Sapphires and Desires (The Gem Fairy Series Book 1) Read online

  Sapphires and Desires

  The Gem Fairy Series: Book 1

  By Tarisa Marie

  Copyright © 2015 Tarisa Marie

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design, texts and illustrations: copyright © 2015 by Tarisa Marie.

  “You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

  - Winston Churchill

  Prologue

  Dear Diary,

  Hi, I’m Laytah. This is my first…er…diary entry. I’ve always thought that diaries were kind of tacky. You know, writing all your feelings down in a book and all, but my cousin, Geoff, thinks it’ll be good for me and truthfully I’m about ready to try anything in order to get rid of all of this anxiety and depression. Before you ask, no, I haven’t seen a councilor; although, I know I should’ve done so many years ago. I probably should’ve first seen one about eighteen years ago, around the time that I was kidnapped, don’t worry I was returned to my parents a few hours later haha… Okay, soooo not actually funny but if you don’t laugh, you cry, and I definitely pick laughing over crying. Realistically I should’ve probably seen a councilor before I was kidnapped, you know, around the time when I started rambling to my parents about these memories that I was having which I was convinced were 100% real but could only possibly be my imagination doing back flips. If anything, I probably should’ve went to a councilor after I watched my parents die in a horrific car accident when I was four years old. But…again…I didn’t.

  So now, here I am today, messed up, depressed, and a ticking anxiety bomb about to explode at any given moment. I guess you could say I’m pretty messed up.

  Sure my life hasn’t been all bad though. I have my cousin Geoff, and his mom, my aunt, who practically raised me. I don’t know where I’d be without them. After my parents died, I probably would’ve been thrown into the system and passed around from family to family like a damn volleyball. So I’m very grateful for my aunt, beyond grateful, actually. When she welcomed me into her house she was only 19 years old, single, and had just given birth to Geoff. I don’t know how she did it. I owe her everything. Aunt Carol was adopted by my grandparents from birth and isn’t technically blood related to me but we share the same sapphire blue eyes and light blonde hair. I consider her a mother to me. I barely remember my real mom. The only memory I have that really stands out is not a pleasant one, it is of the car accident, her terrified face as our car fell towards the icy river…and well the sight of her and my father’s blood mixing with the river water and making it this murky red colour. Anything else I remember of her or my father is fuzzy to say the least, seen through a small child’s eyes is why, I suppose. So I can’t say that I really miss my parents because as bad as it sounds, I barely remember them. And as much as I wish they could’ve been around to watch me grow up, if they had, I would’ve grown up hours away from Carol and Geoff, I wouldn’t know them the way I do now.

  I’m not saying that I’m happy that my parents died, it kills me every day knowing that I survived and they didn’t. Each day I hear their screams and recall the bloody water inside of the car. It’s like living in my own personal hell. A tragedy like that doesn’t leave you. Ever.

  Even though my birth parents are strangers to me, I wish I could know them. There are so many things that I wish I could ask them. Okay, you know what? This really isn’t helping, in fact. It’s only making me feel worse. Enough about my parents, why don’t we talk about…hmm…school? Ah, that reminds me, I have a test tomorrow morning that I haven’t even started studying for. So I guess this is all I can tell you for now, not much I know, I haven’t even started on many of my problems, but I have to go to study. Don’t worry though, you’ll be hearing lots from me in the next while, while I dive into the hobby of diary writing and pray to god that it actually helps me and isn’t just a big waste of my time. So goodnight, Mr. Diary. Wait, are you a man or a woman? Do I name you? Or is that weird? Ah, forget it, I’m losing it. Sweet Dreams.

  Chapter One

  For the third night in a row I wake up screaming. I’m 22 years old and still have night terrors. The dream is usually the same. I can’t even really say that it’s even a dream because it’s not, it’s a memory. The memory is of the car accident my parents and I were in when I was four years old.

