Chapter Fourteen #3
Avelina tossed herself away from Neddy’s forehead. She scrambled back through the mud, mouth agape. “I’m so sorry! Callum, I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!”
She sat in a thick puddle of viscera and mud and water between the walls of the Bark Father’s roots, watching Callum approach. His hands floated up carefully, a white flag.
Like she was a wild animal, panicked and likely to bolt.
Maybe she was, with her curled claws digging into the soggy ground, blood decorating the back of her knuckles, and chunks of dead people behind her.
He only glanced at Neddy once before he let out a low, steady whistle.
“You really did a number on her. What she do?”
“I didn’t mean to—I-I-I didn’t mean to hurt her.
She just wasn’t talking any sense, and she made all the dead people come after me.
Then I turned around and she was there. I just got so mad!
” Avelina rambled, her words toppling over each other, in a mad scramble to escape.
Panic still filled her veins as she dragged herself backward over more body parts.
Each bump caused a sob to escape her. So many people.
I’ve killed so many people. I’m a monster.
Callum stopped moving, keeping his hands out.
I’m a monster.
“Avelina,” he spoke her name, putting a balm on the festering wound that was her fractured heart, “come here.”
Her frantic gaze darted to Neddy’s body then back to him. The paladins have every right to hunt me down. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t exist.
Callum softened his tone as he extended a hand. “Avelina, come ‘ere, please.”
It took all her strength to get to her shaky boots.
I killed her even though she wanted to help me.
Avelina shuffled toward him. But she wanted this.
She said it was apart of the deal. With each step, she checked his face, ready for him to strike at her.
I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. When she was within arms distance, he closed his palms around her shoulders.
He ran them down her biceps, across her elbows, then hoisted her knuckles up to him.
His whisper was far away as he studied her bloodied fists. “I asked her to teach you the ropes. Not to feed you to the undead.”
“She said you two had a deal?” Avelina choked on more tears.
“Aye, we did,” he grimaced, peaking up from her fingers to her face. “Every once in a while, I’d take care of a pest for her. It benefitted us both for me to kill any wandering souls who got lost in her swamp. I’d feed them to her tree.”
“But…but…then why did you need me?” Avelina hiccupped, unsure where her questions were even going. She really just wanted to keep talking as to avoid the conversation he was likely wanting to have…Why did she kill Neddy?
“Like I said, warlocks are really handy. But Neddy wasn’t mine.
She also couldn’t leave this cursed swamp.
She was tied to that tree.” Callum nodded toward the Bark Father and Avelina turned to stare up at it.
The tree seemed more menacing than before, a mean sneer etched into it with gnarled branches and blanched vines.
“I think she wanted me to do it,” Avelina confessed. “As a part of our deal. I think she taught me how to be a warlock solely so she could get out of it.”
Callum was quiet for a long time as she stared at that tree.
When she finally dared to glance back at him, he answered, “She was alive for hundreds of years, little viper. Imagine livin’ for many lifetimes, tethered to that evil ole’ tree, unable to go anywhere or seek out a new life for yerself? I know it’d knock me off my rocker.”
Avelina noticed a tone in Callum’s words that wasn’t that of a ruthless outlaw.
Not a man with endless blood on his hands.
She imagined he ought to love where he was, at the top, nothing but underlings and pawns beneath him.
But it’s lonely being at the top, she knew that.
Her father knew that. Married to a woman who didn’t love him with a child he never wanted to be around.
Top rank in the Order, feared and beloved by all the other Paladins, and yet, he preferred to eat alone.
She didn’t want that. It dawned on her that she wanted to travel.
She didn’t want to be tethered to one place, stuck under someone’s boot.
Avelina wanted to see the world, beyond her mother’s wardrobe, her father’s shadow, and Cottonmouth’s crew…
and she had the power to make it happen. She just needed a little push.
Avelina made a promise to herself as she followed behind Callum, silent and sullen with her head hung low. Crackles of lightning overhead with a symphony of insects hunkering down for the storm as they marched through an eerily hollow Gloomsedale.
I’m gonna get out of here. I’m gonna get out of this place. I’m gonna leave all of this, alive. I’m gonna see Tala again.
In order to do that, she’d need to stop thinking like a Paladin’s daughter. She needed to start playing games back, starting with Callum. Starting with getting on even ground with the pissed off viper that saw her as only a pawn.