Arianna Rose

A novel
By Jennifer and Christopher Martucci

ARIANNA ROSE (Part 1) 
Published by Jennifer and Christopher Martucci at Smashwords 
Copyright © 2012 
All rights reserved.
First edition: October 2012


This book is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes
Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

Chapter 1

The sound of tires screeching on pavement sliced through the silence of Lily Andrew’s house like a high-pitched scream wailing in the wind.  Piercing and shrill, the shriek cautioned from beyond her room.  Seconds earlier she’d slept, nestled comfortably in her bed, dreaming peacefully.  Now, however, she stirred, and concern crawled within her, rousing her from sleep.  She lifted her head, rubbed her eyes groggily then opened them briefly.  The world appeared fuzzy, along with her thoughts.  Slumber summoned her and her eyelids closed several times.  Returning to the dream she’d been having seemed like a far more inviting prospect than getting out of bed and inspecting what was likely a neighbor returning from a night of too much partying.  She was about to let her head fall back against her pillow and ignore the skidding sound she’d heard, as well as the faint worry that whispered through her body, when she realized her room was bathed in light.  She glanced at her alarm clock.  It read 3:30 a.m., too early for the sun to have risen.  Yet, white light poured through her curtains like molten steel and blanched everything around her.  She sat up immediately, alarmed, and jumped out of bed.  The preternatural glow disoriented her, but she managed to cross her room on unsteady legs to her window.  Once there and concealed by her curtains, she peeked out beyond the pane into the blinding light.  She squinted against it and her eyes watered, but she was able to make out an image.  Her breath caught in her chest when she saw that three large black SUVs blocked her driveway and faced her house with their headlights left on.  Her mind began to swirl, exhaustion and confusion conspiring against any form of reasoning.  What she was seeing did not make any sense.  But something prickled inside her, a feeling or sense warned her to get her parents and leave.  She did not know what the vehicles were there for, but did not hesitate a second longer to consider it.  She ran out of her bedroom down a long, narrow hallway to her parents’ bedroom and pounded on their door twice before rushing in.
 “Mom, Dad! Wake up,” she said but they did not move.  “Mom, Dad! Come on!” she tried again and tapped their feet.
“What, what is it honey?” her father asked, his voice thick with sleep.
“Are you sick?” her mother asked drowsily.
“There are people here!” she said with urgency.  “Get up, now!  Three black SUVs are blocking the driveway with the lights on.”
Just as she finished her sentence, the sound of glass shattering was followed by thunderous pounding and wood splintering.  It sounded as though the front door had exploded.   Both of her parents sat upright.  Lily’s body jerked as though she’d been struck by a bolt of lightning, and deep within her, intuition cried out for her to flee.
“What the hell?” her father said and sprung out of bed.
“Call the police!” her mother said and moved to stand beside her.
Her father stood and gripped the phone in his hand.  He began to dial and she watched his features transform from worried, to horrified.  His complexion paled and his mouth formed a hard line.  Her stomach churned and he didn’t need to tell her the line had been cut.  His face had said it first.  “Damn it! There’s no dial tone!”
Lily felt as though her legs would give way beneath her.  The feeling inside her that warned seconds ago screamed now, and demanded that she heed it.  Her body began to tremble. 
“No dial tone?” she asked and felt tears begin to well.
“No!  It’s dead! And my cell phone is downstairs!  Shit!”
“Mine’s in my room.  I can get it,” she said but did not trust her legs or courage to carry her there.
“There’s no time!” her father said.
“We need to stay together!” her mother ordered and clasped Lily’s hand between her own.  She felt calmed by her mother’s touch, but only briefly.
Heavy footsteps stomped decisively through the downstairs hallway and began ascending the staircase.
“Oh my God! What’re we going to do?” she panicked.
“The window!” her father said.  “Out the window!  It’s our only hope.”
Lily felt a tug at her hand, and her mother pulled her toward the window.  She looked out.  Her parent’s bedroom overlooked the backyard.  The landscape was usually a picturesque scene of lush greenery, of serenity.  Normally, she would see a meticulously mowed lawn sprawling and stretching to a verdant tree line that marked what looked like an endless forest beyond.   But she did not see any of that now.  The rich, vibrant hues of green that usually colored her yard had been paled, faded to a sickly silver-gray shade.   Stony moonlight cast a ghostly pallor and allowed her to see that her backyard was not as it had been left hours earlier.  And there were people milling about.  Her heart thundered in her chest as she saw nearly a half-dozen men moving by the scant ashen light of the Moon, as well as the headlamps of the SUVs, piling branches and brushwood around a tall wooden stake.  They moved somberly, but with purpose, in the dusky dimness and lent the perplexing scene gravity and darkness.  Lily felt her mother’s hands release hers and watched as they shot up to her mouth.  Her mother gasped.
“Oh my God,” her mother breathed.  “Jim, in the yard; look what they’ve done in the yard!”
But her father never had the opportunity to see what she and her mother had seen.  A torrent of black swept into the room, a flurry of blurred shapes that moved in a coordinated but hurried manner.  Lily heard the scream escape her lips as she saw them enter.  Her father did not have time to turn toward the window or react.  They moved too quickly.  Men, all large and dressed in dark clothing, descended on them like a tide of blackened ocean.  They surged into the room with ski masks pulled over their faces and advanced without breaking stride.  The men grabbed both of her parents.  
“Mom! Dad!” she cried and felt hands yank at her wrists.  She lurched backward and nearly fell.
The world began to spin.  Her mind filled with disjointed incomplete thoughts, whirling and revolving faster and faster.  She desperately wanted, needed, to anchor herself to a coherent thought, something concrete; something that made sense.  But nothing made sense.  She heard her parent’s voices shouting.  They sounded as if they were calling from the end of a long tunnel.
“Take your hands off my daughter!” her mother shrieked.
“Who are you?” her father demanded. “What do you want from us?”
“Just let our daughter go!” her mother pleaded.
None of the dark figures answered.
“We don’t have any money or valuables!” her father argued. 
