My eyes began to roll back into my head. They felt so heavy… closing was inevitable. Death had come for me. I could feel it… the cold acceptance, chilling my bones.
“Sandy!” he screamed as my eyes began to close. “Sandy, please!” he pleaded desperately, voice cracking with emotion.
I summoned the last of my energy, the last bit of life I could feel within me, and I slammed my knee into his crotch.
“Ffffff…fuck,” he hissed, curling in on himself.
His hold on my neck loosed, and I weakly shoved him off. He crashed limply to his side, and I rolled faintly, coughing into the dirt, gasping through a tortured throat. Agonizing pain ripped through me with each frantic breath. My body struggled to recover as I lay helplessly sprawled in the leaves, gasping for air.
Todd’s fists hit the dirt. His back arched as he rolled up. He growled wildly, and my jaw dropped. He wasn’t in control. She still had him.
I scrambled weakly to my knees between wrenching coughs, slipping on the decomposing leaves. He grabbed my ankle and dragged me back down to the dirt. Blotchy stars consumed my vision as I searched, nearly sightless, for something to save me. My hands brushed over fallen sticks and branches. I grabbed one. It was thick and heavy, with dead leaves dangling from it.
I rolled and swung with my entire body. The branch knocked him on the side of the head. His body lurched, only I couldn’t be sure of how hard I’d hit him. I could barely see through my throbbing vision, barely hold onto the stick. I dropped it and scrambled feebly away from him, dragging my weakened body to my feet.
My head felt woozy. My vision doubled, tripled, and blackened. I swooned, swayed, and stumbled into a tree. Impact jerked me awake. Todd’s keys lay in the grass, fallen from his pocket beside the spell books. My arms were blurry shadows as I reached for the keys. Weak hands closed limply around metal, and I was moving again, lagging forward blindly. Forget the damn books, I was fighting for my life. This one.
I stumbled dizzily through the woods. Stars danced before my eyes, blocking out the forest as I ran. Blackness edged my vision, leaving me only a tiny spot of light. It felt like the earth wobbled beneath me. I was running on Jell-O. I grabbed for a tree to catch myself from falling and doubled over, coughing and gasping. Fuck! This was not the time to stop and rest, but I couldn’t breathe. I inhaled frantically, feeling like I was drowning, breathing in only water and sharp, piercing nails. Each breath cut me down with pain.
Wheezing and hacking, I collapsed against the tree, slowly shrinking closer to the ground. Todd’s dark shadow fell over me. I looked up, wincing, curling my numb fingers protectively around the keys.
“Where’s the third?” he grunted, a fuzzy shadow fading into darkness.
Crap.
“Don’t test me,” he warned, his feral eyes seeming to plead with me to just comply. To give him what she wanted. To let him make her happy.
My knees were weak and I started to sink, slowly falling. Dizzily, I reached out, grasping a fistful of Todd’s t-shirt, and tugged on it to stay upright.
He tossed the books aside. I hacked harshly as he ripped out of my hold. He shoved me and I fell, crashing into the leaves.
“What am I supposed to do with you?” he demanded, looming over me menacingly. I rolled to my stomach. “No you don’t,” he said, kicking my shoulder, knocking me to my back.
My chest leapt up and down to the hard beat of my heart, my lungs desperately pulling for more air. The sparkly stars in my eyes parted the shadows with wild streaks of color, and a sort of stillness washed over me. An exhausted, debilitating paralysis. I blinked slowly, watching Todd stand over me, shifting his weight in frustrated agitation.
I couldn’t fight anymore. It was hopeless. I could never win. I just stared up, watching the shadowed branches sway overhead in the wind. A single leaf still clung to a branch. The leaf was shriveled, brown, and tattered, but it was still there. The last still hanging on. What was it waiting for? Fall. Drop, little leaf. Surrender. You’ll never make it.
Todd squatted beside me and unfolded my coat from my body. He searched inside, hands tracing the lining for pockets. I watched his eyes, wishing for familiarity, for warmth, for the kind eyes that I’d cursed in my youth. He lifted my sweater, baring my skin to the frosty air. The pale gray of his iris was the right color, but everything about his eyes was so wrong. He twisted my back up from the ground, searching any place I could have tucked a book against my body. Was Todd even in there anymore? Where was my cousin? What had she done to him?
