by Jessica King
The green candle burned, and she held onto it, despite its slickness from the oils, and she held the paper until the flame was so close to her fingers, they started to sting. She dropped the last little bit of paper into the water and wished it a happy journey down the river. She sat in the imaginary womb, holding the green candle next to her heart, hoping, hoping, hoping.
+++
Thursday, March 23, 2017, 8:49 p.m.
“I don’t like the look in your eye, David,” Andrea, his wife, said. “I don’t like it one bit.”
She’d made breakfast for dinner, one of his favorites. And had informed him she’d be doing so before he left for work. He knew it was an attempt to lure him home from the lab in time for dinner. He appreciated that she didn’t call him out on staying late intentionally to avoid the thoughts of Trinity that the house seemed to throw at him every few seconds, a sucker punch around every corner.
He didn’t want to take the pictures of her down; he’d never do that. But eating dinner and seeing her picture sitting above his wife’s head, her smile bright and alive and filled with braces—she’d been fourteen at the time—he could hardly stand it.
“Where’s Cameron?” David asked.
Andrea poked at the pancakes on her plate. “Hardly know where he goes these days,” she said. “I sometimes think he goes back to the old neighborhood. See some of his friends who maybe don’t know yet.” David glared at the plastic tablecloth, pressing the dull bottom of the fork into its buoyant padding. It left a dent for a moment, like a footstep in shifting sand.
“I don’t want him around there,” David said. “Those boys are trouble.” And they were. David had been so proud to be able to move his family to a neighborhood where people left bicycles on the front lawns and enjoyed quiet evenings and had security systems. “I know they still seemed little when we left, but Dan’s kid was already getting recruited for gang activities… I don’t like it. Cameron’s better than that.”
“He knows that,” Andrea said. “I just think he’s looking to hang out with people who only knew Trinity when they were all young, and all his school friends knew Trinity pretty well, like, when she…” She stared at the ceiling with glassy eyes. She took a too-big bite of pancake.
“Yeah, well,” David said, the only response he could come up with. He bit into a slice of bacon, the mention of his daughter, shot for going to some sort of witchcraft convention, made it taste like ashes in his mouth. He swallowed roughly and sipped at his orange juice.
“Are you going to tell me?” Andrea asked, and David looked up, confused. “Why you’ve got that strange look.” She gave him a flat look.
David raised his brows. “Don’t have a look,” he said, moving to the grits, which had a bit more taste to them than his last bite did. He pushed down memories of his children being young and let his mind wander back to the lab.
Andrea pursed her lips. “We have been married for twenty-two years,” Andrea said. “I know your looks.”
And he knew hers. And right now, she’d gone from sad to annoyed in one blink. He swallowed, and his shoulders sagged. “I keep thinking I’d like to take some sort of revenge on those animals that killed Trinity and all those other kids. What were they really doing other than wishing on shooting stars and wearing weird jewelry?” Trinity’s friend, Callie, had been at the Prophetess Gathering, too. She’d gotten a scratch on her elbow, that was it. He’d asked her what they were doing there when she’d shown up with a box of Trinity’s clothes and books.
“We thought the whole Wicca thing was kind of cool,” she said. Her red curls were all over the place, and they fell nearly to her elbows. “Please don’t tell my parents.” She looked up, blue eyes watery. “They won’t get it.” When he asked her if that’s why Trinity didn’t tell them, she nodded sadly, tears spilling now. He didn’t cry, just pressed his lips together so this little girl wouldn’t have to watch him fall to pieces. “She really didn’t want you and Mrs. Webb to be disappointed. She thought you might be.”