“We’re not here for either,” a calm voice said from the doorway and sounded far closer and clearer than any other.  The spinning in Lily’s mind slowed considerably, albeit inexplicably.  But her heart pounded more rapidly, speeding dangerously at the sound of the man’s voice.  His voice flowed smoothly in a deep, rich baritone, the cadence as soothing and lulling as floating on a gently rolling river. Yet, it did not make her feel at ease in the least.  To the contrary, the feeling inside that warned when she had awoken and continued to warn, though blindsided seconds earlier, began to rage against it, presaging of imminent danger.  She and her parents were being held against their will, and something about the man in the doorway, something about his demeanor, terrified her more than the men holding them.  
With her mind no longer spinning and her thoughts sharpened, she looked to the entryway, curiosity mingling with terror, to see the person whose serene voice had set off a firestorm of fear and aversion deep within her core.  A tall sinewy shape filled the frame.  He wore dark clothing like the others, but instead of a mask, a large hood covered his head and obscured his features.  
“Is this her?” one of the men that held her asked.
The man with the hood approached her slowly, his gait deliberate.  She could not see his eyes, but felt them on her, burning her skin like acid.
“Don’t you fucking touch her!” her father yelled, but the man remained unfazed.  He kept walking until there were only inches between them.  Lily’s heart knocked dangerously fast against her ribcage and tears streamed from her eyes.  Each breath she took was short and shallow; she had never been so afraid in all of her sixteen years.  The man did not speak right away.  He loomed over her with his body so close to hers she could feel the heat radiating from it.  He smelled of pine and musk, and she felt sickened by the scent.  He raised his hands and she flinched, certain he was about to strike her.  Only he did not.  Instead, he lifted his hands to his head and pulled back his hood.  She inhaled sharply, involuntarily, at the sight before her.  Beneath the hood, he was monstrously disfigured.  Deeply pitted flesh in shades of brown, pink, gray and angry red spread out in a horrific network and covered his entire face.  His skin was puckered and charred, his features consumed completely by what looked like burns.  His lipless mouth remained in a perpetual snarl and his ears seemed to have melted to his skull.  He stooped to look at her and she recoiled in fear.  He glowered at her with sunken, slate-colored eyes that had neither eyelashes nor eyebrows, yet managed to convey intensity with their stare.  The hatred he radiated for her was palpable.  But the reason for his hatred of her remained a mystery; she did not know why.  She had never seen him before, would have surely remembered his face.  And if she survived this encounter with him, she was positive his features would be indelibly etched into her memory for it was the content of nightmares.  With him so close, she struggled to move, to breathe even.  Every part of her, including her lungs, had frozen.  He looked like a demon, a beast that had risen from the depths of hell.
“Yes, yes,” the demon man hissed and ran his tongue over his bared teeth.  “She is one of them,” he said then he reached a hand into his jacket.  Before she knew what was happening, a deafening blast rang out.  She saw the muzzle flash, but did not realize a gun had been fired until she saw her father fall to the floor.  Her mother opened her mouth to cry out, but the words never formed.  She was silenced by bullets to her head.  Lily collapsed to the floor, every part of her trembling and teeming with emotion.  
“No!” she screamed; her voice shrill and foreign to her own ears as she looked at the image before her.  Her parents lay in an expanding pool of blood on their bedroom floor.  Her mind began to spiral, plunging headlong deeper and deeper into a blackened abyss from which there was no escape.  Dark, velvety oblivion beckoned her with welcoming arms and numbness.  She heard a flurry of voices and fought the seductive swell of shock.
“Why did you kill her parents?” a voice questioned.  “Was that really necessary?”
She watched blearily as the demon man unsheathed a knife from his belt and slashed at the air with astounding speed.  The man whom she presumed had spoken dropped to the floor beside her, his throat slit in a long arc below his jaw.
“Does anyone else wish to question God’s will?” the demon man asked.  “He who harbors the devil’s minions will suffer God’s wrath.”
He waited for someone to respond and Lily felt herself fall to the darkness until the man’s voice rang out again.  “Grab her and follow me!”
She felt both of her arms being tugged by two separate people.  Her eyes scanned the room and landed on her parents.  She began to scream and thrash, but the men who held her did not react.  They dragged her down the stairs, through the hallway and out the sliding glass door to her backyard.  She fought and kicked, but was powerless against them.  They were simply too strong.  Her mind no longer tried to succumb to the void though.  Something else entirely began to happen; something primal and inexplicable began to rise within her.  What she saw beyond the glass of the doors sent it coursing through her veins like electricity.  She saw a group of men clad in hooded cloaks.  They held crudely fashioned crosses made of branches and chanted verses that were unintelligible.  They stood and had formed a circle around a tall, wooden rod with brushwood piled beneath it.  She recognized what it was immediately and cried out, “No! Please, no! No!” But no one responded to her pleas.  They hoisted her up atop the twigs and began tying her to the pole.  The circle opened and the chanting silenced briefly as the tall man with the burnt face entered and approached her.  The circle closed around him.  He held a torch in his hand.
“Please,” she begged.  “Please don’t!”  
She watched in horror as he pulled a lighter from his pants pocket and lit the combustible end of it.  He held it close to the kindling and said, “Where is she? Where is the One, the Sola?”
“Sola?” she managed in a shaky voice.
“Do not play dumb with me, witch!  The only one; the one who walks alone!”
“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she cried.
“Liar!  You know exactly who I’m talking about.  She is the sole prophet, the darkest one among your people, witch” he spat.  “She has been here; I can feel her.”
Lily had no idea what he was talking about, why he rambled on about such nonsense.  All she knew was that he was a murderer, an insane murderer who had killer her parents, tied her to a stake and intended to burn her alive.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.  I-I’m not a witch! And I don’t know anyone named Sola!”
“Very well, then.  Have it your way!” he said and threw the torch at the brushwood.
The dried branches caught fire immediately.  She felt her bare feet begin to burn as flames licked at them, writhing and blistering, reaching up her ankles and calves searing her flesh.  She heard herself whimper in pain, blinding white-hot pain.  The man watched her face and seemed to relish in her agony.  She saw her own face reflected in his cold, pale eyes.  And rage began to fill her, rage unlike any she had ever felt.  A strange sensation crept up the length of her spine and spread out from her core to her extremities.  She knew the flames had engulfed her thighs; that the fire had reached her waist, but she no longer felt its heat, or the pain.  The unfamiliar sensation had etched away at it.  She looked up into the eyes of the demonic looking man, and a glow of red in her irises was mirrored in his.  Crimson light blazed from her eyes.  
