The End of Magic (The Witches of Echo Park #3)(80)

Hessika hadn't believed it then and she didn't believe it now. Her parents were poor and uneducated. They didn't know better. Merely took as gospel what the preacher sang down at them from his pulpit. Hessika had been born with the gift of curiosity, and so she was saved from repeating the life her parents had lived. She'd left the woods, left Alabama, left the South . . . moved to California and found her calling. It had reached out to her through her dreams and because of that inborn curiosity, she'd listened when it had said: Los Angeles.

Funny, though, how when the end came, her instinct was to go back to where she'd come from in the first place . . . back to a time that was both idyllic and scary to her.

It was good to be back in her childhood body. The aches and pains of the world had left Hessika when she'd died, but the joy and freedom of childhood had not come back until now. She was full of energy, her heart beating loudly in her chest, life moving in and out of her as she breathed. She wished she could stay in the here and now forever, but she knew she was only getting a little taste. A memory to remind her of what had been, and a gift to thank her for all her sacrifices.

There was another crack of thunder and Hessika looked up to see the treetops swaying in the wind. That same breeze ruffled her long hair, pulled at the thick strands flowing over her shoulders and down to her butt. She was wearing her favorite smock dress, a dirty white thing her mother had made her when she'd outgrown all her older sisters' hand-me-downs, and her legs were bare, her feet dirty from running through the woods without her sandals.

She knew such great happiness in those few moments that tears broke free from her eyes and poured down her cheeks. She thanked the Goddess for giving her this last, sweet taste . . . and then she steeled herself for what was to come.

"I'm here!" she screamed, as the sky grew appreciably darker above her.

The hiss of rain hitting the warm soil filled the air, and she shivered despite the heat.

"I've been waiting a long time for you," she murmured.

The darkness was not a person. It was not a thing, or a place . . . It was a feeling. A state of mind, a way of being. When it owned you, it made you see things through the filter of a darker lens. It heightened the bad, the small, the petty. It made things look hopeless. It stole the joy and the light. Not because it hated them . . . but because to the darkness . . . they were food.

It left desolation and emptiness in its wake. It turned everything monochrome when it should've been Technicolor. The darkness was a leech, a parasite, a destroyer . . . the opposite of what it meant to be alive.

And it was coming for her.

The rain began to fall in earnest, a heavy stream of water that drenched her, slicking the white cotton dress to her body like a second skin. She pushed wet hair from her face, wiped the water from her eyes.

"Is this the best you can do?!" she yelled into the rain-the darkness was most successful when it was inside a host, but it could do damage on its own, too. She just needed to rile it up a little.



       
         
       
        

A lightning strike blew up the ground in front of her, and if she hadn't smelled the electricity in the air, hadn't felt the thrumming energy heading toward her and jumped out of the way, she would've been burned to a crisp.

"Come on now, ma petite salope," she said under her breath as she pulled her skirts around her knees and began to run. She wanted to get as far away from the Red Chapel as she could and draw the darkness away with her.

The rain continued to pelt her as she ran, her legs pumping hard. She dodged prickle bushes, jumped over tree roots that seemed hell-bent on catching her foot and sending her sprawling. She wove her way through the trees, head down so the water wouldn't blind her. She could feel a stitch forming in her side, but she didn't let the pain slow her down.

Finally, she came to the edge of the creek-the rainwater had swelled the small tributary to three times its normal size-and stopped, chest heaving. She looked around, but there was only the silence of the woods and the steady drumbeat of rain beating that silence into submission. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her thighs, pulling in shaky breaths that made her head spin.

She wasn't sure where to go from here. It felt like the creek-a place she'd come to when she was little and needed to be alone-was where this was supposed to end. Something about it seemed inevitable.

She sat down on the muddy bank, her bare feet inches from the furious flow of water. She could feel the rain sluicing down her skin, running off her body into the soil. She stuck her fingers into the dirt, felt it slide in under her nails and lodge there. She lay back, face skyward, letting the rain have at her. It felt like tiny pinpricks all over her skin-and as she closed her eyes, she imagined her body as it had been when she died. The soft child's skin sloughed away, replaced by old, paper-thin flesh . . . but then that began to rot away, too, peeling back to reveal bright red muscle. The rain ate away at the meat of her, the muscle dissolving away until there was only white bone.