Revelations by Carrie Lynn Barker Page A

of gold and amber that hung in waves all the way down to her waist. Her face was perfectly symmetrical. Well, her face was all around perfect. Her grey eyes were nearly colorless and had pupils so dark they seemed bottomless. She towered over me at five foot eleven, just like Jonas did, yet she was slim and had the greatest hour glass shape. The jeans she wore hugged her body. Her shirt did nothing less. She was striking, to say the absolute least.
    Alendra waited until I finished looking to say, “We’re glad to have you here. I hope you’ll like it. The Commune is home to all of us, and we welcome you.”
    It was a planned speech. I knew simply by the cadence of her words. Alendra intimidated me and she hated me, knowledge easily acquired by just a quick glance into her mind. She didn’t trust me. That’s why she hated me. When I stepped away from her to follow my tour guide again, I gave Alendra my best smile as she sat back down to her coffee mug. I vowed I would try really hard to make her like me, but I doubted I would ever be able to do so.
    Back to Jonas.
    He took me outside and the hot desert air hit me like a fist. I hadn’t really noticed, or maybe didn’t care about the AC running in the house. I took a harsh breath and knew I’d need to get used to this. I now lived in the desert, and this was what life in the desert was like. In time I’d come to love the desert more than any setting I would ever come across.
    Jonas held out his hand to me again and quite literally dragged me out onto the desert floor. Off to the one side of the house, I noticed a wooden shed. It was to said wooden shed he took me now.
    “How come it’s so far from the house?” I asked, knowing, from Philip’s descriptions, this was the so-called ”lab” of Humbolt and Hermione, the bovine twins.
    “Well,” Jonas began, “they used to experiment in the house, but the smell was overpowering. We made them move out here. You’ll see what I mean.” He paused and laughed. “I mean you’ll smell what I mean.”
    “Okay,” I muttered.
    With that said but unexplained, Jonas knocked on the door.
    The young man who answered shocked me enough to make me take more than one step back. Even more shocking than Jonas’s sharp, pointed teeth. He only smiled and moved away so quickly to let us pass I barely got a glimpse of him. A glimpse was more than enough. What I did see were a pair of horns ringing up around his ears and a soft pair of brown eyes. He then disappeared into the darkness.
    “Hey, Humbolt,” Jonas said as he walked into the shed.
    I instantly smelled what Jonas meant. I swallowed against the thick scent, thicker to me and my sensitive nose, and quickly identifying it as decaying flesh. Humbolt reappeared behind me, and I got a better look.
    Humbolt was shy, to say the least. He was about an inch taller than me, which made him five foot five. His features were round and his big round eyes a nice, deep brown with a golden tint, almost as if flecked with gold. His thick, short cropped hair hung around his horns, which resembled those of a ram. His build was thick, much like his hair and much like the smell in the room, but he was not fat. I liked him instantly, just like Jonas.
    Then his sister, Hermione stepped forward out of the dim light. She was backlit so I couldn’t see her features very well, but she held out a hand to me. That I could easily see.
    “Hello,” she said, her voice musical and sweet. “You must be Christiana. What are you doing wandering around with Jonas? He’ll just get you lost.”
    Jonas growled from behind me. When I turned around, he smiled. “Pay no attention to her,” Jonas said. “She thinks she’s funny.”
    Hermione’s next move was to stick out her tongue at Jonas, which I totally did not expect. Then she came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder. Her fingers were thick, like sausages, with large, thick nails. Her arm, I could see, was covered in a layer of light brown hair.