  I get out of my bed groggily and turn on the light. Yeah, yeah call me a baby but I hate the dark. It scares me. I hate not being able to see. It drives me absolutely mad. I take a deep breath and switch on my laptop. I can’t go back to bed because as soon as I close my eyes the memory of my mom’s screams, the blood, and the freezing river water will all come back to me as if I’d never woken up. I pull up my e-copy of the ‘Philadelphia Sun’ newspaper to brush up on some of the local news.

  I tell myself that I’ll have to get to bed soon if I want to pass this damn final exam I have at 8 o’clock in the morning. Man oh man university sucks. I can’t wait to start working and move on with my life. And it doesn’t help that I’m going to school almost five hundred kilometers from my hometown in Michigan. Why I didn’t stay in Michigan for university is a long story. Okay, it’s not long, I just don’t really know the answer. It’s all so stupid really. Growing up, I’d always wanted to go Philadelphia, I had some strange obsession with it. I’d begged my aunt to take me to see it a million times throughout the years but she could never afford to take me. Once I grew up and finally got here though, I realized that I absolutely hated it. To this day I still do hate it. Now four years since my initial arrival in Philly, I am about to graduate and get the heck outta here.

  I flip through the pages of the newspaper sleepily. I barely skim most of the pages. I am easily put into a state of boredom and so I only read something when the headline catches my eye which usually doesn’t happen until the entertainment section. After a couple minutes of flipping, nothing seems to catch my eye. I get up and grab a banana from my bedside table, open it and shove it in my mouth.

  “Hello?!” I hear a man’s voice out in the hallway. I look at my clock, it’s the middle of the night but this is a university. Probably some drunk kid getting back from the bar. Then again, why would he be in the girl’s dorm? “Can anybody see me? I think I’m invisible! Hello?!” He shouts. How has no one came out and yelled at him yet. Will it have to be me?

  “Hellllloooooooo.” His voice sounds again. Do I dare go yell at him? What if he’s some kind of sexual predator and has a gun or something? I mean really. Why else would he be in the girl’s dorm at this time? Booty call maybe. Maybe he showed up drunk to his girlfriend’s door and she kicked him out. I would. I hate drunken idiots.

  I rashly make up my mind and swing open my door. I look both ways down the hallway. No one. He must’ve finally left our floor and continued on to harass a different one. Just as I am about to close my door, there is big bang down the hall, like the sound of a gunshot. Out of instinct, I slam my door shut thinking that our dorm is under attack by a shooter or something. My heart hammers in my chest.

  The dorm is completely silent. No opening doors, no screaming, maybe everyone has the same idea as me and has decided to stay in their rooms and pretend they’re not there.

  After a few more moments of silence I take a look through the peep hole in my door and glance around. For as far as my peep hole will let me see, there’s no one in the hall. Being the idiot I am, I crack open my door and take another look around. Still, no one. I take a step outside into the hallway. No one. Am I losing it? Still dreaming?

  I look at the slits under all of the other dorm doors. They’re all black, as though the lights are out. Had no one
else heard the gun shot sound? I mean it was so loud how could it not have woken the whole building, let alone this floor?

  “Hello?” The male voice says again, this time far too close for my comfort, sounding only inches away from my ear. I hold back a scream and step back into my room, slamming the door. “Can you hear me, miss?”

  Through my door I shout, “What do you want? I’ll call the cops!”

  The reply is a deep, eerie chuckle.

  I bring my left hand up to tuck a stray strand of hair behind my ear, when I do this my hand lightly brushes my forehead. My forehead is wet, sweaty, like I’ve just ran a marathon. Gross. I use the sleeve of my shirt to wipe off the dampness. I reach for my phone on my bed and begin to dial the res security number which is on the poster behind my door. Before I can get all the numbers typed in, my door swings open, hitting me and knocking me down onto my butt. My heart pounds in my chest and I feel like puking.

