Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
DYLAN
Raindrops hit me like little rocks, each one felt razor sharp against my bare skin. The water pooling beneath me could have been a puddle of blood - it should have been.
But I wasn’t that lucky.
I was cursed.
That was the only explanation for this.
I squeezed my eyes shut so tight my muscles strained and burned. I clenched my teeth hard enough to make my jaw pop - and then I screamed in my head. I screamed in my thoughts as loud as I possibly could.
Because my thoughts never ran out of my breath.
The voice in my head didn’t break and crack.
I could scream and scream until I popped a blood vessel in my eyes without running out of steam.
I’d basically been screaming since it happened anyways.
My throat and voice could not handle any more wear and tear.
Light flashed across the back of my eyelids. A split second later the sky cracked and roared with thunder so loud the ground rumbled beneath my feet. Thick, heavy, cold rain fell in blankets. My whole body shivered and trembled. I fisted my hands and felt my fingernails slice into my palms.
I screamed through the pain that drowned me.
My legs buckled and my knees slammed into the ground. The force made me gasp but I choked on the oxygen filling my lungs. I didn’t want it. Hot tears poured like rivers of fire down my cheeks. I didn’t try to stop them. I let them mix with the rain. I couldn’t do this anymore.
This had to be a dream, a nightmare.
I just needed to wake up.
Wake up.
Wake up.
Wake up.
Just wake up, Dylan.
This isn’t real. This can’t be real. Just. wake. up.
I opened my eyes and a violent sob ripped up my throat. I wailed with all the agony in my heart. The real kind, the raw kind that burned like acid down my throat and made my voice crack. My cries echoed through the hollow hole in my chest.
It was real. It wasn’t a dream. No matter how many times I tried to manifest it into being imaginary, reality struck me over and over. Each time like the first time. There was no relief.
My body forced me to gasp and suck in air to breathe.
Pressure coiled around my whole head. I collapsed forward and gripped the soggy wet grass for stability.
The world spun around me. I fisted handfuls of dirt and grass until my knuckles popped.
I’d reached my limit. I couldn’t suffer this anymore.
Please, make this stop.
Make it stop.
It has to stop.
I have to make this stop.
I yanked my dagger from the holster strapped to my thigh and lifted the blade to my chest. The sharp pointed tip pressed tightly to my skin just over my heart.
Or where it used to be. My body trembled like a leaf in a hurricane…
but my hands were steady as cement. I was a Knight, an elite among Swords.
These hands were trained for this. I sucked in a deep breath just to give me strength and clutched my dagger with both hands.
I pulled my arms away from my body and screamed as I pushed.
But my arms locked in place.
COME ON.
DO IT.
DO. IT.
My strength vanished. I sobbed hysterically and my dagger dropped to the grass. I heard the agony in my voice but it felt worse.
I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t end myself and all the pain.
She wouldn’t have wanted me to.
I looked up to the gray marble slab with my wife’s name carved into the stone in big bold letters.
JESSICA COHEN-SCHWARTZ
Born February 4th 1994
Died October 31st 2018
I cried and curled into a ball, my forehead resting on the wet grass right next to my dropped dagger. I stopped trying to hold myself together. All that pain and anger…just exploded out of me right there in the middle of the cemetery.
“I’m sorry, Jess. I’m sorry,” I cried through the heavy stream of hot tears.
My wife Jessica would have been twenty-five today. We were supposed to be in Greece today, supposed to have been touring all the islands.
Somehow I’d survived these last six months without her.
Every day I wished I hadn’t.
But today was harder than I could’ve ever prepared for.
Fifteen years ago this very day she’d lined up beside me in the lunch line at Edenburg. She’d always joked I was her best birthday present. We’d been kids then. I was grateful I’d gotten fifteen years with her but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t close to enough. I wasn’t ready to let her go.
I sat up and pressed my right palm on her gravestone, just over her name - Schwartz- the one she’d taken from me when we married.
For fifteen years the back of my right hand held a glistening gorgeous bright blue crystal with black lines that covered my skin from the tip of my fingers to the center of my chest where an identical blue crystal sat.
That blue vanished six months ago.
Now it was gray.
A dreary, sad, broken shade of gray the same color as the sky over my head.
I’d always known my soulmate glyph would turn gray when I lost her.
A girl had read my tarot cards once and told me I would outlive my heart, it hadn’t made sense then but it did now.
Because my heart died that day with my soulmate.
It wasn’t fair that a soulmate could survive if the other fell.
We should’ve been permitted to fall together. I’d begged for death every day since.
I looked up into that gray stormy sky and cried. “Please, Goddess. Help me. Please. End this. Have mercy on my soul and let me come home.”
Bright golden sunlight sliced through the storm clouds. The beam shined down right on me, except as it got to me it turned a neon blue. I gasped. The Goddess! I braced myself for relief—sharp pain shot through my left arm.
I frowned and looked down at my arm. That neon blue beam of light lit up my left forearm for a second but when it faded my jaw dropped.
There on my skin were bold black letters written in Roman numerals. My breath left me in a rush. It was a Coven Mark. I’d been Marked for the Coven. I was…I swayed and fell onto my side. Fresh tears burned my eyes and slid down my face, mixing with the cold relentless rain.
“How does this help me?” I cried and stared at my new fate.
Blue light flashed just under the letters. I held my breath and waited for it to fade. When it did, I found words written in an elegant scroll like an instructional packet.
Lend to them your fighting soul,
An honor’s fall, I’ll make you whole.
I gasped and blinked through my tears as Her words clicked. She’d heard me. She’d answered me. I placed my hand over the words and looked up to the sky. “Thank you.”