by Kat Bostick
“Mr. Sowka, I understand that you’ve just experienced a terrible loss, but I’m going to need you to calm down.” Davis stood, putting placatory hands up.
“She killed her mother, too. Did she tell you that?” Dad came further into the parlor, his face swollen with fury.
The sheriff and his deputies exchanged concerned glances.
“Mari’s mother died in childbirth.” Jasper was standing now too, ready to permanently silence Dad by the look of it.
Dad’s voice darkened to a note she’d never heard before, his blue eyes taking on a hardness that made her chest tighten. “You have a dark future, Mariella. You have blood on your hands and it can never be cleansed away. Men will die at your feet, death will follow you because of the company you keep.”
“Some men deserve death.” Jasper’s answer made her flinch.
Mari rose shakily to face her father. That was some kind of trigger for him. Too fast for any of them to react, he was across the room, grabbing for her with vicious, violent hands. “You took everything from me! You destroyed my family!”
That final word became an arrow, striking Mari right in the heart. It was one that she’d seen coming for years and still it ripped through her with such intense pain that she flinched. His family. The family he chose over his own flesh and blood. With that one simple sentence, Alan Sowka had successfully disowned Mari. She was always other under his roof and now he put it into words.
Sheriff Davis and Jasper both moved at the same time. Jasper pulled her backward just as Davis pushed Dad away. Mari had the good sense to whirl, putting her hands on Jasper’s biceps and holding him in place.
“Don’t react, Jas.” She hissed. “Please, don’t react.”
Jasper held himself completely still, not even breathing. He squeezed his eyes shut for good measure as the two deputies helped wrangle her father. The last thing they needed was Jasper losing it in front of the sheriff’s department.
It took too long to remove Dad from the house. Even as he was dragged through the front door, he continued shouting, “You killed her! I know what you did!”
A stunned silence entered when he left, making Mari’s ears pound. Davis turned to her and quietly asked, “You mind clarifying about your mother?”
“What Jasper said is true. She died the day I was born.” She was sure to inform the sheriff of exactly when and where that was and he scribbled it down. Clearly he wasn’t going to be finished with Mari tonight.
“I understand it’s been a long night, but is there any other detail you haven’t told me? Anything you remember about before your stepmother went into the water?”
Red eyes. Desperate for air. The sick crunch of her throat as it threatened to give. Darkness. Darkness pushing and pushing for a way in.
“No.”
Another of those lengthy, pensive looks from him before he nodded. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. O’Connell, and I’m sorry that this is how you had to end the happiest day of your life. For now, I suggest we all get some much needed rest.”
“What about—” She almost didn’t want to ask, but she had this insane fear that the demon would somehow reanimate Veronica and come back for her. “What about Veronica’s body? Will Dad get to bring her home?”
“She’ll be transported to Hibbing. They’re going to perform an autopsy.” What did the inside of a person look like after they’d been filled with so much hatred?
“Oh. Right.” To make sure Mari didn’t drown her. Could they even tell that sort of thing?
“You got any honeymoon plans I should know about?”
“We won’t be travelling.”
“Good.” He nodded again, his brown eyes seeing more than a mundane man should. Maybe that was just what a cop was like. “Mrs. O’Connell.” He said in farewell. “Charlie.”
Charlie stepped from the kitchen, walking the sheriff out. The door swung open and distantly, Mari could hear the grief stricken ravings of her father. She couldn’t blame him for his anger. Twice he’d found love and twice it had been robbed from him. If it were Jasper floating dead in that lake…she wouldn’t survive it.
Mari waited until Charlie stepped back inside to mutter her apologies. “I’m sorry for causing so much trouble.
With deliberate and stiff movement, she turned away from the pack and climbed the steps. Inside, her veins had turned to ice. A numbness crept up her body until even the muscles in her face felt frozen. Was her heart still beating? It was hard to tell with the chill that created a barrier around it.