He tossed me down to my back. “I need that third book,” he growled.
“Did you want to check my underwear too?” I hissed in a raspy challenge.
He grabbed my neck again, but didn’t squeeze this time. He lifted me by it, staring into my eyes. His pupils were empty pits, and in that dark pit lurked something sinister. He grabbed my waist in one solid hand and dragged me closer, until I was beneath him. That evil was coming out to play. The way he glared into my eyes was not pure hate. It was possessive and strange. His ragged breathing grew heavy. His face was so close to mine, and his hand gripped my rib cage.
Oh God. He wasn’t going to kill me. Aurora was going to make him do something worse than that. He shifted over me, his heavy gaze threatening, and his hand slid down my body, reaching for my jeans. “No…” I croaked weakly. “Todd, no.”
He clamped his hand over my mouth, pressing my head deep into the decomposing leaves. I moved to rise but his knee dropped down on my leg, keeping me trapped on the forest floor. Shit! My heavy eyes frantically searched the trees for something or someone. For any help I could find. I spotted his keys in the grass and reached. Too far away. My finger almost looped through the ring.
He tugged at my belt. I wailed against his hand and began to cry. Tears slid down my cheeks, and I choked on aching sobs. “…wake up…” I rasped, weak and muffled against his sweaty fingers. “Todd… wake up.”
He wasn’t listening. Nothing was breaking through to him. I rolled in blind panic, clawing at the dirt to get away, scrambling to reach the keys. I felt his body fold to mine. His chest beat against my back as I crawled, inching forward. He shoved me down and I bit dirt. My fingers scraped the leaves, raking a fistful of dirt, and looped through his key ring.
He flipped me over, dragging me back down under him by the waist of my jeans, and I whipped the fistful of dirt into his eyes. He leapt back, blinded. I scrambled up and bolted through the trees like they were on fire, arms and legs pumping hard. I broke free to the parking lot, tearing up pavement as I ran for the car.
Todd emerged from the woods, pounding after me as I yanked the door open. I dove inside, tugging on the door, but he blocked it and grabbed me by the leg, trying to haul me out. My bloodied fingernails scraped along the dashboard until they reached the steering wheel. I gripped it hard as Todd pulled at my body. I screeched and fought, batting at his hands, trying to pry his fingers loose. His fist struck my face. Stunned, I dropped across the seats. He stared wildly at me, panting like a beast. I wept pitifully on his seat cushions, wailing in choked, ragged sobs, waiting for him to kill me or rape me. I couldn’t fight anymore.
And I kept waiting.
He didn’t move. I didn’t move. The world was still and silent around us, hovering on the edge of a knife. Our ragged breathing sliced the silence with the sound of terror.
I slowly opened my eyes, tiny slits surrounded by wet, netted lashes. Todd’s face was as white as paper. He stood over me, looking tormented.
“Fucking hell,” he gasped. He had no words; he just stared, inching back in horror. “God damn…”
Tears dropped from my eyes in endless rivers, and my body trembled. The coppery taste of blood slid over my tongue from my lip. I sobbed harder.
“Sandy…I didn’t-” He cursed under his breath. “Are you alright?” His voice broke on the last word.
“Get away from me!” I screeched in a broken, strangled voice.
He backed u
p and gripped the roof of his car, hanging his head in shame. His shoulders shuddered, rocking the car softly. He made no move against me, and I could practically feel the cloud of anger around him begin to dissipate. It was like the air had been charged with lightning, and now the storm was over. But even so…
I slid carefully into the passenger seat, brought my knees to my chest, and curled up against the inside door. Warmth was fleeting. My body trembled, and I curled up tighter.
“Is it you?” I asked weakly, my head tipping until it met the glass. My hair soaked up cold moisture from the window.
From the corner of my eye, I could see Todd, distressed and swiping at his eyes with the heels of his hands. He bent down to look at me, leaning in the open doorway with his fingers clamped firmly on the frame. His eyes, surrounded by smears of dirt, were red and pained. “Sandy, I… I think so.”