He’d told her that her parents would still love her if she decided to make a shrine to that singer she and Trinity were constantly obsessing over, which had earned a smile. That no matter what she did, it wouldn’t change a thing. They would just be happy to have her. At that turn of the conversation, the tops of Callie’s cheeks and ears turned red. “We tried to run,” she said. “When I turned around, she had vanished. I… I’m so…”
He’d told her there was nothing to be sorry about. Nothing she could have done differently. Maybe they shouldn’t have been there, but it didn’t matter now. He’d told her to go home. To move forward. Callie had nodded, her little head bobbling on her tiny body, and walked out of their house. He hoped Callie followed his advice, but that advice had been for her, not for him. He’d sat on the couch staring at the wall for an hour or so after that, a headache forming as he wished to turn back time.
“David,” Andrea said, snapping her fingers in front of his nose. “You gonna talk to me, or you gonna pretend to be a statue until I decide to go to bed?”
David cracked a smile, and she rolled her eyes. She didn’t smile, but there was light in her face.
“I think there might be ways to return the favor to those Kingsmen.” He spat the word out. It tasted bitter and sounded more like a child’s medieval videogame than a cult that would have killed his child. He’d really believed when they’d rolled away from their neighborhood in West L.A. that’d he’d saved his kids from guns, from violence. He swallowed. He’d been naïve.
“And what do you think that way is?” Andrea asked. “Most of them are dead. The rest are in jail. There’s not much else to be done against them on this earth.” Andrea was very much a “let karma handle it” kind of woman. She didn’t do evil to others because she believed everything would eventually come back around. Spiders were her only exception. She’d burn the house down before letting one of them escape with their life.
“Is it awful to say that I want them to suffer horribly?” David asked. Andrea considered her husband for a long moment. “There’s so many more out there,” David said. “It’s not like they’ve been wiped out. That was the select few who showed up. They’re thousands strong.”
“I don’t think it’s wrong to wish them ill… right now,” Andrea said. “And you might not ever forgive the people who did that. But you can’t hold onto that forever, David,” she said. She walked behind his chair and rested her hands along his shoulders. “It’ll kill you.”
“I wish it’d been me,” he said. “I feel like I did something wrong.”
His wife pressed her forehead into the crook of his shoulder. “I know you do. I feel that too, but we didn’t. And we have to be there for Cameron…” Her voice broke on their son’s name.
Something rang in his mind. “Have you forgiven them? In your heart, did you forgive them already?”
“Of course, I haven’t,” she said, her voice muffled against the collar of his shirt. Her tears had soaked through the material already. “I hope I can one day. I think that’s what we’re supposed to do, but no. Not right now.”
A news alert pinged on his phone, and he felt Andrea lift her face just enough to see it.
Californian Kingsmen, cult taking responsibility for this week’s mass shootings, to hold support rally for imprisoned members.
Andrea scoffed. “As if that’ll get them out. Those people will never see the light of day again.” She moved to stand next to him, leaning on the table.
David stared at the headline for a long time, his breathing growing rapid, the air flowing in and out between his teeth. “Can’t the cops shut this down?” he asked. His wife’s eyebrows jumped at his sudden volume, but she just shook her head.
“Free speech thing,” she said. “Unless they start planning another attack, the police probably have to view it as a protest of some sort.”
“That would be a great time for revenge,” David said. “Stupid of them to all gather. It’s like they want
a taste of their own medicine. Wonder how they’d like facing a wall of bullets?” He imagined his daughter running, falling to her knees, a bullet in her back. He fell as if his heart were concrete as he imagined the Kingsmen meeting the same fate.
Andrea looked at him out the corner of her eye. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am.” His mind wandered to the carefully locked box in their closet. The semi-automatic he hadn’t touched in years.
“Well, you won’t be the one shooting at them, you hear me? I don’t care how mad you might be about Trinity. That’s the last thing she’d want you to do.” She was looking at him, bewildered. He saw the threat in her eyes—she’d hide the gun if she thought he was going to do something dumb. He didn’t know how he knew it, but her eyes told him her whole plan in a mere moment.
“She wouldn’t want someone to avenge her death?” he asked.