Dad’s words didn’t come as a shock. In some ways, it was relief. Mari knew he didn’t love her, didn’t want her, could never forgive her for taking her mother’s life as she left the womb. To hear it was somehow freeing. That empty hole in her chest that widened every time she scrabbled for her father’s attention and failed could finally close. She wouldn’t be getting that attention ever again. Had she ever really had it, beyond what was required of him to keep her alive?
Mari hadn’t realized that she was in the bedroom, perched on the end of the mattress, until she heard the soft click of the door shutting behind her and Jasper’s cautious voice. “Mari?”
She couldn’t answer because even her tongue was frozen. She was ice.
She was ice but he was fire and the moment his hand came around to brush her cheek she was melting. Her whole body lurched forward into him, liquifying into such violent sobs they made her ribs ache. Jasper swept her into his arms, cradling her on the bed as a lifetime of pain and rejection came to an explosive climax.
It wasn’t the pain of Mari, the grown woman with an unbreakable heart. It was the pain of the little girl that still lived inside of her, the one who cried after soccer games when her father never showed and Aubrey’s mother had to drive her home. The one who, at only seven years old, came to see the way the love in Dad’s eyes faded when they travelled from Samuel to her. The one who, despite the vitriol and barely masked disdain, longed for Alan Sowka’s approval. She’d fought so hard to be someone he thought worthy, only to realize that wasn’t possible.
Mari was chaos. She was destruction and death in Dad’s eyes, and he judged her for that even as a child.
Jasper’s hands were soft as they soothed up and down her arms, but inside of him, she could feel tendrils of rage dancing along the link between them. He held it back for her, quieting it so that she could pour out the sorrow that filled her soul. Mari had a feeling that if she asked him to, Jasper would race outside and remove her father’s heart from his body.
For one tiny moment that thought consoled her, but she let it pass because she knew her father was wrong. She didn’t have a dark future. She was not darkness come to the world. Maybe she wasn’t perfect, maybe she wasn’t pure, but she wasn’t doomed to become like Lyse or worse.
A lifetime of carrying the weight of her family’s disapproval could have made her that way. It was a heavy burden, pushing on her shoulders until she sunk into herself and finally withdrew from them completely. Did she let darkness into her soul then? When they sent her off to college with barely a word for four years? When Gran rejected her from the coven that held her family legacy? When Lyse walked into her world and offered her the reins to the storming power inside of her? Never.
Mari was strong, stronger than anyone had given her credit for.
A final tear squeezed from her swollen lids and dripped down the side of her nose to land on Jasper’s collar bone. She glanced up at worried eyes and couldn’t help but trace the edge of his perfect jaw with her fingertip.
Stronger than almost anyone had given her credit for. Jasper has always known what I’m capable of. And what she wasn’t capable of.
Veronica was dead. It wasn’t her fault.
She’d been ready to die before she gave herself over to the evil trying to worm into her soul. Just as she’d been ready to die the night she killed Lyse. Mari would sacrifice herself before she succumbed to the whims of darkness. Didn’t that make her the opposite
of what her father believed?
Men will die at your feet…Death will follow you…
Perhaps that was the true price of magic. Life for a witch was not tame or gentle. Death would follow her because death was the balance to her power. It was the balance to Jasper’s power. A world without death was a broken world.
And even if Mari hadn’t completed her rites, she could never have escaped the cost that came with her blood. The goddesses couldn’t force her in one direction or another, but that didn’t mean her fate could be ignored either. It would find her, it would chase her no matter how far she ran. Dad could have locked her in a cage and still she would have fate on her heel.
That was the price of magic. That was the way of a witch’s world. Mari had no intention of denying it any longer.
There was a lot she couldn’t deny any more.
As the last of her tears were shed, so was something else. The grief of losing a family that still lived wouldn’t be gone overnight, but that weight she’d been carrying for so long was suddenly gone from her shoulders. So much clarity came with that freedom.
