I lose forty-six times today, in forty-six different ways, each more painful than the last. My entire body feels like it’s been used as a punching bag by someone at least twice as large as Mr. Jackson.
I’ve got bruises on top of bruises, and when I lie down to sleep I can’t stop the tears from dribbling from my eyes. Mr. Jackson calls it a breakthrough.
The next day we go back to theory, which is a major relief. Although I protest to save face, I don’t think my body can take another beating like the one I got yesterday. Perhaps with a day of rest I’ll give Mr. Jackson more of a challenge tomorrow.
The topic today is Witch History For Dummies. Mr. Jackson says that to beat my opponents I need to understand where they come from.
Evidently, the magic-born have been around even longer than humans, although I’m not sure where Mr. Jackson’s getting his information. The witches watched with curiosity as humans appeared, reproducing like rabbits and filling the earth. The magic-born blended in, for the most part enjoying their new neighbors, occasionally playing tricks on them, using them. So long as the humans were unaware of them, the witches didn’t mind sharing the earth.
Witches had a hand in the start of many of history’s most violent wars, although, most of the time, the bloodthirsty humans barely required a nudge forward into chaos.
Every once in a while there was “a scare,” where someone from the magic community would be accused by the humans of sorcery and witchcraft; some were even sentenced and put to death. But so long as each event was just a one-off, the magic-born ignored it, blaming the results on the reckless and stupid actions of the accused.
Salem, Massachusetts. 1692-1693. I’d learned about the Salem Witch Trials in school, but Mr. Jackson says those were only half-truths. In fact, out of the dozens of alleged witches put to death during that time—not to mention the hundreds imprisoned—only a handful were really witches.
The magic community called it The Scare—the first time they realized just how vulnerable they were. They could fight back, but they were hopelessly outnumbered by the humans now, who had armies and weapons and fear on their side. Witches and warlocks were scattered across the earth, many of them loners or transients or disinterested in the activities of humans. Wizards were even worse, almost scarce, living like hermits.
They needed to unite.
To plan.
So they did.
Witches and warlocks of similar skillsets came together and began forming communities for protection and self-preservation. Gangs.
From time to time violence erupted between rival gangs in the battle for turf; however, eventually the leaders realized that if they were ever going to thrust off the shackles of secrecy that humans had forced them to wear, they’d have to work together. A tenuous alliance was formed between the gangs, one based on necessity rather than trust. A skeletal plan was created, agreed upon, set into motion.
Slowly, slowly, the magic-born infiltrated every aspect of human life.
And then they waited for the appointed hour.
I was there for the next part of the story.
“Why’d they wait so long to…take over?” I ask.
“Long?” Mr. Jackson says. “Time is different to them. They live longer than humans—centuries.” Centuries? A few months earlier I’d have told you that living over a hundred years was something that was only for vegetarian Tibetan monks who practiced daily yoga and meditation.
Mr. Jackson continues. “To them they were being patient, methodical, and smart. They focused on increasing their numbers, something that had never been a priority to them. Reproduction became their number one activity.”
“A witch baby boom?” I say. It’s almost laughable.
“When they were ready, they attacked,” Mr. Jackson finishes, ignoring my comment.
“How do you know so much about witches?” I ask, a question I’ve posed a million times.
Mr. Jackson scratches his chin.
I suck in a deep breath. I’m so sick and tired of the secrecy, of the unanswered questions. If I’m ever going to truly understand the world I’m stuck with, I need to know how the man I’m living with fits into the big picture. I inject as much steel into my words as possible. “Why are you preparing to hunt witches with me?” I ask. “I need to understand.”
Mr. Jackson sighs, looks away.
I can’t do this anymore. How am I supposed to learn anything if he won’t tell me everything he knows? But wait…
Mr. Jackson’s expression changes, softens, morphing from stern and stubborn to almost resigned. His eyes meet mine.
“My son is a warlock,” he says.