“We all see it now, witch.  Evil has shown its true face to us,” he said and attempted a cruel smile.  
Lily let his words fall to the flames with her body.  The fire engulfed her fully, yet she felt a sense peace overtake her.  Death embraced her.  Consciousness slipped away, escaped slowly.  The sadness and anger she’d felt earlier dissolved into obscurity along with the ethereal scarlet glow of her eyes.  Her body had been reduced to ashes, but her spirit had been released.  Fear, pain, misery and rage dispersed like cinders into the night sky.

Chapter 2

Arianna Rose looked around the cramped mobile home she and her mom stood in and groaned.
“You can’t be serious, Mom,” she said.
“It’s fine baby.  We’ll be fine here.  It just needs a little sprucing up is all,” her mother replied.
“If by sprucing up you mean set on fire than yes, sprucing up is exactly what this place needs.”
“Don’t be so negative, baby.  We’ll make this place a home in no time.”
She knew that making the dumpy trailer “a home” was her mother’s code for picking up a man at the nearest bar and making him a regular fixture in their living room.  The thought of yet another scotch-soaked suitor setting up camp with them made her stomach turn.
“Yeah Mom, I know what you need to make this place a home.  And I’m sure you’ll find Prince Charming at the dive we passed on the way here.”
Her mother raised her brows and feigned insult.  “Don’t you talk to me that way, girl,” she began.
“Oh save it, Mom,” Arianna said and effectively ended her mother’s halfhearted attempt to reprimand her.
“Give me a smoke will ya?” her mom asked.
Arianna reached a hand in her black canvas bag and dug out a pack of Camel Lights and a lighter.  She took one out for herself and one for her mother.  She watched as her mother lit her cigarette with impossibly long, hot-pink nails.  Arianna often wondered how her mother managed to do anything with her artificial claws, much less ignite a lighter.  But she did, and with surprising dexterity.  
Arianna smiled and cocked her head to one side.  Her mom loved to smoke, so much so she closed her eyes and tipped her head back as she puckered her lips and inhaled.  Each crease around her mouth deepened as she did so, yet her expression remained one of sheer bliss.  She left her eyes closed while she blew out ribbons of opaque smoke.  Once the ritual had been completed and the first drag had been taken, she opened her eyes and raked her hand through her dry, dyed blonde hair.  Her hair remained back where she’d pushed it, positioned in place like hay with styling product added to it. The metal bangle bracelets on her wrist clanged together softly as she dropped her hand to her side.
“Yeah, we’re gonna be just fine here, baby,” her mother crooned.  “You’ll see.” 
“Oh I’m sure we will,” she replied and lit her own cigarette.  She did not indulge in the same dramatic routine as her mother, but the infusion of nicotine into her bloodstream did improve her mood a bit.
“You have everything you need for school tomorrow?” her mom asked.
“I guess so,” Arianna answered.  “I really wish I could have finished out my senior year back in Rockdale, though.  At least I knew a few people there, had a few friends.”
“Oh don’t start in on me about that now, okay?  Haven’t I been through enough with the whole Carl thing?  Haven’t I hurt enough without you giving me shit too?  I was shamed out of Rockdale.  Do you know what that was like?”
She saw her mother’s eyes begin to well with tears.  She did not want to risk making the blue mascara and eyeliner that rimmed her tear-filled eyes run, so she decided to let her mother off the hook on the subject of relocating during her final year of high school for the moment.  She shifted the conversation, instead, to a more pressing matter at hand.  Namely, the run-down trailer that reeked of mold and a sour stench she could not quite place.
“Speaking of shit, this place is a shithole.”
“Shithole or not, we would be on the streets if it weren’t for your Uncle Eddie.  No thanks to Carl, of course.”  
Her mother ran her hand through her hair again and instigated the bracelets a second time.  Arianna found her good mood souring along with whatever had rotted in their new home.  She’d had enough of her mother’s self-pity for one day and decided to remind her that Carl’s decision to evict them had not been on a whim.  
“Mom, he found you screwing his cousin on a lawn chair.  What did you think he’d do?”
“Well, I don’t know what I thought he’d do.  But I didn’t think he’d kick us out, that’s for sure.”
Ordinarily, she would never have let anyone else get away with saying something so ignorant, but she genuinely believed her mother lacked the ability to think any situation through.  It was as if her mother has stopped developing mentally somewhere around her sixteenth birthday, that adulthood had eluded her entirely.  Arianna’s mother, Cathy Rose, never considered consequences, especially where relationships were concerned.  She acted on impulse, was self-indulgent, and prone to fits similar to a two year-old baby’s tantrum.  She loved attention – preferably of the male variety – and drank too much, but she was the only mother Arianna would ever have.  And for that reason, she let a lot of stuff go.
“We passed a Safeway on the way here with a Help Wanted sign in the window.  I’m gonna drive by there and pick up some hair dye for my roots and some stuff to clean this place, and maybe see if a manager is around so I can see about the job.  You can start unpacking your stuff.  I’ll help you unload it first.”
Her mother disappeared out of the trailer to their car.  Arianna stubbed her cigarette out on the sole of her boot and looked around.  She dreaded unpacking.  Time and experience had taught her that no home was permanent.  Just as she’d get settled in a new town, her mother would decide that the relationship she had been in had to end.  And they would have to leave.  The same story played out each time.  The only thing that changed was the zip code.  Now, she was in a new town called Herald Falls in New York and she could almost hear a timer initiating the countdown until they left for another town, and yet another miserable trailer.  Until then, though, she would have to deal with the current one.  Reluctantly, she turned from the dismal display before her and walked to her mother’s car.  Two boxes waited for her stacked neatly.  Her mother had passed her and brought one to the trailer.  Three egg boxes they’d gotten from a supermarket held every belonging Arianna owned.  Her life had been condensed into three egg boxes.  The thought made her chest ache, but only briefly.  She never allowed herself to wallow more than a moment.  
“Ya got those, baby?” her mother called out as she opened the driver’s side door of her ancient and decrepit Toyota Camry.
