Looking towards the mill she decided that was where she wanted to watch the coming dawn. She would go find Patrick and they would sit together as they had in the past. Forgetting just for a moment that there was still danger about and that she should have woken someone to go with her. She was happy and confident that she was indeed pregnant, she wanted to share that happiness with her friend, with God and with the day itself. She took off towards the mill and never looked back, never even noticing the figure in the woods following her.
"Patrick?" she called out as she neared the mill, the darkened window waited for her like the cyclops of a childs fairy tale.
Silence.
"Patrick?" she said again good-naturedly, "I guess he is off doing something else. I shall just have to suffer the glories of this beautiful morning alone." She said more to herself than anything else.
As she began the climb up the spiral staircase to the loft above, the figure that had been following her from the house followed her inside. As she continued up the stairs a shadow seemed to fall upon her heart. Looking upwards into the near-darkness she saw nothing, so she dismissed the feeling as being caused by the gloom of the old mill. She ascended the remaining stairs with a light run, half-expecting to find her friend asleep at the wooden table that sat before the window.
"Patrick?" she called out once more
The loft at the top of the mill was cloaked in a strange hush, normally Patrick was up there at this hour whittling some stick of wood into something for Anya's boy, but today air in the room was as still as a pond with nothing living under it's waters. There was no sign of Patrick.
"Odd, oh, well," she said, trying hard to push down the urgent feeling she had of foreboding. Alannah continued in her mission and moved closer to the window, looking around the dark room for some sign of Patrick. "I wonder where he is, he should be here today"
Just as she reached the window and was reaching out to open the shutters, a bright light exploded before her eyes, and just as abruptly as the light invaded her head causing a piercing pain at her temples. Then everything around her went black.
Dominic woke up and Alannah was not in the bed, he got up took a shower and then went down to the glass room for breakfast.
"Good morning Mami, have you seen Alannah?"
"No son, I thought she was still in the room with you."