Holy shnikes.
I blink. He doesn’t laugh, doesn’t say “Gotcha!” Mr. Jackson never jokes, and he’s not kidding now. “Go on,” I say.
“My father was a warlock, too.”
“And your wife?” I ask breathlessly.
“A witch,” he says, the two words like punches to the gut.
Holy freaking son of a…
“She was killed,” he says.
“I—I’m sorry,” I say. But am I? Isn’t the whole point of everything we’re doing to kill witches? Destroy the ones who destroyed our world?
“She was one of the good ones,” he says.
Mind. Blown. “Good ones?” I say, incredulous.
“Like any species, there are the good, the bad, and the in-betweens,” he says. “Just because a group of humans goes around killing doesn’t make all humans evil, does it? Are you prepared to destroy all the Germans because of what Hitler and the Nazis did? Or what about the American pioneers? They slaughtered the Native Americans, are all of their descendants to be destroyed, too?”
I’m speechless. Everything he just said makes sense, and yet applying it to…witches—even thinking the word leaves a bad taste in my mouth—just doesn’t seem right. “But how do we know which ones are good?” I ask. “Is your son good?”
He laughs. “I hope so. My wife and I tried to raise him that way. I haven’t heard from him since before Salem’s Revenge.”
“And you’re not a warlock?” I say, trying to catch him off guard.
He laughs again, louder this time. “I wish I was. Perhaps I could really make a difference then. Try to stop what’s happening. Make peace.” He pauses, crinkling his nose and biting his lips. His eyes shimmer with moisture. “That’s what my wife was trying to do. Without good magic-borns like her, Salem’s Revenge would’ve been much sooner.”
And yet…it still happened. How? My lips part as it comes together. “They killed your wife because she opposed the witch apocalypse.”
Mr. Jackson’s eyebrows go up. “Of course, son,” he says.
~~~
Never. Trust. Anyone.
Those are the only three words Mr. Jackson speaks to me today. I’m still wondering whether he means him, too.
~~~
Mr. Jackson has withdrawn from me completely. He barely speaks to me, barely looks at me, just trains me harder and harder each day. Evidently he’s done with the mental and emotional. It’s purely physical now. At the end of each day I’m left with aches and bruises on parts of my body I didn’t even know existed.
I’ve gained ten pounds of muscle in the last two weeks alone.
But I can’t beat him, and so I can’t leave.
Chapter Nine
Not your normal birthday party.
No cake or icing or candles. No presents. Nothing except pain to tell me I’m seventeen years old.
Clang! Mr. Jackson’s sword glances off of mine with such force that two months ago it would’ve knocked me back a foot and numbed my arm. But not anymore. Now my muscles accept the blow almost eagerly, even as I lash out with a slash of my own. Mr. Jackson blocks it, but not as easily as he used to. I’m getting quicker by the day.
“Control your temper!” Mr. Jackson roars as I slash again, forcing him back across the training room.
I can feel it, a hot bulge in my chest, rising, r
ising, growing, growing, pushing its way into my muscles, my hands, my gritted teeth. The red hot anger of my temper, screaming at me. Kill, kill, kill. The Necros. Their leader, the Reaper. The witches. Anyone who would harm those I once cared about—who I still care about.
RAGE
Even as the word springs to mind, I feel it begin to fade: RAGE Rage rage rage.
The energy leaves my body, reducing it from a coiled, well-oiled spring to a limp thing, like a used rag. Mr. Jackson leaps forward, disarming me with a single swipe, shoving the sharp tip of his blade to my neck.
He’s breathing hard, his hot exhalations washing over my face in waves. “Don’t give up,” he says, setting his sword down and walking away from me, leaving me to reflect on my failures.