  I expect to see a big burly, scary man walking into my room but nothing is there. This time I’m not so quick to be fooled. I kick the door back as hard as I can and sure enough it seems to hit nothing and bounces back towards me. I hold in a scream. Am I seeing a ghost? Well, not seeing, but you know what I mean.

  I feel something cold brush against my cheek and I begin throwing punches and kicks in every direction trying to hit something.

  “Of course you can hear me. You’re one of them, aren’t you? You almost look like…but that’s….impossible.” The rough voice speculates with a tone of interest. “Ah…not impossible. Smart.”

  Then everything goes black.

  My eyes spring open, startled, and a loud ‘beeping’ fills my ears. My alarm clock. I cuss. Is it already morning? Did I really fall asleep for several hours? Great. It feels like I’ve barely slept.

  I get up out of bed feeling groggy and stiff. I stretch and throw off all of my clothes. By now I’m as cranky as a mother bear. I’m not a morning person. At all.

  Something then comes back to me. A terrifying dream about a ghost. God, I had to stop eating before bed. I roll my eyes. If I had a nickel for every nightmare I’ve had, I’d be the richest person alive.

  I gather up my books and throw them into my bag. I go to grab my cell phone from my bed but it’s not there. Annoyed, I begin searching my covers and underneath my bed. It’s nowhere to be found. I do though, find half an uneaten banana that I don’t remember eating on the floor by the foot of my bed. I throw it in the garbage and check the bathroom for my phone. Maybe I’d gotten up in the middle of the night to pee and it somehow ended up in there. Nope. And yes, I do occasionally sleep walk.

  A moment from my latest nightmare surfaces and I remember my door swinging open and falling to my butt, sending my phone flying underneath my desk. Before thinking, I glance under my desk and sure enough, there is my phone. But that was a dream not a memory. It couldn’t have possibly really happened. Suddenly, I realize that the half-eaten banana is also explained by the dream. I almost puke as I put the pieces together. There’s no way that I believe in ghosts. Do I?

  I wobble sleepily over to my laptop and lift the lid. The article I was reading pops up just how I’d left it earlier in my dream. I sigh. I must be losing it. Wait until Geoff hears about this one. He might check me into the nuthouse this time. I mean, I’ve been known to sleep walk and dream while doing so. Once, for example, I dreamt I was making pie and woke up standing in the kitchen holding a cup of flour. This wasn’t so far off. But I don’t have time to dwell on it right now, it’ll have to be done later. I’m late for class.

  Once I have my shit together I exit my dorm room and head down the hall that’s attached to the university, my backpack hastily thrown over my shoulder. In the hallway I meet my cousin and best friend Geoff O’Malley who meets me in the same place at the same time every morning before class. Geoff is four years younger than me, he’s a first year and obviously not a female so he lives in a separate dorm tower than me although all the dorms are attached by a single hallway.

  When my family was in that tragic car accident all those years ago, we were on our way to meet Geoff, my aunt’s newborn baby. So I guess you could say that he isn’t just my cousin and best friend, but also my little brother. I’ve been around his whole life and even though we’re not blood related, we’re so alike that we could be twins.

  He’s distracted by his cellphone and hasn’t noticed me yet so I stick my finger in my mouth and the shove it into his ear.

  “Aww! Gross, Laytah! Seriously?” He cries shoving his phone into his pocket and using the front of his shirt to dig the spit out of his ear.

  I laugh.

  “That’s sick. I’m gonna get you back later you know,” he laughs with me.

  I’m not scared, he’s not near as stealthy as I am.

  “You ready for the test?” he asks eagerly. I’m sure he was up all night studying where as I was definitely not, I was having nightmares. I guess that’s one difference between us, he’s a studier, and I’m definitely not.

  “What do you think?” I say all snarky.

  He laughs.

  “I had the dream again last night, thirteen nights in a row and counting. It’s the longest streak of it I’ve had in a couple years. The last three nights have been so intense that they’ve actually woken me up.” I admit.