“I’m fine, Mom.  Go get your hair dye,” she called back.  But her mother couldn’t have possibly heard.  She had already closed the door and waved absently as she preened in the rearview mirror.  Arianna rolled her eyes and made her way through the small living room and even smaller kitchen to a narrow hallway that ended with her room.  She dropped the boxes she was carrying and opened the one on top.  After moving a few leather-bound albums, her hand felt a plastic scented-oil warmer.  She pulled it out and searched for an electrical outlet to plug it into.  When finally she found one, she shoved the prongs of the warmer into it.  The vanilla oils began to heat immediately and contend with the odor of mildew.  She breathed in the warm scent and began removing her possessions.
She took folded clothes and placed them in the squat dresser that had been left behind by her Uncle Eddie’s previous tenants.  The dresser had water ring stains on the surface and more splintering chips in it than she could count.  But the drawers slid in and out smoothly, a feature she was grateful for.  Her last one would fall off its track half the time and fell out of the dresser completely the other half the time.  Any dresser, or no dresser, was an improvement from the last she’d had.  
Unpacking her clothes did not take long, and what little she had fit nicely in the small bureau.  With that done, she turned her attention to the bed, if it could even be called that.  The sleeper more closely resembled an oversized window seat, and she wondered whether it would be long enough for her to stretch out and sleep comfortably in.  She sat on it and crinkled her nose as the smell of sweat and feet rose from it.  Before she would attempt to lay in it, she would need to borrow one of her mother’s old comforters to cover it and stifle the stench.  She stood and slid the last two boxes in the far corner of the cramped room and set about inspecting the rest of the trailer.  Overall, it wasn’t dramatically different from her last.  The trailer her uncle owned and allowed them to stay in for the time being, the one she now lived in, was much smaller and smellier than the last, but the layout was nearly identical.  Of course, one major selling point of their current trailer was that it lacked Carl and his many friends and family members who visited at all hours of the night in varying states of inebriation.  But she was confident her mother would remedy his absence with a new string of frequenters.  She was sure that in no time she would stumble home after a work shift and several cocktails at the local dive bar with someone new.  All she could hope for was that the new clown was a mellow drunk as opposed to some of the angrier, more aggressive types she’d encountered along the way.  Angry, aggressive drunks who sought to enjoy both her mother and her had taught her at a young age that she needed to arm herself when she slept.  She remembered her knife and quickly returned to her room and took it out of the bottom box.  The hilt was slender and the blade lightweight.  It fit perfectly in her hand, familiar and comforting like an old friend.  It, like a friend everyone should have, had saved her many times.  She removed it from its sheath and stared at the silvery blade.  
In it, she saw an image of herself, distorted, but her, nevertheless.  She looked different from most girls her age, harder.  She did not opt to bleach her hair as her mother did.  And she did not have her mother’s fair skin and blue eyes either.  In fact, she did not resemble her mother in the least and guessed she looked like her father, whoever he was.  Her deep brown hair fell in pin-straight panels around her face to her shoulders and was all the same length.  Her eyes were nearly the same color as her hair and her complexion was olive rather than peaches and cream.  She lined her eyes with charcoal-colored makeup and preferred to wear black as opposed to the candy-colored rainbow her mother favored.  
Arianna was nothing like her mother.  She promised herself years ago that she would never allow herself to be vulnerable and at the mercy of a man.  And if she ever decided to have a child, she would wait until she was older and more settled, and certain she could provide for it.  
Settling down and having children were distant, obscure possibilities.  School, however, was definite.  In less than twenty-four hours, she would enroll at yet another school.  Her eighteenth birthday had passed three days earlier and she was sure she would be one of the oldest students in her grade, and likely the newest to the school.  But the months would fly by as they always had, and before long she would do something else her mother had never done: graduate from high school.  After high school, she wasn’t sure what she would do.  She quickly sheathed her knife again and tucked it safely in her boot.  She would place it under her pillow as she had every night for the last eight years, and it would accompany her to school the next day.  
The sound of tires kicking up gravel in front of the trailer distracted her from her brooding.  She looked up and realized the room had darkened considerably, that the sun had set some time ago.  A rumbling engine outside meant that her mother had returned.  Her mother had been gone for several hours and had likely found her way to the local watering hole.  Arianna paused a moment in her room and considered going out to greet her and share a smoke with her, but the sound of a male voice followed by her mother’s laughter changed her mind.  She froze where she was.  Her mother did not like to be alone, and Arianna never liked the people she kept company with.  
“Baby, come out and meet a new friend I made in town,” her mother called in a slightly slurred voice.  “We got fried chicken!”
More giggling ensued, both her mother’s and the mystery man’s, and Arianna decided to ignore her mother and forgo dinner.  Hunger would be a welcome alternative to sharing a meal and part of an evening with another of her mother’s loser suitors.  Instead, she shut the door to her tiny room, and the world beyond it, and prepared for her first day in a new school.

Chapter 3

The alarm clock radio beeped incessantly until Arianna reached a hand out and silenced it with a smack.  She stayed in bed for several seconds and allowed her eyes to scan her room.  Morning sunlight did little to brighten it by any definition of the word.  The effect was quite the opposite, in fact.  Water stains on the ceiling were more visible, along with the overall yellowness of the walls.  But the condition of her room was the least of her concerns.  She needed to get up and start a new school.  And she needed to slip into the bathroom without encountering her mother’s overnight guest.  She doubted either of them would be awake.  They had stayed up until the early morning hours and, judging from the noise level of their partying, had imbibed plenty of liquor.  To be safe, she hurried and picked an outfit from her dresser: a white tank top with a cropped black T-shirt that hung off her shoulder to layer atop the tank top and a pair of black, stretch skinny jeans.  She accessorized with several hoop earrings that went up her earlobe, a thick-banded wristwatch and her favorite black motorcycle boots.  Her boots were the most expensive article of clothing she owned.  They were genuine leather, steel toed, and her proudest purchase, second only to her motorcycle that waited on the trailer’s porch.  