I stared at a spot of dirt on my knee, leaning away from him. “The books,” I said, wiping a smudge of blood from my lip. Red streaked across my thumb, and I wiped it on my jeans, painting the dirt crimson.
Todd looked to the woods. He shut the car door, leaving me alone inside, and walked out to the trees. His body was a blur of black through the frosty windshield. I waited for minutes, heart pounding in my chest, throat suffering and jaw aching. I could feel my lip begin to swell from his punch. Salty tears mixed with the metallic taste of blood and the grit of dirt on my tongue. As they dried on my face, my skin felt tight.
My eyes grew heavy, but my heart still raced. When he emerged from the trees, my blood pumped harder. With shoulders hunched and hands empty, he made his way across the lot. Once he got in, he slammed the door closed.
“They’re gone.” He breathed in a slow, deep breath. “God dammit!” he cursed in a blurted rush and pounded his fist into the dashboard. I jumped on instinct. He avoided looking at me. “Do you need a doctor?”
I said nothing, facing my window once more. My mind drew a blank as I stared at the stray flurries drifting through the air. A flake stuck to the glass. It wasn’t a pretty snowflake, just a tiny speck of hard white ice trapped on the pane.
“Sandy?”
With a small motion, I began to shake my head, barely aware of the pain that wrapped my throat like steel cables. “No,” I croaked absently, watching as the ice disintegrated from the fog of my breath. Another quickly took its place, and I swept my hand through the frost, leaving three streaks behind.
ERIC:
The tires of his Pontiac rolled over patches of fresh ice. He drove down a quaint portion of Main Street lined with maple trees. His wipers dragged ice and snowflakes back and forth across the windshield. He passed historic brick buildings, the post office, and the only coffee shop in town. Three doors down from that was his destination.
He stopped his car behind a faded red Neon at the curb that was quickly becoming buried in snow. The McLeary house cast a long shadow across his car. He wasn’t welcome, and he knew it, but that didn’t stop him from showing up anyway. Jules was there, and he needed to see her.
He closed his door softly as he looked up at the old brick house dusted with winter white. Her dad was a McLeary, but her aunts were the ones who hated him. They, unfortunately, lived across the street. With a fleeting glance back, he noticed the rustling of curtains in their front window. He was already seen, and it would be a bloodbath.
He rolled the spell book copy in his fist and headed quickly up the front steps with fat snowflakes gathering in his hair and on his shoulders. As his knuckles rapped the door, he could hear the phone ringing inside in warning that he was there. The door swung open just before the ringing stopped, and Julie’s mom greeted him with a warm smile.
“Hi, Eric. Are you here to see Juliet?”
He smiled politely. “Yeah. Is she home?”
“She is. Come on in.”
She opened the door wider for him, calling out to her daughter. Suddenly the door was pushed out of her hands and slammed shut in his face, narrowly missing his nose.
“Jules!” he yelled. “Please talk to me! Juliet!”
He could hear arguing on the opposite side of the door, but it was too muffled for him to decipher.
“I just have a few questions. Please!” He waited for an answer but heard only silence. “I’ll stay out here all month if I have to!” he warned.
At his words, the door slowly cracked open and Julie’s rosy, freckled face appeared. “I told you that we were done. You swore you wouldn’t contact me,” she said, sounding agitated.
“And you stole a page from the books,” he accused. He didn’t actually think that it was her, but he knew an accusation would at least get him some kind of answer.
“What are you talking about? You have all three books,” she snapped.
He shuffled through his copy, fingers numb and fumbling from the winter cold, and opened to the page with the mark he’d shown to Sandy. Juliet slipped through the narrow opening, stepping outside and shutting the door behind her. She wrapped her knitted sweater closed and crossed her arms with a shiver as he tipped the page to show her, pointing to the mark.
“There. See? A page was torn out.”
She leaned in, examining the shadow of a tear. “I didn’t do it. My aunts gave you everything that we had,” she said.
