Indigo Moon Read Online Free

ached and her head thumped. She was exhausted and didn’t need this. Not now.
    “There was a car crash. And a deer.” She struggled to answer. The rim of a glass pressed against her cracked lips.
    “Here, drink this. Sip slowly.”
    She took several small sips. It tasted oily and bitter, not water at all, but the coolness acted as an elixir on her parched throat.
    “There were deer…and monsters. The monsters got me.” Her voice rose in distress as she remembered this fragment of the dream. A hazy memory of waking as a child plagued with night terrors crept from the corner of her mind. This wasn’t the first time she had cried out in the dark, or dreamt of being chased by monsters.
    “Hush now. It was only a dream.” She was soothed back to the present and enfolded in comfort. A comfort she somehow knew she’d gone without as a child. She drank more from the glass.
    “Thank you,” she whispered between sips.
    “You need to rest.” Her pillows were plumped and the smell of freshly washed cotton surrounded her.
    “The drink will help with the pain.” The voice ebbed and flowed. Close then far away. She shook her head to unclog her ears. The tension eased from her body as promised. Her pain melted away. Tired and torn muscles simply floated off her aching bones, and her roiling thoughts calmed to a simmer. Her gaze drifted around the room. It was plain and bare and nothing looked familiar.
    “Where am I? And who are you?” she asked, forcing herself to focus. Her head was stuffed with the scents of lilac and lavender from the newly washed bed linen. Her sense of smell was overpowering. She struggled to sit up, refusing to fall back to sleep with so much left unanswered. “Where are my clothes? My bag? All of my things?”
    “Gas leaked into your suitcase. Everything was ruined. Lie still.” Hands held her in place against the pillows, and her last remnants of strength dissipated. Isabelle noticed the most important questions had been ignored. Where was she and who was this woman who seemed so determined to care? “You need to take your medicine, then rest.”
    “Can’t,” she mumbled, disappointed that she was, in fact, falling back to sleep. “Need to know…things.” She couldn’t stay awake any longer. Her eyelids flickered as she fought sleep. She focused on her benefactor, on her face, on her eyes. Black irises looked back at her. They shimmered with a dozen points of lamplight, like a starlit sky. Isabelle felt safe under that stare. And tired, so very tired. Her eyelids fluttered shut.
    “Who are you?” she said.
    “Isabelle. Isabelle.” A deep, urgent voice called her back. She struggled to respond.“Isabelle. You need to take all of this. Try to drink a little more.” The glass returned to her lips.
    “Who are you?” she asked, more determined, between sips of the bitter liquid. This was their trade-off. She would drink if the other would answer.
    “I’m Ren.”
    “Ren,” she whispered. The name sounded right. She savored it on her tongue. “Ren. Ren who?”
    “Ren will do for now. Drink more.”
    “Ren,” she said, and swallowed more medicine. She did know this woman…this Ren. A memory flitted by, shadowed and unsettling. It hovered on the edge of her consciousness, as ominous as a graveyard bird, its beady-eyed stare daring her to remember. All around her white sheets and eiderdown billowed up in warm, scented waves to drown her. The bird rose on its wing and disappeared, taking its cold warning with it. She knew she was sinking into a drugged sleep, that the bitter drink was taking her away to blissful nothingness. One last question surfaced before she slipped under its spell. “Who are you, Ren?”
    “I’m your world, Isabelle.” It was barely a whisper and she wondered at it, assuming she’d misheard. She let it go and slid away into sleep. The soft whisper followed her down, through tickling fronds of weed and beds of rippled sand, where it hooked her: its sharp