Her motorcycle, a used 2009 Kawasaki KLR 650, had been purchased seven months earlier with money she’d saved working after school and summer jobs.  The three-year-old bike was the closest she’d ever come to owning a new one.  She loved to ride, had caught the fever for it when she was twelve.  A boyfriend of hers had had a dirt bike, a KX 80, and had taught her to ride.  As soon as she had become comfortable with the mechanics of operating it, she had fallen in love.  Everything about riding had enticed her, the feeling of freedom, of speeding on two wheels with nothing between her and the world around her, going where cars couldn’t go.  Her relationship with her motorcycle-riding twelve-year-old boyfriend had ended after a short time, but her love affair with riding had just begun.  When she had turned sixteen and had gotten her driver’s license two years earlier, she had bought her first bike, a used CR 250.  Not surprisingly, her mother had not protested her purchase, as any decent parent would have.  To the contrary, she had celebrated alongside Arianna when she’d finally saved enough money to buy it.  
Arianna shook her head remembering her mother’s unorthodox reaction to her choice of transportation and took a final glance in the mirror.  She supposed most girls in her position would have started a new school with a new outfit, but new clothes were a luxury she simply could not afford.  The clothes she wore were neither new nor expensive.  But they were clean and she had paid for them herself.  Such details may have been lost on another, but were held as small victories in her mind.  They gave her a degree of confidence and pride she would not have had otherwise.  
Dressed and armed with her smidgen of self-confidence, she stole out of her room and crept to the bathroom to brush her teeth and hair.  Once she’d finished in the bathroom, she peeked out beyond the door into the living-room area and saw a man sprawled out on the couch.  She shook her head and was about to slip down the hallway and out of the house when she heard a voice whispering in her ear.  
“Funny, I didn’t remember him havin’ boobs last night,” her mother whispered and Arianna jumped.
“Shit mom!  Are you trying to kill me?  You’re like a ninja or something sneaking up like that.  Shit!” Arianna’s heart pounded.  She’d assumed her mother would be in the living room or her bedroom, not right beside her.  It took a moment to compose herself before she laughed at her mother’s comment.
“So, he didn’t have boobs last night, huh?  Looks like he’s got a pretty generous set now,” she said and giggled.
“I know.  His are bigger than mine,” her mother said and cupped her own breasts.
“Mine too.  How much did you drink last night?”
“Enough to free willy in there,” her mother said and laughed.  “The guy’s a whale, get it?”
“Yeah Mom, I get it,” Arianna said and took a few steps closer to get a better look.  The man slept in a white undershirt with matching yellow crescents under each armpit.  His belly was large and round and he did have what appeared to be breasts.  The few hairs he had had been combed and stretched across his scalp in a feeble attempt at concealing his bald head.
“Oh Mom, I think this one’s a keeper,” she said sarcastically.  “You should marry him.  I see my future father in there.”
“Oh shut up, you little wiseass.  This is not my proudest moment.”
“No, no it’s not.”
“What should I do?  He can’t stay here.”
“For starters, take a shower.  Don’t forget to bring your cell phone in, and lock the bathroom door.  And when he wakes up, tell him you have an early appointment and you’ll call him later.”
Her mom paused and seemed to mull over the advice she’d given her.  The time she’d spent coaching her mother had cost her time she would have spent eating breakfast.  Her stomach rumbled and reminded her she had skipped dinner the night before.  If she hurried, she would have time to stop at a gas station and grab a roll. 
“That could work, baby!  What would I do without you?” her mother asked and gave her a quick peck on the cheek.  “Where are you off to so early?”
Her mother had clearly forgotten it was her first day at a new school.  A night of heavy drinking often caused her memory to lapse.  That and what little common sense and good judgment she had generally expired.
“School, Mom, I start school today,” she replied.  “And I’m going to be late if I don’t leave now.”
“Oh, good luck, baby!  I’m sorry I forgot.  This has all been so hard on me.  I can’t seem to keep a thought straight in my head.”
“It’s okay.  I’ll see you later,” she said.
She turned and walked down the hallway, past the sleeping man.  She grabbed her backpack that rested against the inside wall by the front door and headed out.  Her motorcycle leaned against the trailer with her helmet affixed to the back.  She slipped her arms into the straps of the backpack and put her helmet on.  Then she straddled the bike and started it.  The Kawasaki engine purred and she felt her pulse rate quicken.  She enjoyed few things in life, and riding was one of them.  She revved the engine twice, released the clutched and shifted into first gear with her foot.  With a slight twist of her wrist, she felt wind in her face.  She rode, enjoying the openness of the county roads, for more than ten minutes before she reached the gas station that skirted the campus of her new school.  She ran in and grabbed a roll and paid.  She ate most of her breakfast quickly then continued to school.
She supposed she should have felt butterflies in her stomach, or nerves of some sort.  But she didn’t.  New schools were old news.  She did feel like having a cigarette.  Twelve hours had passed since her last one and her body was craving nicotine.  Most schools were smoke-free campuses, but as she rode down the driveway, she did not see any signs indicating her new school was as well.  She parked her motorcycle in a side lot and noticed that there were many ordinary cars.  Interspersed among the ordinary cars, though, were many luxury ones as well.  Mercedes, BMWs, Land Rovers and Porsches, all shiny and new looking, popped up frequently and made the normal cars look like jalopies by comparison.  Arianna hadn’t seen a nice neighborhood when she and her mother had entered town.  Hers certainly wasn’t.  
She wondered where the fancy mansions that belonged with the equally fancy cars might be as she lit her cigarette.  Just as she filled her lungs with smoke, the first bell rang.  She was the only person in the lot and leaned against her bike, but she noticed that groups had gathered near the main entrance and slowly started to disband.  She figured she ought to start walking and make her way inside.  Surely, a meeting with a guidance counselor would be on her agenda, as well as a tour, compliments of a student council delegate.  
With thoughts of guidance counselors and tours filling her thoughts, she began climbing the wide concrete steps.  As she did so, she noticed a group of boys watching her.  Dressed in collared shirts and chinos, they looked preppy, and rich.  She stared back with her cigarette dangling from her lips.  All of them looked away, except one.  With exceedingly bronze skin, light-brown hair and bright blue eyes, he looked like a designer clothing catalogue model or a playboy who would be more comfortable helming his yacht than attending high school.  He stared at her in a way that irked her so completely, she contemplated walking up to him and punching him right in his smug face.  But she did not want to get kicked out of school on her first day.  Not again.  So she decided to let it go, to ignore his scrutiny.  She took a final drag of her cigarette and heard a voice.
“Man, I’d like to go slumming and tap that ass someday,” preppy yacht boy said as she was about to pass him.