His thin sense of hope faded with her answer. “Do you know who might have? Or what it was of? Was it the spell we’re looking for? The one that Rose-”
His sentence cut short as he felt the approach of two people behind him. He turned slowly to see Winnie McLeary and Colleen McLeary-Denton. They walked up the sidewalk, side by side, in snow boots and house coats. Winnie looked so much like Rose, just as Juliet resembled her, but Colleen had dark brown hair streaked with gray and not one freckle on her cheeks. Both were Juliet’s aunts, descended from Rose’s bloodline, and both were glaring at him with stares that could kill. He stood his ground as they blocked the stairs like stiff wooden soldiers. He was surrounded by witches and had no idea what any of them were capable of. A smarter man would have run, but he was desperate for answers.
“You swore to stay away,” Winnie stated coldly.
“He says a page is missing,” Jules explained.
Colleen shook her head, giving Juliet a scolding glance. “We told you to ignore him. Now he brings danger to your doorstep.”
“I don’t mean any harm. I just need to know,” Eric said quickly.
“You need to leave,” Winnie said firmly, nostrils flaring as she barely withheld her ire.
“A spell is missing! I need to know what it was of,” he demanded.
“We won’t help you.”
“Rose would have!” he argued, feeling his blood begin to boil. Didn’t they realize what was at stake? “She cared about people and helped however she could.”
“And she died for it!”
“Do you think I don’t care?” he pressed, the words coming from a place he had little control or understanding of. “I knew her! I loved her! She was my closest friend! I’d give anything to change what happened!”
Tears burned at his eyes and as he fought their fall, the three watched him intently, stunned to silence. They looked at him as if truly seeing him for the first time. All his life they’d known him but never looked at him with such understanding.
“Please. Cassandra will die if we don’t do something. Aurora will be free soon, and I have no way of stopping her.”
“You can’t,” Winnie said softly. “You are powerless against her.”
“I have to do something! She’s going to kill my wife!” he exclaimed desperately, tottering at the verge of frustrated sobs.
Winnie stepped forward and placed a hand on his arm. He stared at it, expecting some kind of mind attack, and his body tensed, but nothing happened. He felt no pushing in his head, no loss of thought or numbing of his mind. She was simply being kind, the first she’d ever shown that toward him.
“Whatever Rose knew was not passed down to us,” she explained sim
ply. “We never read those books. Never opened them.”
He looked down. Defeat piled on at every turn. He couldn’t seem to grasp onto any sort of answer or understanding.
“You are not the first person to come in search of the books,” Colleen informed him stiffly.
His heart thumped quickly, and his glance shot to her face. “Who else did?”
Winnie gave Colleen a wary glance before volunteering, “Steven and Eve Mason.”
He involuntarily backed up a step. “Aurora’s parents?”
“We refused to hand them over. Days later, our house was broken into. Nothing was taken, but the books were found. They were left out and open.”
“They stole the page?” he surmised. They didn’t argue it but exchanged brief glances. “Why? When?”
“About twelve years ago.”
“A year before they died?”
Both aunts nodded gravely. Colleen spoke: “Now do you see why we won’t help? We can’t. So please, take your problems elsewhere.”
She stepped aside and both aunts turned their heads away. Eric tightened his hold on the book copy and stepped slowly down the stairs, passing them warily. Juliet fell into step beside him, walking him to his car, probably to make sure he’d get in and leave. His head spun as he wondered what that spell could do, why Aurora’s parents had stolen it, and how it related to their deaths. It must. That couldn’t just be coincidence.
He slowed to a stop by his car. “I’m sorry, Eric,” Jules said, gazing up at him sympathetically. “I wish I could help.”
He nodded his head, feeling overwhelmed and disappointed. She turned to go. “Wait. One last thing,” he said.
He reached into his car for the plastic bag on the back seat and handed it to Jules. Confused, she took it from him and glanced inside. “Um…” she said awkwardly. “Eric, this is a bra.”
He nodded, feeling a soft shade of pink spread over his face. “I know.”
She drew it out, holding up Sandy’s lacy red bra suspiciously, and he swallowed hard. He’d felt something that day she wore it, something cold and unwelcome, a feeling that left him when he’d tossed it outside. That same feeling consumed him now, and his stomach turned uneasily. It had nagged at him until he went back and found it by the side of the road. It was just a bra, but he couldn’t stop thinking… maybe it was more.
Envious Deception Page 26