No wonder she’d been afraid to stay with Jasper, to put faith in him. In her head she’d feared that being a mate was a similar obligation to being a father. She was afraid that Jasper wanted her to stay because he was bound to her and he wasn’t the kind of man to relinquish responsibility, even if he didn’t want it.
But Jasper wanted her because he loved her, regardless of what she could become.
Mari reached into her heart and tugged at the arrow that her father pierced her with. In her mind she took the shaft and broke it, shattering her previous notion of the word family. She had a family, one that she chose, and they would never leave her. They would never doubt her. They would never treat her like she was other, even if she wasn’t of their kind.
She twisted in Jasper’s lap, snaking arms around his neck. Mari inhaled the smell of him, luxuriated in the warmth that radiated off his skin.
“You’re the only family I need.” She fluttered soft kisses along his throat then jaw, meeting his lips for a slow sip. “You’re the family I choose.”
A Message for My Lovely Reader
In the year of quarantine, it should have been easy to write a book. But there is something about isolation that makes those quiet inner demons louder.
I wanted to write a happy ending for Mari and Jasper. In fact, I did. I wrote a big gooey happy ending and realized it was all wrong. Metamorphosis is a struggle until that final breath of freedom, wind on our wings, the world at our fingertips. This year we are all in our chrysalis, waiting to break free.
So too are my characters. This isn’t the end for them. I wanted this book to be a reminder that it’s not always bright and easy. Still, we persevere.
Until next time,
Kat Bostick
PS. Like what you read? Leave a review on Amazon! Reviews go a long way to help independent authors get discovered, which in turn helps them write more. Support my work by letting others know what you thought!
About the Author
Kat has always believed in magic, if only the kind that flies from fingertip to keyboard and then onto paper, enchanting a reader and giving them a brief respite from the mundane world. She made her debut in 2019 with her first novel, Hunter’s Moon. Like all of Kat’s favorite stories, her Urban Fantasy is packed with adventure, sprinkled with equal shares of humor and heartbreak, and finished with a healthy dose of romance.
When she’s not writing Kat is a full blown homesteading, crunchy-as-all-get-out granola mama, raising a baby, dogs, and any plant she can grow in the cloudy Pacific Northwest.
Books By This Author
Hunter's Moon
It all started with a really bad date…
Mari Sowka is a bookworm, a chocolate-lover, and a witch. In theory, anyway. She possess magic like her mother, her grandmother, and all of the women that came before her, but she’s never been taught to use it. After the tragic and apparently magic related death of her mother, Mari’s father banned her from learning or practicing witchcraft of any kind. Resigned to her mundane fate, Mari does her best to settle into life as a young adult.
Except everything mundane about her life goes out the window when her date attacks her in a secluded park and Mari is rescued by a werewolf.
Cursed by a witch with rare and powerful magic, Jasper thought he was doomed to walk on four legs for as long as he lived before madness took him. His pack and much of his humanity are already lost when he comes across a young witch that smells of honeysuckle and home. One act of violence intertwines their fates, sending them on a journey across the state in search of a lost werewolf pack, fleeing a dangerous witch, and seeking the truth about Mari’s heritage.
Moonshine
There were three things Liv never wanted to be; starving, filthy, and alone. When an unexpected and inexplicable black out thrusts the world into chaos, that’s exactly how she finds herself.
Clean water and food vanish as she flees Seattle in pursuit of rumored safety and power further east. The roads are stalked by stray dogs and stray men, both with growing appetites and frightening intentions. It isn’t long before they find her.
Running for her life, Liv falls at the feet of an unwilling savior. With a shack, a farm, and a lifetime of survival skills, Joshua is the perfect companion for the apocalypse. If only he wanted companionship.
It’s hard to earn his trust and even harder to keep it. At a glance he seems to be nothing more than an off-kilter backwoods prepper with a grudge against humanity, but the longer she looks, the more Liv begins to see the man behind the churlish words and unkempt beard.
As reluctant as he is to keep her, Joshua just might need her. After all, no one survives the end of the world alone.