Still, she refrained from punching him, but chose instead to casually flick her cigarette at his face as she walked by.  
“Holy shit!” he shrieked and ashes, some lit, cascaded down his expensive-looking shirt.  He frantically tried to brush them off and left charcoal smears in their wake.  “What the fuck?” he whined and sounded like a girl.  
“Dude, you totally sounded like chick just now,” she heard one of his friends say and they all laughed at him.
She tossed her head back, laughed loudly and kept walking.  
Inside, the hallway was lined with students, most bustling at their lockers gathering books, while others lingered and chatted.  A few girls looked in her direction, but looked away quickly.  Arianna was not shy about making direct eye contact with people who eyed her.  She’d been told many times that her stare was lethal.  While she doubted anyone had been killed by it, she felt confident that at least a few had been withered by it.  
Her eyes roamed about from the faces of students to room numbers.  She was looking for the main office when a pert blonde placed her face in Arianna’s. 
“Hi there!  Are you Arianna?  You must be because I’ve haven’t seen you around here before, and I know everyone,” she said in one breath and eyed Arianna’s clothes disapprovingly.  Arianna caught the not-so-subtle look and bristled immediately.  She also couldn’t help but notice how the girl’s smile curled up at the corners of her mouth, and did not reach her eyes.  
“Yeah, I’m Arianna.”
“I knew it!  I’m Cheryl Charles and I am your official tour guide,” she began and flashed her insincere smile.  Arianna repressed the urge to gag.  “I am the Vice President of the Student Council here at Herald Falls High.”
“What, I’m not important enough to get the President,” Arianna joked and watched the phony smile sag.  Clearly, her joke had been lost on Cheryl.
“Well, I suppose I could speak to Principal Wood and get the President here if I’m not good enough for you,” Cheryl said snippily.  
“It was a joke, Cheryl.  I was just kidding, relax,” she said levelly.
“Oh,” Cheryl said and smoothed her lavender blouse.  “I see, well, ha, ha then.  Very funny,” she added narrowing her eyes and pursing her lips.
“Hey no need to get all worked up.  I was just trying to break the ice.”
“I am most certainly not worked up,” Cheryl screeched indignantly.  
“Of course not,” Arianna muttered as a man approached.  He wore a tweed blazer with elbow patches and had gray hair parted neatly and plastered to one side.   
“Good morning Cheryl,” he said in a gravelly voice then turned to Arianna.  “I’ve never seen you before.  Who might you be?”
“Mr. Wood, this is our new student, Arianna Rose,” Cheryl said in a suddenly syrupy voice.
“Nice to meet you Mr. Woods,” Arianna said and offered her hand to him.
“It’s Wood, not Woods dear.  Wood, W-O-O-D, no ‘s’; Wood,” he corrected her.  Cheryl smirked triumphantly and Arianna used just her middle finger to scratch an imaginary itch on the bridge of her nose.  Cheryl got the message and gasped.
“Are you okay Cheryl,” Mr. Wood asked.
“Yes sir, I’m fine,” she sang.
“Very well, then.  Miss Rose, I will see you in my office after the tour and introduce you to our counselor Mrs. Gallagher.  She can help you with your course schedule et cetera.  Good day Miss Charles,” Mr. Wood said and turned on his heels to leave.
“Let’s get this over with,” Cheryl said in a tone far different from the saccharine one she’d used with the principal.  “I have more important things to do than be seen with you.”
“Oh and I want to be seen with a preppy little bitch like you?” Arianna said testily.  “Go.  I think I’ll manage without you.”
Exasperated, Cheryl handed her a map and several other sheets of brightly colored paper.  “Here.  Suit yourself.  Good luck.  I’m out of here!”
“Sounds good to me,” she replied and watched as Cheryl started to walk away.  
Cheryl stopped abruptly and turned, wearing a snarky smile on her face, “If you go straight down this hall and take the first left, you’ll see a door.  On the other side of it, you’ll find people who are more your kind,” she said and eyed Arianna from head to toe.  “You know, the trashy kind that really don’t belong here.”
“Excuse me?” Arianna asked.  “What did you just say to me?  Did you just call me trashy?”
“I think you heard me just fine,” Cheryl said icily.  “I would get closer and say it right in your ear, but I don’t want to catch something from you.”
Incensed, Arianna fought to keep her tone calm.  She took several steps and stopped just inches from Cheryl. “You’re about to catch something from me right now, bitch,” Arianna hissed and stared into her eyes.  
Cheryl’s face blushed deeply and she recoiled from Arianna, shrinking back a few paces.
 “I’d back up too if I were you,” Arianna added.  
Cheryl refused to meet Arianna’s gaze and opted instead to stare at her feet before marching out of sight.  Arianna simmered as she watched her walk away and decided she needed a little fresh air.  Left alone with her map, she decided to take Cheryl’s advice and step outside for another cigarette.  After her interaction with the student council Vice President, she needed it.  She figured she had at least half an hour before she needed to report to Mr. Wood-without-an-s’s office.  That left plenty of time to smoke and visit the ladies room.   
She continued down the hallway and took her first left and stopped at a pair of doors.  She opened one, but wedged a rock in the hinge so that she wouldn’t be locked out.  A single step led to a clearing surrounded by trees.  The treeline looked afire with rich fall colors.  Leaves in varying shades of red, orange and yellow blazed against the azure sky.  The scene would have been enjoyable, relaxing even, if she hadn’t been so annoyed by the Cheryl incident.  She sat on the step, took out her pack of cigarettes and her lighter and was about to light up when someone called to her.
“What’re you nuts!  Don’t light up there.  You’ll get suspended,” a male voice said.
“God, is that you?” she said and laughed.
The voice laughed as well then added, “I’m serious.  This is a smoke-free campus.  You don’t want to do that.”
“Funny, I didn’t see any signs,” she said and rolled the flint of her lighter.  Before the flame touched her cigarette, she caught sight of a figure near one of the trees.  “Oh shit, I guess it wasn’t God after all.”
She couldn’t see him clearly, but was able to make out that he was tall and dressed in dark clothes.
“Why don’t you save yourself from getting the boot from this dump and join me over here?” he said.
“What do you care if I get kicked out?” she asked.
“Huh,” he replied.  “I guess I don’t.  Good luck,” he said and disappeared.
