Chapter Seventeen • Mixed Signals • Damien #3
My heart aches. Lillith now, as a thirty-something woman, is so sweet and kind. She has this fragility to her that makes me want to protect her. The thought of her, small, with black hair and her huge silvery eyes, trying and failing to make friends… It makes my chest feel like it’s caving in.
“I kept this up all the way to high school. There were some near misses; something always happened. Some stroke of bad luck that always got blamed on me. Finally, my junior year, I met him. Whitman Grey.
“He was fucking beautiful. He’d moved here with his family from Birmingham, England.
You know that show, Peaky Blinders? Where they have that heavy accent where their words all kind of roll into each other?
He had this dark hair and this moodiness to him.
We listened to the same music and dressed the same way.
We were both in our scene phase at the time, not that it was ever truly a phase for me...
But anyway, I was so enchanted by it, and since he didn’t grow up here, he didn’t have any problems with me or my family’s reputation.
Instead of making fun of me or avoiding me, he actually asked about my life.
He wanted me to show him Tarot and runes.
He asked me what stones could help him pass his tests and help him study.
He foraged for herbs with me and helped me prepare for little rituals.
And he gave me my first kiss beneath a lunar eclipse.
“I kept him a secret from Nan. By this point, she hated that I was in school and was constantly threatening to pull me out. I learned to keep my struggles to myself because I wasn’t ready to give up, even though I was miserable.
But I was quickly falling in love with him and I really, really thought I was safe with him.
I invited him to the annual Midsummer celebration that my Nan and I went to every year. And he came.
“It was too much for him. I overestimated just how accepting he was of me.
He told me that he thought we were doing some weird roleplay thing—pretending to be witches.
It was disastrous. He went from hanging out with me every day and telling me he was falling for me to telling the entire school that I was a real witch.
Telling them everything he saw at Midsummer.
“Kids started leaving really awful things in or around my locker. Dead animals that looked like they’d been scraped off the highway, crucifixes, stuff like that.
I kept going to school until a group of them all pinned me to the ground and—they’d gone to the butcher and bought a bunch of liver and hearts and buckets of blood... ”
She trails off and her eyes go a little glassy and distant. Like she’s back there, pinned to the ground and getting smeared in gore for daring to beg to be loved.
“Did your grandmother pull you out after that?” I ask.
Her lips twist in a sad smile. “Nope. I got expelled,” she says.
“What?”
She gives a tired little chuckle. “Staff found us after I started screaming and begging. The group told them they’d tackled me to the ground when they found me doing a ‘satanic ritual’.
And, well, it was their word against mine.
I wasn’t officially expelled for witchcraft—they said something about hazardous materials at school. But. Well, you know.”
“That’s the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard,” I say. “You were bullied. Your entire life. Relentlessly. They had to know that. All the staff had to know what you’d been through.”
“I think they thought I deserved it,” she says. “I’d gotten used to wary looks and nervousness. I think I started to get complacent about it. I didn’t think they really thought me and my Nan were evil, but… Well, I learned that day.”
She turns off the water and swishes her hand through it, letting the bubbles build. “Can you come help me wash up?” she asks, as if we’re just going to be done with the conversation. Like she told me about some embarrassing mistake, and not that she’s been treated like hell her entire life.
There are dark corners inside of me that I don’t visit very often.
They used to be all-consuming back when I met Oren, but with time and effort, I’ve curtailed them and wrangled them into submission with music and drumming and my work as a paramedic.
My ability to lean into my warmth and devotion has been something I’ve had to cultivate, and there are times those darker parts of me come forward.
There is such rage inside me. I want to find every single one of these unimaginative fucks and force feed them the same gore they covered Lillith in.
I want to burn their fucking houses down.
I want to show them what actual evil looks like, so they never make the mistake of thinking there’s a single evil bone in this woman’s body ever again.
I can’t even look at Lillith, because I know the sad smile that’s probably still pasted on her face is going to make me implode.
Silence fills the room, heavy and cautious. I can feel the worry rolling off of her even though I’m not looking at her.
“I’m sorry,” she says in a whisper. “It was too much.”