The Legend of the Firewalker Read Online Free

was l abored. 
    Frantically, he looked around the room only to be caught off guard by the piercingly bright sunlight that crept through the curtains to his bedroom window. Groggy, he shielded his eyes, as faint memories of the dream that had just terrified him began to replay in his mind. Who is she? he wondered. And why am I having the same dream about her over and over?
    Every night since return ing home from school for summer, he has dreamed about her. The dreams have become so frequent that Nathan stopped counting the number of times in which he awoke in the dead of night drenched with sweat. For hours, he would stay awake, trying to recall some small detail about her, to identify her, retracing her steps.
    Nathan shivered. He always remembered her tousled brown hair and the blood that glowed brightly against her fair skin. “It all seems so real,” he murmured. He also r emembered her flailing arms as she fought desperately against an unseen attacker. “This just can’t be real,” he reasoned. 
    Like he did on most nights after awakening in the dar kness, he sat in bed recalling the scratches and blood on her, and trying hard to remember from whom she’d been defending herself.
    Suddenly, Nathan shivered again. He didn’t want to a dmit what his mind had been circling for weeks. “The scratches,” he muttered. “There were so many of them, and they appeared all at once. She just couldn’t keep up her defense.” He slowly shook his head. “It was like she was overwhelmed, as if she was fighting against more than one person.”
    He looked down and was drawn to the tingling sensation in his hands. The sensation in his palms was just as frequent as his dreams, and he found it equally annoying. The first couple of nights home, he thought maybe his hand had fallen asleep, that he was just sleeping wrong. It wasn’t until both hands started having a prickly feeling that he actually co nsidered something was amiss.
    On most days he just ignored it, and it usually went away before he finished brushing his teeth. His only working the ory was that the tingling was from all the heavy weightlifting he’d been doing and that he might want to consider investing in some workout gloves. Now that he was back home, he was taking full advantage of the weight room at the Devaro Mansion. He detested using the gym at school because the weight room was always crowded. But despite that, he’d still managed to keep a somewhat consistent workout schedule. 
    Since returning home, he had also made a concentrated effort to sleep in and to avoid Lafonda Devaro as much as possible. He had managed to avoid her at school practically all year, only having to see her during the holidays, when they returned home for breaks. It was easy for him to avoid her most of the time because they lived in different houses. Nathan lived with his grandfather Rodion, in the medium-sized, two-bedroom cottage behind the main house and near the garden. His grandfather, the caretaker for the Devaro e state, maintained the grounds on the property.
    It wasn’t that he didn’t like Lafonda — they had actually been close while growing up. But once they entered high school, her new friends and their big houses, fast cars and money kind of complicated things. Although in his mind the money issue created distance between Lafonda and him, he knew he could always count on her if he ever needed her.
    The Devaro Mansion was the only home he had ever known, and the Devaros were the closest thing he had to an extended family. Without them, it would be just him and his grandfather. As far as he knew, his grandfather had always worked for them.
    It was still midmorning when he finally decided to get out of bed. Nathan’s hand prickled as he pulled back the curtains and opened the window. He took in a deep breath as the warm air rushed across his bare chest. I’m up a little earlier than usual, he thought with a sense of accomplishment. He rarely got out of bed