Arianna couldn’t explain why, but felt compelled to meet the person who’d warned her.  She stood, slung her bag over her shoulder and walked across the grass to the tree he had stood near.  She looked behind it, certain she was at the right one, but saw no one.  She turned around and scanned the clearing.   As far as she could tell, she was alone.  She placed the cigarette she held between her lips and lit it, all the while wondering where the darkly dressed figure had gone.  She looked from left to right a final time as she exhaled a cloud of opaque smoke.  She fanned it with her hand, despite being outside.
“Looking for me,” the now-familiar male voice said behind her.
She spun, startled, and said, “Shit! Another ninja!”
“Ninja?  What?” he asked confused.
“Nothing; never mind,” Arianna said and waved her hand dismissively. 
“Okay,” he said.  “You’re new here?”
“Yep, today’s my first day.”
“Shouldn’t you, I don’t know, be in class or something?”
“I’m supposed to be getting a tour from Cheryl Charles.  But we didn’t exactly hit it off so she gave me this,” she showed him her map then added, “and sent me on my way.”
“Lucky you.  Dodging Cheryl Charles is a good thing.  Prissy little bitch,” he spat.
“How could you say that about your esteemed Vice President?” Arianna said sarcastically.
“You’re funny.  I like that.  My name’s Luke by the way.”
“Arianna,” she said.  
“Arianna, that’s different.  Pretty, but different,” he said and lit a cigarette of his own.
“Thanks.  So where should you be right now?”
“Uh, that’s a good question.  Art class, I think.  I go so infrequently, I’m starting to lose track.”
“Are you a senior?”
“Yep, for the second year in a row,” Luke said and bowed.
“Ha!” Arianna added.  “I got left back too, but in first grade.”
“No elementary school story here, just cutting class and attendance bullshit,” Luke smiled.
Arianna liked his smile.  His smile was mischievous and pleasant; his entire face smiled, in fact, right up to his gray-blue eyes.  But his smile dropped almost immediately.
“Drop your cigarette,” he ordered her.
“What? Why?” she asked.
“Principal douche bag Wood just passed in that window,” he pointed to a large window on the building.  “He never comes out here.  How much you wanna bet that bitch Cheryl told him to check out here?  Come on.  Let’s get out of here,” he said and took her hand.
She allowed herself to be led, liked the feel of his hand around hers.  He walked quickly and navigated a labyrinth of trees and low-growing brush.  The strip of woods was narrow and they arrived at a grassy clearing which led to the front parking lot.  He let go of her hand once they were on the grass and Arianna felt inexplicably disappointed.  She was not the type of girl who fawned over guys.  She didn’t dare indulge in extravagances like teen romance and crushes.  She was all too familiar with what men did to vulnerable women.  And she did not allow herself to be vulnerable. 
“We should be fine now.  I doubt he saw us, just that there were two people standing by a tree.”
She sighed.  “Well that would have been a record for me, getting kicked out of a school on the first day before I even made it to my first class.  My mom would have had an excuse to tie one on,” she mumbled under her breath.
“Sounds like our moms are a lot alike,” Luke said and surprised her.  She didn’t think he’d heard her.  “Mine goes from shitty boyfriend to shitty boyfriend with a glass of whiskey in one hand and joint in the other.”
“Shit, we should send them out together, my mom could be your mom’s sloppy wing man,” Arianna laughed.
Luke laughed too but stopped when he looked up.  Arianna followed his eyes and saw what he was looking at.  She was tall and thin with platinum-blonde hair.  She wore heavy eye makeup and a tight miniskirt that showed off nicely shaped legs.  And she glared in their direction.
“I gotta go,” Luke said and didn’t take his eyes off the mystery blonde.  He turned to her suddenly and added, “It was nice meeting you, Arianna,” then jogged toward the glaring blonde.
Arianna watched as he went to the waiting girl.  She felt a twinge of something, a faint pang of emotion she was uncomfortable with.  Jealously was too strong a word for it.  But it did vaguely resemble it.  It seemed ridiculous to feel jealous, even slightly so.  After all, she had just met Luke.  And he had not flirted with her overtly.  Yet, as she watched him approach the waiting blonde, she felt annoyed and a little sad at the same time.  He stood in front of the girl.  She could not hear what the girl said, but saw that she spoke animatedly to Luke, gesturing angrily to him then to Arianna.  He did not appear to argue back which surprised her.  She wasn’t sure why, but she did not see him as the kind of person who accepted reprimand readily.  Then again, she’d only known him for ten minutes.  Either way, she felt a fleeting sense of disappointed.  
She quickly brushed off the feeling of disappointment.  She needed to get back inside and meet with her guidance counselor.  She walked to the front of the building again and entered.  The hallway was deserted and she consulted her map to find the main office.  Her day, as well as her final year of high school, was about to commence.

Chapter 4

Howard Kane knelt upon the pristine, tiled floor before the altar of the Soldiers of the Divine Trinity Church and listened intently, waiting patiently for God’s instructions.  God had been speaking to him since he was a young boy, guiding him and directing him through life.  Though many people had claimed they’d heard God’s voice, he felt confident only a select few had.  The rest were narcissists who lacked the discipline to hear anything more than their basest impulses.  He was not like others who had alleged to hear God.  Howard had heard God clearly, and the Lord’s voice had not caused him to indulge his desires or whims.  To the contrary, he felt more rooted to his beliefs, compelled to dedicate himself fully.  He needed God, and God and his fellow worshippers needed him.
With his hands pressed together in prayer, he paid close attention to every subtle sound in the hallowed building, opening the sincerest, humblest channels to his soul to foster God’s voice.  In a near-meditative state, he heard many things. Sounds of settling creaked and crackled intermittently.  Dried leaves rustled from a treetop beyond the stained-glass windows, likely caused by the departure of finches or sparrows that had remained too late into the fall.  But his Maker’s instructions did not echo in his head, did not breathe through him like a warm spring breeze caressing tender blooms as it had in the past.  All he heard was the sound of his own breaths, and the rhythmic pulse of his heartbeat.  
Days had passed since he’d heard God’s words, long days of strained silence.  But he felt neither frustration nor anger.  God would invariably speak to him.  He always had, and Howard doubted He would ever stop.  
