Over the next few days, a cat-and-mouse game ensued between Persephone and I. But no matter what I tried, I was always the mouse and I always lost.

She seemed to enjoy coming up with new inventive ways of injuring me to the brink of death and then pouring blood on me at the last second to heal myself.

The times when she struck always varied. Sometimes I’d wake up somewhere covered in blood and then hours would go by with no sign of her. Other times I was only allowed a few minutes respite before being attacked again.

I gave up trying to run from her. She was always faster, but I never stopped fighting. Even though she always won, resisting always felt better than giving up.

Other than the near constant brutal injuries, the worst part was that I never got to sleep. The blood healing restored me to perfect health and happened so frequently that I had no need to sleep. Persephone knew this too and so the events of the last several days blurred together into one long, never-ending day of torture.

Other than fighting her, I kept trying to sense auras, but the ability continued to elude me.

This time, it had been an hour since her last attempt on my life, so I decided to take a break from practicing to go get some food.

The manor was so large that it had at least two kitchens that I knew of and several dining halls. Inside of each were orange aliens that worked as the staff and the guests. I ignored all of them and grabbed the closest source of food, which happened to be a bowl of soup with some bread.

I sat down with my food next to some aliens who didn’t look up. That was okay. A quiet meal suited me just fine.

The soup contained some vegetables that I couldn’t quite discern, but I’d long gotten past any squeamishness for alien food after the first couple of days of living here. I swallowed a spoonful of the soup and frowned. It was sweet and spicy but with a kind of burnt cinnamon aftertaste that was slightly unpleasant.

“Hey, does this soup taste funny to any of you?” I asked the aliens.

Suddenly, my muscles went slack and wouldn’t respond to my commands. I fell face first into my bowl of soup and started choking. The bowl was deep enough that I might have drowned in it, had a hand not grabbed my shoulder and thrown me back.

I coughed and wheezed several delicious lungfuls of air before I saw who’d saved me. I scowled at the orange alien in the kitchen uniform that stared down at me. This was her most humiliating attempt by far.

She responded by dumping a vial of blood on me and then said, “get back to training,” before walking away.

That was another frustrating thing about this whole situation. As a shapeshifter Persephone could take any guise, which meant being constantly on my guard. Apparently, now she’d kicked it up a notch by showing me that she can predict my movements and be there first to strike.

Humiliated, I wiped the blood and soup off my face before heading back to my bedroom. It wasn’t safer than anywhere else. I’d almost died at least seven times in there, but at least it was usually quiet and comfortable. Plus, it limited Persephone’s options.

In prior attempts, she’d kicked the door down with an axe in hand, hidden under the bed with a dagger, and once she shot me with an arrow through an open window. After that, I’d managed to find some wood and board up the windows. Logically, it seemed pointless, but the illusion of safety somehow calmed me. Plus, I knew she was unlikely to try the window again. The one thing that I could count on was that she never attacked the same way twice. Though if I had to guess, I’d think she was just varying things up to avoid getting bored.

I sat down and activated Crimson Domain. One positive aspect to this insanity was that I’d gotten a lot of practice at implementing it in a short amount of time, and now it only took me ten seconds to activate it.

Inside my own extra dimensional space, I felt a little calmer. Of course, I wasn’t safe in there either. Persephone would eventually smash through the outer wall of my domain and hurt me. No matter what I tried, there seemed to be no way of strengthening my domain to avoid the intrusions.

Still, I rededicated myself to sensing my aura until I heard a roar.

A speeding truck being driven by an evil cat slammed through my domain and ran me down.

As I lay in a broken heap, Persephone in cat form pressed her paw on the steering column. The truck’s horn played an annoying jingle as she hopped out through the hole where the windshield used to be. It may be easy for her to kill me, but I was no pushover anymore either. With my enhanced toughness, my body had wrecked the front of the truck when it collided with me. Though that wasn’t much comfort as I lay groaning on the floor.

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“Hmm, this is still taking too long,” she said. “I might have to stop going so easy on you if you don’t make progress soon.”

A twelve-ton truck had just crushed my legs and given me severe internal organ damage, and this is her going easy on me?

Persephone morphed into a man, poured some blood on me, and left to let me lick my wounds.

I had to think. I was getting nowhere with aura sense. I needed new ideas and, unable to come up with any of my own, I returned to the library. This time not to hide, but to do research.

There was an orange alien behind the front desk that I assumed was the librarian. I asked her for books on auras and how to sense them. I’d asked mostly as a joke, but to my surprise, she scribbled down the location for me on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.

