She awoke with a start, sitting up straight in her bed and heaving great breaths as everything spun around her. Her room bathed in soft moonlight and the cool breeze coming in from the slightly opened window didn’t calm her down. The sheets were tangled uncomfortably with her legs but all she could concentrate on was the ringing in her ears.

Slide.

It echoed in her head, in her heart, throughout her entire body like a bullet ricocheting off titanium walls; A word with absolutely no explanation behind it, none that she could discern anyways.

With a shaky hand she ran her fingers through her damp hair, brushing it out of her face and easing herself down from the confusion of that dream.

‘Confusion. What a fucking understatement.’

Disorienting, frightening, and utterly ridiculous covered it better but even then it couldn’t define the gravity of it. The main issue being was that Ashley never dreamed. Well that wasn’t true exactly. She did dream but most of the time it consisted of either sex or hellfire; or in some cases both. This dream however, with its haunting songs, its fog, its word, it was not the regular dream of a demon in hell and she knew it all to well.

She looked to her left and noticed Cujo resting his massive head on her bed, big brown eyes staring back at her. A small whimper escaped through his nose and she smiled at him. “I’m alright. Really, I am.” She reassured him with a scratch behind his floppy ears. “But thanks for caring.”

The clock on the wall read 4:11 am. She sighed, lay back down, and willed the spinning to stop.

A blazing sun baked the streets and boulevards, making cars over heat and people more cranky than usual. All this meant for Ashley was a better chance of a tan and no need to wear a jacket.

With a sluggish stride she walked over to the chair that sat across from Aiden on the outdoor patio of some restaurant and ungracefully plopped herself down, folding her arms on the table and resting her head on top of them.

The green-eyed man looked at her with a furrowed brow, taking in her disheveled hair and exhausted aura before speaking, “You look like crap.”