I sit for two hours in Mr. Jackson’s wood-paneled, carpeted basement—what we call ‘the training room’—reflecting. Why is it so hard for me to control my temper? It never used to be that way, but I guess I hadn’t lost everything before. Now my temper is either so powerful and fiery that I become my own worst enemy, or as mellow and cool as a glass of lemonade on the beach. There’s no in between. Every time I think of the broken bodies of my family, picture Beth’s bloody message on the wall, get lost in a happy memory, or read one of my old journal entries, I can feel the hunger for revenge tighten inside me, like a viper readying to strike. I hate that feeling. But when I try to control it, when it counts the most, it disappears, as if washed away by an ocean of despair, or perhaps pathetic self-awareness.
Mr. Jackson pokes his head in. “You okay?” he asks.
I shrug. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Because we both have cabin fever. Let’s get out of here.”
For a second my face lightens and a swell of airy excitement fills my chest, but no—he doesn’t mean it’s time to leave his house for good. Another field trip.
“Okay,” I say.
~~~
Even though I’m incredibly relieved to escape the home that feels more like a prison, I’m dreading what I might see today. A girl turned to stone and smashed to bits? A houseful of survivors burned to death?
We slip down small side streets and alleyways, Mr. Jackson leading us to some predetermined destination. Somehow he always seems to know exactly where the action will be, as if he has witch radar. Or perhaps it’s simply because you can go anywhere in Atlanta and find witches doing witchy things.
When we reach a fire escape attached to the side of an old apartment building, Mr. Jackson starts to climb. I look up and down the alley and then follow him up.
Two stories, three stories, four. We enter through a fourth-floor apartment. The door is already open a crack.
The smell of decay and disuse welcome us inside, musty and moldy. An old kitchen in severe need of renovation. Appliances so old and rusty they must have been a fire hazard. We sit at a round breakfast table, rest our hands on the strawberry-patterned tablecloth, yellowed with age. Far too cheery for the day.
Mr. Jackson gestures for me to look out the dirt-streaked window, across the alleyway to the neighboring apartments. I don’t want to look, because every time he tells me to look at something when we’re out, I’ve felt sick afterwards. And angry. So angry. At him. At the world. At the witches. And at myself.
But I do, because not looking is even worse. Ignorance is the worst plague of all, a form of blindness that destroys the hearts of the people who hide behind it.
At first I see nothing but a window and a set of thick navy blue drapes.
“Look closer,” Mr. Jackson says when I tell him there’s nothing to see.
I do and realization strikes me hard in the chest. “The window is clean,” I say. No streaks, no smears. Shiny and clear. Someone so obsessed with cleanliness that they had to clean the window in the middle of the witch apocalypse. “There are people living there.”
Mr. Jackson says nothing.
The drapes move, barely, just a flutter, so slight I almost think I’ve imagined it. But then they move again, and a head appears. A young boy of Asian descent, no more than ten, peers out the window to the street below. He brushes a hand across his forehead, pushing his dark, too-long bangs away from his eyes.
“Why are we here?” I say, although I know I don’t want to know the answer.
“Watch,” Mr. Jackson says, and I hate the word and the way he says it.
“I’m going over there,” I say, standing.
“It’s too late,” Mr. Jackson says. “They’re already inside.”
“No,” I say. “We can’t. Not again.”
“You have to see what they’re capable of,” Mr. Jackson says, grabbing my arm so tightly I can feel it in my bones. “Know your enemy better than you know yourself.”
I already know my enemy. The blank eyes of my family stare at me every time I close my eyes, dwarfed only by the shadow-like memories of Beth and Xave.
Motion across the alley catches my attention. The curtains are thrust to the side and a woman—the boy’s mother?—grabs him, her eyes hollow with terror. She turns to drag him away but the shadows are already there, behind them, in the apartment. Witches. How did Mr. Jackson know they were already inside?
“Not again,” I say, wrenching my arm away from Mr. Jackson’s grip, ignoring the sharp pain as his nails drag across my skin. To my surprise, he doesn’t try to stop me as I push through the door and onto the landing. Frantically, I climb higher and higher on the fire escape, to the top of the building, pulling myself onto the roof.