“Avenge? David, you’re talking like a superhero,” she said. She shook her head. “I’m just as mad about it as you. But Trinity would scold you for saying such a thing. Not to mention how long you’d end up behind bars for something like that. Maybe forever!” She shook her head and cleared the dishes from the table. “Can’t believe we’re even talking like this.” The dishes clattered against one another, and she handed him a chocolate. “Eat this and take a nap. You’ll feel better.” Chocolate and a nap was Andrea’s fix for everything.
It was true that Trinity would have scolded him, and it was the second time he felt like he’d let his daughter down today. This morning, when he realized that his bacteria would be used against real people, he’d felt queasy. But they were real people who deserved to be stopped.
Just like the Kingsmen.
An idea formed in his mind, and he tried to wipe the expression from his face before Andrea realized he was up to something. Something quite possibly horrible.
But not as horrible—and not nearly as traceable—as the gun Trinity had faced.
“Thank you,” he said finally, popping the chocolate into his mouth. He stood, stretched, and kissed Andrea on the top of the head. “I’ll get the dishes tomorrow.” She waved him away with a sponge, and he lumbered to their bedroom. He searched through his computer until he found the documents he’d been given upon being hired at Gray Dynamics, scrolling until he found the security page.
He’d need to know the ins and outs of the building’s security if he was going to steal a vial of DB1307 before the Kingsmen meeting.
+++
Thursday, March 23, 2017, 8:55 p.m.
“Cammie, tell your sister hey for me, okay! Make sure she doesn’t forget her first love!” Robbie clutched his heart like it might stop beating, and Cameron laughed despite the stab in his heart. Robbie disappeared out of the halo of streetlight and into his cement block and brick house, the clothesline swaying. He must have batted at in on his way in, the way he had when they were children.
“All right, then,” he said, his car sputtering when he turned the key. His father’s old car had seemed a blessing when he first got it, but now he feared breaking down on the side of the road at any moment. Still, he had wheels, and they could get him away from the house when he needed it.
Cameron waved goodbye and rolled away. He’d forgotten the noises of nighttime in his old home. The sounds of rap music and yelling—the kind that was indistinguishable of whether it was angry or excitable yelling—and fixed-up car engines revving. There were pieces he didn’t miss. The barbed wire and fences and iron bars over store windows. He’d found them disconcerting even as a toddler, making him feel like he was in some sort of cage.
His father must have felt the cage too. He’d been so desperate to get them all out of there. But Cameron knew why, and he’d been sure when he’d found Robbie and Manuel, his best friends from middle school. He hadn’t seen them in at least a year and a half, and even though they’d grinned when he showed up outside Robbie’s house, they looked much, much older than sixteen. They already had a few tattoos across their shoulders, like blooming weeds that would only take over the rest of their body as they aged. And Robbie had a gun. Cameron had seen plenty of guns up close, but seeing Robbie have one, seeing Robbie call it his… Cameron had tried to pretend it didn’t scare him.
He didn’t ask if Robbie had ever used it.
When he finally neared the back door of his house, he almost turned around. He could hear his father angry about something. Probably that he’d been spending time in West Los Angeles again. He leaned against the screen of the back door, nearly tripping over the recycling.
“She wouldn’t want someone to avenge her death?” he asked.
“Avenge? David, you’re talking like a superhero.” His mother’s voice. “I’m just as mad about it as you. But Trinity would scold you for saying such a thing. Not to mention how long you’d end up behind bars for something like that. Maybe forever!” A pause. What had his mom meant by that? Ending up in jail was his father’s nightmare for any of them after watching his own father endure years in the prison system; he’d never do anything to jeopardize leaving them like that. But he understood wanting to do something in response to his sister’s death. He hated to admit that he’d felt particularly violent since she’d been gone. Like he wanted to throw, stomp, sprint, scream until his body finally rid itself of the extra energy inside him. “Can’t believe we’re even talking like this,” his mother continued. He heard the clinking of dishes, and then: “Eat this and take a nap. You’ll feel better.”
