HDMGF Book 2- Part 6

“Sir… are you okay?” A store employee wondered. Suddenly, I forgot what was so funny, and who I was talking to.”

"Uh… yeah… I-I’m fine. Excuse me.” I said with my head filled with fog. I left the store, and the bread behind, then went out and sat in my car with the door open. “Suma… Suma something’s- somethings not…” I said trying to contact her, but my head was spinning, and throbbing too much for me to focus. “Suma, can you hear me?” I said and fell to the ground, that the last thing I remember for a while.

Some time later, I woke up with a throbbing pain in my head, and a bright light in my eyes. “Uhg.” I groaned.

“Mr. Vandal, you’re awake; excellent. Are you okay?” A voice said.

“My head hurts.” I said. “What… uh… what happened.” I moaned as I slowly opened my eyes. I tried moving around, but that only made the pain in my head worse, so I stopped.

“It seems you fell and hit your head sir. What’s the last thing you remember?” The voice came close enough to see that it was coming from a doctor.

“Where am I? Is this a hospital?” I wondered.

“Yes sir. You collapsed getting into your car. A store employee called 999 for you.” The doctor said.

“My mum, I was going to see her.” I said, my mind in a confused fog.

“Yes, we already contacted her. She is on the way now.” The doctor said. “Mr. Vandal, do you have any idea what may have caused your collapse?”

“It was the flaming man, the figure of flame. He did this.” I said, at the time not realizing what I was saying.

“Hallucinations, he may have head trauma.” The doctor said. At first, I thought she was talking to me, but after the fog left my brain, I realized she was probably talking to a nurse who was somewhere I couldn’t see. “Schedule a CT and a psych eval.” I don’t remember much of what happened for the next ten minutes, mostly because of the haze, partially because it was just the doctor talking to the nurse about how I was probably on drugs and I needed a “tox screen”. Soon, my mum burst into my room crying, shoved past the doctor, nearly knocking her over, and hugged me.

“JAKE! Thank goodness you’re okay! What happened? Are you hurt? What happened?!” Mum screamed as tears ran down her face. She hugged me so hard I heard something pop, and not in a good way, in a “cry out in pain” kinda way; which is exactly what I did.

“AH! MUM, MY BACK!” I yelped.

Mum turned to the doctor, “What happened to him?”

The doctor, who was rubbing her shoulder after having been knocked into the wall by the charging bull that was my mum, answered. “We aren’t sure yet. He fell unconscious and may have hit his head. He was delirious when he first woke up. He was talking about flaming men.” Mum’s eyes went wide, then she looked at me confused and worried, but soon her eyes narrowed, and I felt my butt cheeks pucker when I realized that she had realized what I didn’t what her to ever figure out… I was keeping things from her.

She turned back to the doctor with a mask of friendliness and pleasantness draped over her true feelings. “Thank you for taking care of him, how long will the tests take?”

“Um… about six hours total.” The doctor answered.

“Thank you, I will wait here with him.” Mum told her. As soon as the doctor and nurse left, Mum’s mask came off. “Jake…”

“Yeah?” I asked nervously.

“Who is the flaming man?” A cold calm dripped from her voice, the likes of which I hadn’t heard since that one time she caught me smoking in high school. I knew what that eerie calm meant… bad things.

“Um, nobody Mum. I was just having a bad dream and was-”

“Jake…” She looked at me with glare that almost begged me to try and lie to her. Sometimes my mum is really unnerving.

“Okay, so I met this guy. He did something to my head and I have been seeing things, but this was the first time I have passed out.” I confessed, talking quite quickly.

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Suma’s POV

I was in my roost, nearly asleep, when I heard a voice. It was far away, but calling to me. It sounded like Zachariah, my familiar. I flew towards the voice, I was soaring high in the sky, and the voice was growing louder as it called out for me. “Ambos… Ambos!” Finally, I saw Zachariah. He was practicing in a field with his sword; like always. I landed on a rock next to a small sapling to talk to him.

“Hello, Zachariah” I said.

“Hello, Ambos. Did you need something?”

“The Royal Court wants to see us.”

“To scold us again?” He groaned and used a reverse summons to send his weapon away.

“Most likely, but maybe we will get lucky and they will just kill us instead.”

“Better than sitting through another of their long-winded lectures.” He joked. “Do you know what it is about?”

“Do you really need to ask?” I wondered.

“Let me guess: they once again disagree with how I used my magic in battle.” He shook his head. “We are at war, does it really matter how the enemy dies, so long as they do?”

“I believe they are more concerned with that new spell you used in the last battle, actually. The final one you used that looked like a cloud of fog.” I guessed.

“I wonder if they will make it another of my, Forbidden Spells?” He stood up. “What do you think Ambos? Was I wrong to use it?”

“I thought the spell was rather interesting, and your application of it was superb.” I answered.

“You know what I’m asking, Ambos.”

“And you know that I do not care how the enemy dies. Watching them turn on each other like they did… it is what they deserve.” Zachariah nodded his head and looked towards the sky for a moment.

“Alright then, let’s go get into trouble again, Ambos.” He said.

“Yes, let’s-” I started to say, but was interrupted by yelling.

“SUMA!” I jerked awake and saw Nine standing over me. “Finally, you sleep deeply, don’t you? It’s time to wake up for training.”