Breathing heavily, I look across to the top of the other building, which is a few feet lower than the one I’m standing on. Maybe ten feet away, a really long jump, impossible without the height difference and the adrenaline coursing through my veins.
Catch the pass; dive if you have to.
I back up sixty feet, to the other side of the roof. Imagine I’m on the football field, facing off against a really quick defender, one that might actually be able to match my speed. The center snaps the football and the quarterback drops back, but I don’t see any of that because I’m already gone, bursting toward the end zone on a basic deep route. The defender is already behind me, the ball already in the air, but the quarterback puts too much arm into the pass. I’ll have to dive. Three steps from the edge, two.
One.
I leap, planting my foot as close to the edge as I dare, spring-boarding forward, wind-milling my arms. Doing everything in my power to catch that ball.
The other roof comes up fast and hard and I only remember to somersault at the last second, as Mr. Jackson has taught me. My shoulder smashes off the concrete and tosses me into a chaotic roll that sends shivers of pain through me.
But I’ve made it.
The pain is nothing because those witches are already inside.
I push to my feet and find the door to the inside, taking the steps three at a time to the fourth floor. Hear noises. Screams. Shouts. Wails. Am I too late?
Without thinking, I burst into the apartment and into Hell. The woman is lying on the floor, moaning, scratching at her skin like she’s covered with flesh-eating bugs. Except nothing is there but her fingers, drawing thin lines of blood down her torn cheeks. The boy is laying on the floor next to her, unconscious, a knife in his stomach, a circle of blood widening through his t-shirt.
Three shrouded witches stand solemnly in a semi-circle, muttering incantations past barely moving lips. Their eyes are closed.
“No!” I scream, charging at them, extracting my sword from my belt as I run. I’ll kill them all. It’s what they deserve.
The tarantulas appear from out of nowhere, dropping from the ceiling in droves. Hundreds of them, as big as my hands, with hairy legs and big, round, black eyes. I hate spiders. My worst nightmare.
I slash one, then another, then a third, their thick bodies exploding with green liquid, splattering my skin and burning like acid. One lands on my shoulder and I try to squash it with the hilt of my sword but it crawls to my belly in an instant. Frantical
ly, I slash at it with my sword, slicing it in half and opening up a deep gash in my skin. Blood pours out.
The woman screams and runs past me, her fingernails still cutting into her flesh.
CRASH! Shards of glass tinkle to the floor and into the alley as she throws herself through the window and into open space, her scream lessening in volume and then cutting off completely as her body surely breaks on the hard ground.
And still the spiders fall from the sky. I slash and slash but they keep coming. I feel the warmth of my spilled blood but they keep coming. The shadows of the witches hang over me but the arachnids keep coming.
I’m dead. But then they disappear, every single spider, and the shadows scream and fall.
Behind where the witches were just standing, Mr. Jackson stands, his sword crimson.
“Hallucinators,” he says grimly. “None of it was real.”
I carry the boy all the way back to our house, but he dies a few hours later, his wound likely inflicted by his own hallucinating mother.
Chapter Ten
Training is different today; very different.
The fury is curling inside me, fiery tendrils of flame licking at my heart, but I don’t show it. Not this time. Typically Mr. Jackson can see the anger plastered on my face, in the line of my taut muscles, in the way my strokes get stronger and stronger…and then he calls me on it, tells me to focus, to not let my temper control me. And it always disappears and I always lose.
Always.
Every time.
Failure.
Not today.
Today I hide my boiling wrath, clamp a lid on the pot and pretend my anger isn’t there. But it is there. And it continues to feed my muscles, my body, and I launch an attack that even I didn’t know I had in me. Mr. Jackson fights back, but I match him stroke for stroke, and then he trips and falls back, his sword spinning away from him, and I leap…