Chapter 1 #2
If I didn’t know better, I’d think he cared about me. The soft tone of his voice was deceptively sweet. But it was all an act. One he’d insisted upon. Carl the kind. Carl the merciful. Carl the forgiven.
What a crock of bullshit that was.
And an even bigger crock held my own deception. I wasn’t this meek version of myself. The button-down beige and pastel clothes were echoes of a different life.
Now that he’d let me go, I counted the marks. He made it easy, lining up the neat hash marks in rows of five. Only the top line and the bottom row with its lightly scratched ghosts broke the pattern.
Sixteen and four to come.
If Carl was to be believed, he’d had a hand in those deaths.
Details on those would come in handy if I needed to blackmail him.
Yet , a part of me didn’t want to know.
If Carl had escalated his bloodlust, I was in deep trouble.
And those ambiguous final four had to remain quiet.
Because , while Carl gave the Destroyers exactly the information they needed to hunt the gang down, he hadn’t precisely done anything wrong.
And he had a point. No one narced on the Destroyers and lived.
He’d found people more diabolical than he was, and that was not only dangerous, but deadly.
What if he’s playing a game with me?
Then I’d have to play a better game is all.
He fought proxy wars by making others do his dirty work.
Carl rarely took an active role, knowing full well how a single crime could bury him.
Or ostracize him. I smiled. I’d been his downfall once.
I could do it again if he didn’t do what I needed him to do. Hopefully , before he killed me.
I needed to break free. I needed an escape.
I needed hope . But that wasn’t what grew in my heart. The spark born there was vengeance. A thirst for violence when despair becomes desperation.
The only light I could see was that after the blood donation procedure, this farce should be done.
I’d be free if everything went well. Carl had complied with all the medical orders, taken the shots to boost his stem cells, and all his tests came back perfect.
I’d made plans to move in with Beth’s family to help her focus on her recovery and to eliminate “temptation” from Carl’s life.
Hopefully , by the time she got better, I could figure out a way to return to my old self and remain out of Carl’s crosshairs.
Despite that, an invisible noose tightened around my neck. Carl had manipulated my life to fit his plans. I couldn’t trust he’d let me go. That meant I needed to give fate a little “nudge.”
A few nights later, I slipped out, prepared, but not knowing if I’d find a suitable location.
My requirements were moving water, a place to stand in the in-between, and the new moon.
I couldn’t look anything up on my laptop because Carl would find out.
I couldn’t use my phone because I wasn’t certain that Carl’s hacker hadn’t touched that, too.
The weather got worse as I crossed the bridge. A late hurricane drove moisture up the eastern seaboard and despite breaking up over twenty hours ago, the clouds churned ominously.
But that worked in my favor. The threat of more rain kept sane folk inside.
A flash of lightning lit up the sky as I drove west along a tributary to the Susquehanna .
The flash bounced behind the clouds, giving a soft glow to the surroundings.
In that brief reprieve to the gloom, I spotted a chained driveway.
I stopped the car. It was a boat launch. Perfect for what I needed.
I unhooked the chain and drove in. I hid the car from view behind a monstrous bank of drooping gooseberry bushes.
The dense canvas of my coat barely snagged as I slipped through a gauntlet of thorny brush to reach a broken dock that jutted into the river.
The right side had solid planks that creaked as I walked onto them.
I took the jacket and my dress off to face nature wearing nothing but the sky.
Then came the hard part. Unbraiding my hair.
And meditating.
I always had problems with that part. My spirit was too wild and volatile to reach calm. I was at my most focused listening to the heaviest metal music complete with throaty screams and wild drum beats, not some tranquil chiming of bells or worse… silence.
Silence was deadly, like a church.
Thankfully , the wind and the water were loud. I merged with the violence easily as I prepped the spell.
I stood on the non-broken spur of the pier. There , I balanced between the land, air, water, construction, destruction, cultivated landscape, and untamed wilderness. The skies obliged sending not one, but two fast concussive bolts of searing white light from one end of the horizon to the other.
This is powerful, my soul cried .
The wind picked up, casting sticks and debris into the maelstrom.
My hair whipped around, blinding me, and binding around me. The egg in my hand had Carl’s name scribed seven times across the surface. The words inked in a mixture of wax from a black candle and the ashes of intent written in my blood.
Being a good little witch was beyond my patience.
This magic suited me much better. The strength of it coursed through me as easily as breathing.
My will focused on one thing, getting rid of that man’s influence on my life.
A single word encompassed my entire future; I was working a spell toward freedom .
I whispered the word to the egg, conveying the desired outcome of the binding into the spell.
There was no vision of how this change would unfold, only the sensation of finally owning my destiny and experiencing joy.
Maybe holding my best friend’s youngest in my lap?
Or better yet, watching that child graduate from high school and cheering almost as loud as Beth as we celebrated June’s passage into adulthood.
Yes , that would be the reality I sought.
Another sheet of lightning sizzled above me.
My hair lifted into the wind as if two unseen hands held it aloft.
I felt the magic in my bones. My heart called to it in the short span of time and space we lingered together.
It simmered in that moment of held breath, will, desire, and natural energy.
I cocked my arm back and screamed a curse into the void.
Then threw the fragile carrier of all my hopes and desires into the rushing river.
The last of the light faded as the churning water ate the splash.
The wind blew straight, wet, and cold, chilling me so quickly it sapped my energy with each sideways, stinging raindrop.
I slipped in the mud as I climbed back onto the bank, still naked, and drenched from the water pouring from the sky.
My clothes were wet and muddy. I put them on anyway.
Luckily , I’d planned for this possibility and slid onto the tarp-covered seat.
At most there’d be a little mud on the floorboards, nothing for Carl to yell about.
Barely a sign that I’d defied him once again.
Right before I drove away, I swore I saw a wild animal in the bushes. I blinked and it was gone. Strange . And fortunate. Sneaking out of the house and using Carl’s car was dangerous enough, but having to fend off an animal crazy enough to not get out of the rain was not on my agenda today.
Hexing my ex-boyfriend and tormentor? Absolutely .