebellion bubbled into her thoughts. By what right had someone endowed her with emotions she was not equipped to bear? And they were emotions. Real emotions. She wasn’t capable of conjuring the storm that brewed inside her. Even with all the mortal joy and suffering she’d witnessed, from a detached distance, she never would have imagined frustration so powerful, desperation so consuming. It was a wonder the field did not go up in flames from the friction of her thoughts alone!
If she were mortal, she’d blame it all on PMS, but she couldn’t; she wasn’t pre-anything!
In all her assignments, she’d never known an emotional Somerled. Even Marcus, though he knew he would miss Skye like a daughter, had not been emotional at their parting. It had been she who had wrapped her arms around him and tried to delay the inevitable.
And her inevitable moment was coming. Could she hold on, suffer her emotions in silence, until they were purged from her in the process of transformation? Could she hold out another two weeks? Would she be able to walk calmly to the center of the circle? Would Jamison miss her?
Speaking of Jamison, why had he stopped? Why was he approaching from the South, instead of from Town? He still needed to pass her place to get home, and yet he wasn't moving.
She thought about resisting, about stubbornly staying in her private little lair until night fell, but curiosity pried her from her pity party. Once on her feet, she walked briskly through the field then shed her clothing just before emerging near the house.
The evening air would have cooled a mortal, but she couldn't feel it as she walked unseen around to the front yard. Two giant oaks, one on her side of the road, one on the other, reached across the asphalt to support each other thirty feet in the air. Their leaves were dulling to a lifeless green. Soon those leaves would be changing, falling, and revealing limbs threaded together like lover's fingers over the road that kept them apart. The autumn breezes would scatter those leaves into borrow pits and blow them across fields, like thousands of yellow and red love letters flung at each others' feet, then swept away.
Skye tip-toed across those lovers’ limbs and settled on a sturdy branch. Her hair was the pale green of drying leaves. Gray slanted across her face to continue the reflection of a branch. Her swinging calves and feet were blue, like the early evening sky behind her, as Jamison and the sheriff would view it beneath the entwined boughs.