  “Jeeze,” he supplies. “Well, I really think you should go see one of the councilors here, they’re free and I mean you really shouldn’t be having creepy flashbacks from something that happened almost twenty years ago. I know I’ve said this like a thousand times…or more…but seriously, go get help.”

  He’s given me variations of this speech for my whole life and I’ve never went to get help so I don’t know why he keeps trying.

  I don’t say anything and he changes the subject to his latest humanities class project as we begin walking to class. Something about a slide show presentation or something, I try to listen but just keep zoning out and thinking about last night, I eventually just end up nodding now and then to make him think that I’m listening.

  I keep thinking about the voice from last night, the door swinging open by itself, and then this morning, how it all seemed to be somewhat real. I mean the banana and the phone, what are the chances? I find myself unable to pay attention to what Geoff is saying. Soon my head begins to hurt and I find my nose to be a little runny. I grab the pack of tissue I keep in my jacket pocket and blow my nose into one. When I pull it away from my nose it’s bloody. Hmm, the air must be dry today. Gross. I never get nosebleeds, Geoff is usually the one that gets them.

  “Oh yuck, Laytah,” Geoff says pulling hand sanitizer from his own pocket. “Here, use this crap,” he murmurs drenching my hands in it. What a germophobe.

  “Thanks.”

  “Whoa, you look pale,” Geoff says throwing his hand up to my forehead.

  “I must be getting sick. Can you get nosebleeds from having a cold?” I ask while tearing open my backpack to find my cold medicine. Sure enough I’ll be half through the test and have to leave because I’m so ill.

  “I don’t know, I’m in general studies not med school, but probably.”

  “Great, right before finals,” I complain as we turn into our classroom.

  ‘Cultural Studies’ is the only class that Geoff and I have together. I needed an elective last minute due to one of my classes being cancelled and he forgot to sign up for his classes before they all filled up so we decided to take cultural studies together although neither of us is really interested in it. Obviously not many were interested in it since it was the last class to fill up.

  To tell you the truth, we hardly even go to this class. We usually go for coffee or sleep in instead. The class is blatantly boring and pretty straight forward if you read the text book, not to mention that it’s far too early in the morning for our tastes. Easy I say, yet I suck at it. Who am I trying to kid? It’s not hard but it’s so boring that I can’t learn any of the material.

  “You gonna be
able to manage?” Geoff asks, eyeing me as if I’m dying or something.

  I nod and we both head to our assigned seats.

  You’d think that in post-secondary you’d be able to have the freedom of picking your own place to sit. Not in this class, another reason why I hate it.

  I glance up at the clock at the front of the room. We’re just in time and it isn’t long before our professor starts handing out the exams and giving us the ‘test speech’.

  “This test is meant to be completed alone, there will be no copying, asking questions, or other interactions. It is due at the end of class when you will flip it over where you sit and leave the room. There should be nothing on your desk while you write, please keep all cell phones in your backpacks or hand them in to me at the front here. You may begin.” The professor, a balding man in his sixties, instructs.

  The test takes me about an hour and Geoff half an hour. I know he’s waiting for me outside the classroom and so I try and hurry, to no avail.

  When I finally finish I flip to the front and print my name on it along with my student number. Then I quickly flip through the pages of the test to make sure I didn’t miss any questions. When I’m about halfway done flipping through it, I realize that I forgot a whole section of questions that I skipped because I didn’t understand them.

  I cuss silently and look at the clock. I’m pretty well out of time.

  Tired, sick, irritated from the test, stressed out from exams, and tormented by my night I stand up and flip over my test uncompleted and leave the room. You know how I said that this class is pretty straight forward? Well, I swear it is. I only suck at it because I don’t study, don’t review the notes, and don’t listen in class probably because I never go to this class, so it’s 100% my fault that I’m probably going to fail it. Geoff is going to be so mad when I tell him my mark once it’s done being assessed.