Watch Me Burn: The December People, Book Two (32 page)

David heard two gunshots.

In response to the sound, David crawled out of his own window with a lot less grace. He put deep cuts in his hands and legs in his rush to see where the shots had come from.

Then it felt like a dream. It had all happened so fast. In one moment, he sat next his little brother in the truck. And now, he looked at him lying face down, blood soaking the parched earth around this head. This couldn’t be real. He had wandered into a nightmare, that was all.

Thea, also on the ground for some reason, reached a shaking hand toward James’s body.

“John, no,” she said.

“He went after you. He was going to hurt you.”

David knew he should pay attention to the man with the gun. He should look up. He should move. He should fight. He should run. But he could only watch the stain of blood around his brother’s head grow larger. Lying there dead, he transcended time. He was the little boy David had once tried so hard to protect. He was the grown man who had stepped out of the car first, this time to protect David. And he was the old man he would never become. The one that should have grown old with the man he loved.

David finally looked at John. He still held the gun. His hands shook and he looked pale. He had been staring at James’s body too, until he felt David’s glare on him.

“He attacked you,” John said in a wavering voice. “I had to.” David assumed John spoke to Thea, but he kept his eyes on David.

John pursed his lips and squared his shoulders, steeling himself. David didn’t fear being shot. He didn’t fear anything. He felt numb. He felt gone. It wouldn’t surprise him if he saw his own body bleeding on the ground.

John stood several yards away. Despite his lack of training, perhaps David could find a way to attack with magic, but he knew a bullet would be much more…decisive.

“John. No,” Thea said.

David felt a rush of heat. The heat rippled the air like an invisible explosion. He thought his eyelashes might have seared off. When the heat passed, John was on the ground and Thea stood over her husband. She had his gun, but held it limply at her side.

Thea tossed the gun in David’s direction. David looked at the gun sitting in the straw-like grass, feet from him. The numbness had started to pass, and his hands trembled. He felt grief saturating his body. Thea’s actions made no sense, but he didn’t care. He moved toward his brother and felt like he had floated there, hovering above him as a ghost.

He wanted to touch the body. He wanted to feel the heat of his brother’s body before it left forever. The warm blood soaked the knees of his jeans as he kneeled next to him. He pressed his head into his brother’s shoulder.

Then, Thea grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up. She pressed the gun into his unwilling hands.

“What do you want?” David’s voice sounded thick, as if he spoke under water. He could barely speak, let alone understand why she handed him a gun. He looked over at John still passed out on the ground. The man should die. David should kill him right now. Was that what she wanted? He didn’t want to leave his brother’s side. Grief had surpassed rage. He wanted to wait for the warmth to pass, for the bleeding to stop. He had missed out on so much of James’s life. He wanted to be there beside him for every moment of his death, even though could tell from the gaping hole in his skull that James’s life had ended as soon as the bullet hit.

“I’m tired of you not fighting back,” Thea said. “There is no sport in it.” Her tone didn’t match her words. She sounded as if she held back tears of her own. “I’m tired of not getting credit,” she continued. “I’ve done so much to you, and you don’t even see it.
I
was the one who burned down your housing development in Tangled Woods.” She laughed a shaky laugh that sounded more desperate than evil. “I ruined your business. You lost your house, your money, and your dignity. And I did it all just to spite you.”

David stood to face her, the muscles in his body spasming in strange places, like his forearm and his jaw.

“But that wasn’t enough,” she continued. “I wanted to hurt you more. So, I set your house on fire, with you and everyone you love inside. I wanted you and your children to burn. I wanted them to scream. First afraid…fearing death. Then, begging for death to stop the pain. I wanted my fire to rip the flesh from their bodies, and leave them nothing but charred bone and ash. I wanted to send you and your babies to Hell where they belong.
Hell
…where your little brother is now burning.”

She glanced at the gun in David’s hands. “So, knowing this, there is only one thing to do. You will kill me. You,
David Vandergraff
, will kill me,
Thea Prescott
. And then, the prophecy will be fulfilled.”

This last part sounded too formal, too specific. It reminded him of the spell Rachel Colter had cast. The one that destroyed the talisman of protection over her brother. Thea wanted to cast some kind of spell.

David dropped the gun and grabbed Thea by the neck and throttled her. “Why do you want me to kill you?”

“No…” she said between gasps as he restricted her air supply. “The gun….blood…there must be blood.”

“Why do you want me to kill you?” he asked again. His mind swirled with darkness. He wanted to kill her. She deserved to die. She had to die. But he didn’t trust her. Some of what she had said had been true, but some of it had been a lie. But his senses had become clouded, so he couldn’t sort it out. The hate and rage inside him erupted from his hands around her neck. He could feel her going cold.

“No…” she spluttered. “Blood…please, blood.”

David could feel death spilling from his own hands. Not by repressed oxygen, but from something deeper. Just pure death, coming from inside him, and saturating the little woman’s body. Her eyes rolled back and he noticed white flecks in her eyelashes. Ashes.