I followed the instructions and found a couple of books near the back of the library that might help. One was a treatise on the metaphysical ramifications of our spirit being made physically manifest. I skimmed it but found it to be too philosophical in nature to be of any help. The next book was a children’s picture book, where the front cover featured a green, glowing baby. The language was alien, but as soon as I touched it, the language morphed into English. The title was ‘Baby’s first aura sensing.’

Had Persephone planted this here for me as a joke?

Curious, I opened it anyway and learned that the book was about teaching very small children on how to unlock their Aura Sense. Despite the insulting form the information took, I was intrigued and read on. Apparently, every living thing gives off an aura, and that every aura is unique. Even two trees that grew tall next to one another would appear to have identical auras at first glance, but on closer inspection carried minute differences. Most tree auras represented the colors at the peak of their life, so they were glowing outlines of brown and green that sort of radiated outwards.

Other living things, like animals and people, contained a sphere in the core of their bodies that represented their aura. This too would have waves radiate off of them, particularly in times of extreme emotion.

The book went to say that being immersed in nature helped and that many unlocked their aura sense, either by being surrounded by trees or in the water. I finished the last page of the book and put it back on the shelf. Its last piece of wisdom was to look deeper. To look beyond the surface.

It was still vague, but with the tip about nature was something that I was willing to try.

My first attempt involved sitting in the woods surrounded by trees. I closed my eyes and focused until I heard a rustling noise. I looked around and saw nothing but the trees. Any time I closed my eyes, the rustling would return.

Frustrated, I yelled out, “just get it over with!”

Persephone in the form of a Treant, a giant tree-like humanoid, scooped me up and threw me up into the air. I sailed out of the forest and landed in a field with multiple broken bones.

Once she’d left and I was back to normal, I tried the water next. There were no natural sources of it close by, but Samara’s estate had a giant pool with various paths that looped around the estate. Some orange aliens chose to lay on sun beds next to it while others swam or floated in the pool with a drink in their hands.

It was like they were on vacation and it made me realize that I’d never seen any kids here. I’d never asked before, but now I wondered who exactly were these people to Samara.

Not caring about decency, I tossed most of my clothes aside and dove into the water in my underwear. As the cool water enveloped me, I stayed under and focused on the closest orange alien. He was sat in an inflatable ring drinking something with a tiny umbrella in the glass.

Thanks to my Iron Lungs I could hold my breath for a quite a long time. And as I focused, I saw a shimmer of turquoise around the alien. I blinked, not sure If I’d imagined it. I kept looking until I saw it again. It was coming off of the alien. Part of their aura must be turquoise colored.

I smiled. Yes! I was finally getting close to cracking it.

A loud splash behind me cut my joy short. I turned only to see the biggest shark I’d ever seen swim towards me. The last thing I saw was its yawning mouth and row of teeth.

I screamed under the water and the other alien residents became alarmed and rushed out of the pool. The shark tore off one of my legs and an arm before spitting the rest of me back onto land.

I refused to go back into the water after that. That was worse than most of the other attacks. I shivered at the thought of being held underwater and being torn apart like that again. In fact after that, I never left the manor house again. Aside from driving into me with a truck or dropping a huge weight on me, it restricted Persephone to more human shaped methods of violence.

But there was something of value to staring at the orange aliens. Like a thread with a hint of promise, I stayed with it and observed every alien I came across until I could see the turquoise aura pattern again. It finally happened in a lounge room while a group of aliens were playing a dice game.

Suddenly, I could see that all the aliens in the room had spheres in the center of their chests that comprised orange and turquoise. As one of the aliens lost the game and slapped the table in frustration, I saw an angry orange wave radiate out of him.

I then looked down at myself. My aura was a swirling mixture of red and black, which wasn’t a surprise given what my domain ended up looking like. Short, sharp waves of red and black radiated off of me in sync with my heartbeat. To anyone with Aura Sense, I appeared anxious, which, given what I’d been through, didn’t seem unreasonable.

I looked up and saw more alien auras past the walls. I smiled. Even better than seeing auras through walls was that I could see a white one approaching the door.

It opened and a male orange alien carrying a tray of drinks entered. This man slowly made the rounds, refreshing each of the dice game player’s drinks before coming my way. As the man bent down to offer me a drink, my blood blade went for his throat.

The man stopped it with his bare hand and smiled. “Good, you’re improving. Now that you can see me coming, there should be no excuse for you not to be able to shroud your aura by tomorrow night.”

“Why? What’s tomorrow night?”

“Samara’s party,” she said before stabbing me in the chest with a broken bottle.