He assumed the edible cure was one of the dark chocolate squares his mom kept on hand instead of headache medication. She didn’t like her family taking medicine, and she had gotten it into her mind a long time ago that dark chocolate was good for headaches and aches and pains. Of course, Cameron and Trinity had faked plenty of illnesses in order to get their hands on their mother’s stash, until he’d gotten his first-ever migraine, and his father broke out the “secret stash” of ibuprofen he kept hidden in the back of the master bathroom’s cabinet.
He begged the door to comply as he opened the screen door just enough to fit his body through and pushed the back door open slowly. The plastic piece at the bottom of the door slid audibly against the wood floor, but the hinges didn’t creak, and he whispered a silent thank you, slipping into the laundry room.
“Cameron Martin,” his mother said from the kitchen.
He cringed. He walked into the kitchen.
She pointed to a plate on the table. “I’m not going to ask because I am too tired to have this conversation right now.”
Cameron dropped into the chair behind the plate of steaming grits, eggs, and pancakes. He reached for the syrup, drowning the entire plate in it. His mother turned to face him. He’d grown bigger and taller than her in the past few years, and when that happened, he thought he’d stop being scared of the look she was giving him now. It was still terrifying.
“Your father and I were worried about you,” she said, running an already wet towel over a plate. “Can you please make sure you’re responsible with your choices so we don’t have to be?”
Cameron nodded around a mouthful of pancake, likely looking like a chipmunk. “Yeah,” he said.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” she said, pointing a fork at him. The sink now empty, she patted her hands against her jeans. “Do your dishes when you’re done.”
Cameron nodded again. “Fank woo,” he said. At his mother’s flat stare, he swallowed. “Thank you.”
She turned around. “Uh-huh. Goodnight, baby.”
Cameron scooped up his plate and moved to the couch, flipping on the television. The street outside their home was clear and covered with streetlights. Each peaceful, gray cookie-cutter home was sitting happily, a spring wreath hanging on the doors. His mother had taken their Christmas wreath down since Trinity and hadn’t put anything else up, because they were “the people in mourning.”
He shoveled another bite of pancake into his mouth, flipping through channels until he found someth
ing loud and angry enough that he could feel his heartbeat in his hollow chest.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” Exodus 22:18
Friday, March 25, 2017, 7:07 a.m. | Central European Standard Time
Tatiana had always felt like a princess when she entered St. Peter’s Basilica. The grand architecture and the intricate design, she didn’t remember a time when she didn’t appreciate it. Didn’t stand in awe of something new she saw each time she entered the space filled with gold and white, the bronze swirling pillars and melting sunshine color of the stained glass.
The place was filled with its usual guests admiring the architecture, the arches and dome and floors covered in color and imagery. Normally, she pretended to be a tourist, too, taking her time to look at the things around her. Normally, she let it all soak in. But today, she fled to the aisles.
When she was young, her mother told her that when someone came to confession, they prayed first so God would tell them what they were guilty of before telling the priest.
She knew she must have done something horribly wrong when she’d woken to the guilt. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the images of her dreams—an infant emerging from the smoke of herbs, turning into a child with rose-quartz eyes and nails and teeth. An evil girl who looked like a faerie but acted like a devil.
She’d sprinted to the bathroom, Leo still wrapped in quilts, his curls hiding his eyes and ears. With shaking hands, she’d pulled out the pregnancy test and waited for the results. Positive. She pressed a hand to her lips and bit hard on a finger. She’d been pregnant before she’d done the spell. Hands pressing against the cold floors, Tatiana lowered herself to the ground, guilt eating at her heart. Why couldn’t you just be patient? Why did you have to go trying a spell? She bit hard on her lip. She hadn’t felt good about doing the spell in the first place, and now she felt the embarrassment of it eating at the edges of her heart, turning her hollow.