He released her and she crumbled to the ground, but he could still see her chest rising and falling. He hadn’t taken her life. He looked up to see that the fire had eaten its way through the drought-ridden forest quickly, igniting the dry trees with vigor. The smoke had taken over the whole sky, and the black cloud rising over the forest reminded him of a massive thunderhead. It blotted out the sun. He heard sirens.

Thea grabbed him by the ankle. “Kill me,” she said again, in a strangled whisper. “With the gun.”

He shook her off. He turned back to his brother and squeezed his hand one last time. He left the gun on the ground and ran towards the flames. Thea could have shot him in the back, but he knew she wouldn’t. He could read people. And she had the most complicated intentions and motives of anyone he had ever met. He had no clue why she had attacked her husband, and then begged him to kill her. But he knew she wouldn’t kill him.

He had to get to his kids. He ran along the road, limping. He hadn’t realized he had hurt his leg in the accident until he started to run. He wouldn’t get to the fire fast enough this way. Thea’s Prius sat by the side of the road, with its royal blue paint untouched by the accident.

Hating having to move backwards when his body wanted to fly towards the smoke, he limp-ran back toward Thea. He wished he could fly. Wizards in movies could fly.

Thea cowered when he ran back at her, still on the ground, but she looked at the gun and looked back at him hopefully. Maybe she thought he had changed his mind.

“Give me your keys.”

“You’ll have to kill me for them.”

David lunged at her. She didn’t have a purse, so he hoped she had the keys in her pocket. Despite wanting him to kill her, she fought back, kicking and scratching at him as he tried to get to her pockets. A lot more vicious than her little body would suggest. He tried to subdue her with magic, but she was better. She resisted his dark magic violently, trusting another wave of toxic heat toward him. She reminded him of a frightened animal shooting poison at a predator.

David had to scuttle away, but only for a moment. He turned toward her again. “Give me the damn keys. All I want is the keys. We don’t have time for this. It’s a distraction. Distraction. Distraction.” He chanted the word a few times and knew he sounded crazy.
Distraction
was the only word that could get him to leave his brother’s body. He needed to find his sons.

David turned and looked at the smoke again, and when he looked back at Thea, her eyes were on the sky too.

“My babies are in there,” she said.

As soon as John roused, his head burst with pain. His whole body felt dried out, and he half expected to see leathery claws instead of hands. He never knew what she planned to do anymore. He’d had his eyes on the dark wizard, and never thought to defend himself against her.

He smacked his lips, trying to generate saliva. It took him a moment to remember what he had done. It didn’t fully hit him until he saw him lying there. Face down, in a pool of his own blood. John might have vomited if he any fluid left in his body. He trembled instead, the pain in his head intensifying.

This was her fault. He did this for her. Because of her.

Only official vehicles remained on the road. Perhaps they had closed the road because of the approaching wildfire. He had cast a concealment spell around them when they approached the dark wizards so nosy Mundanes wouldn’t bother them. The spell continued to work, and cars sped by as if he and the dead man were invisible. He knew the spell would make it so no one would look over, or if they did, they wouldn’t care about what they saw. It would slip in and out of their mind with no lasting effect. He didn’t want anyone to see what he had done, but he could hardly remember ever feeling so lonely. His entire world had shifted to the point that the sky above him might shatter. But no one cared. No one noticed.

He hadn’t realized how vividly he still remembered that night. But when he saw the dark wizard knock Thea to the ground, the images flashed through his head again.

John and Thea had travelled the world together. They had visited countries few others would. Countries torn apart by war and poverty. Dangerous places. Places where women were still treated like property. Places where Westerners could be killed just by taking a step in the wrong direction. But they had been brave. They had been careful. They were there to do good. To give vaccinations. To teach the children. That goodness protected them, or he’d thought it had.

The true danger lurked closer to home, and found them on June 21
^st
, 1993. The summer solstice. He knew that wasn’t a coincidence. That had been part of the fun. Part of the joke.

John and Thea had gone to the grocery store. They bought food to bring to a solstice gathering later that night. Thea had planned on making strawberry pie. He remembered this because when the attack happened, the strawberries scattered all over the floor. The strawberries never made it into pie. Instead, they grew blue fuzzy mold. After the attack, he would find them everywhere, serving as a constant reminder. A moldy strawberry under the couch. A dried strawberry tucked under a rug. Smashed strawberries would never come out of the damn carpet.

They had left the door of their apartment ajar as they brought in the groceries. Five winter wizards took their chance. Burst in without warning.

They beat him. They raped her.

For no other reason than because they existed. Beauty and life and happiness and the light of angels filled Thea to the brim. And they hated her for it. They wanted to take it away.

And he failed to do anything to stop it.

But John believed they failed to take their light. They had hurt them in a way that would never be fully repaired, and had managed to leave a mark of their evil that would last—in the form of a baby girl named Caroline. But they hadn’t taken their light. They hadn’t won. Until now.

It had taken twenty years, but they got what they wanted. They had turned them into villains.