With his hands still clasped in front on him, he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply and focused more intensely.  When concentrating as he was, his senses seemed to heighten.  Sounds were amplified.  His sight became sharper, and his sense of smell more distinct.  He filled his lungs, drawing in air through his nose.  Strong notes of pine infused the air and mingled with the slightest hint of lemon.  The average man would not have noticed the fresh, clean scents surrounding him, their subtlety; their depth.  But he did.  He had a divine appointment.  His followers knew of his blessing and one of them had undoubtedly scrubbed and polished the altar hours earlier.  His many gifts were not secrets he kept from his congregants, and they responded accordingly, heeding and abiding the ancient adage that cleanliness was, in fact, next to godliness.  He was, after all, the closest a human being could ever be to God, and his followers knew that.  For that reason, every surface of the church was cleaned daily in his honor, as well as the Lord’s.  As founder and leader of the Soldiers of the Divine Trinity congregation, in addition to having divine influence, Howard was the heir to a kind of sight only a select few in his family had possessed; sight that the naked eye was incapable of perceiving.  He could see evil, sense it as clearly as the notes of pine and lemon in the air.  His vision, his divination, enabled him to lead his congregation.
He preached daily at the consecrated dais he knelt before, reached out to his flock, shared his vision, and spread the word of God.  But God’s word was not as simple as other groups claimed it to be.  It went beyond Commandments and Sacraments, surpassed feasting, fasting and offerings.  His unique vision offered his devotees a singular experience.  It offered them opportunity to seek out and eradicate evil.  Other sects downplayed the evil that roamed the earth, romanticized it even.  But he did not.  He knew the truth.  He had the gift.
His gift empowered him and the Soldiers of the Divine Trinity to obey the Lord’s commands and protect the world from the vile minions of Satan.  God ordered them, through Howard, to root out servants of darkness.  They were anointed soldiers of light.  The devil had created warriors that roved about and wreaked havoc on humanity.  Howard and his followers were charged with destroying them before their numbers grew unmanageable and threatened humanity.  His church had become powerful with hundreds of devoted disciples worldwide, all committed believers in his mission, God’s mission.
Fighting evil was in his blood, quite literally.  His ancestors had been fighting the devil’s slaves for nearly three centuries.  Their battles dated from the days of the Salem witch trials.  It was his ancestors who had orchestrated the destruction of countless witches and had rescued humankind from an uprising of catastrophic proportions before it began, before the number of witches had proliferated and innumerable covens had been formed.  The witch trials of Salem had since been held as a benchmark of brutality brought on by mass hysteria.  But what the ignorant masses could never possibly understand, what their fragile minds could never comprehend, was the truth.  An uprising of evil had begun, but was thwarted by the Lord’s soldiers.  He, and his descendants before him, had fought and continued to fight to preserve light on Earth, the slaying of each fiend a result of his divine sight and orders from God.
Howard breathed deeply and enjoyed the purity of the air, of his surroundings.  He found that reflecting on the successes of his predecessors relaxed him and filled him with indescribable peace.  Remembering the sacrifices and trials of those passed opened the channels between him and his Maker.  He felt confident that his work, and the work of his servants, had been far-reaching and considerable.  Many witches had been exterminated.  They had been of little consequence, however.  Some had even claimed unawareness of their power.  Of course, he did not believe them.  Witches were liars, all of them.  Awareness of power was unavoidable.  He was living proof of it. To believe that a witch was unaware of her power was as ridiculous as believing a muscled man did not know of his strength; it was preposterous.  He knew the demons were conscious of their abilities, and that a herald walked among them.  She was referred to as the Sola in his ancestor’s scriptures.  Sola, or one who walks alone, had been long considered a harbinger of humanity’s demise, but she had not arrived yet.  For more than three hundred years, her arrival had been predicted, her power and capability for chaos warned about.   The Sola had been prophesied to possess the capacity to unite every witch on Earth and create an army of evil.  But no one had ever sensed her.  No one had felt her presence.  But of late, Howard had begun to feel her.  
In recent months, he had sensed her, felt her foul presence among humanity.  He was drawn to her in a way that contradicted reason, and instead of repelling her, as most polar opposites do, he was attracted to her.  His pull toward her felt almost magnetic in nature.  And each day that she lived, he could feel her growing stronger.  Her power was rapidly gaining strength, signifying that she’d either become of age for her powers to manifest themselves, or she had made an enormous stride in her dark art.  Either way, the potency of her energy had changed dramatically in recent weeks.  Her essence was connected to his.  His task of killing her pulsed and throbbed in him, summoning him with all its majesty.  God had linked him with the Sola to simplify the greatest challenge in his mission, so he could eliminate her, and the threat she posed against humankind could end.  
He had been close to her many times in months past.  He had been on her trail.  But she had eluded him.  He wondered whether she, too, felt his presence, that the fear of the Almighty existed within her instinctively.  After all, they were heritable enemies.  
He pictured her in his mind’s eye.  Though he had no idea of what she truly looked like, he envisioned a raven-haired enchantress with black eyes and tan skin capable of seducing and charming with wickedness.  He imagined her raven hair enveloped in flames, her black eyes weeping as fire consumed her.   Her death would be his greatest tribute to the Lord.  The day could not come soon enough.  In the meantime, she still lived and retained the potential to join all evil on Earth.  
Howard shivered at the thought of the damage the Sola could cause.  If she were able to do as his descendants predicted, he worried he and his followers would not be able to stop it, that she would overtake humanity.  He rose to his feet slowly, but not before touching his hand to his forehead.  His fingers lingered there long enough to graze the charred and puckered skin, the same scarred skin that covered his entire face, before he dropped his hand to his navel, crossed it to his left shoulder then his right.  He breathed a quiet “Amen” and genuflected before heading down the center aisle of the church, out the door and to the vestibule.  There, he dipped his fingers in the basin of holy water and crossed himself again.  He left not because he doubted God’s voice would fill his head, but because he needed to find her.  He needed to destroy the Sola.  And he believed he would succeed.  The worry and doubt that had plagued him earlier was a test, one of many tests he’d been subjected to throughout his life.  God would fortify him with the strength he needed for his task, as He always had.  God would not allow him to fail.

Chapter 5

The school day had passed quicker than Arianna had imagined it would.  Though it had been practically the exact same routine in every school she’d been to and her new school differed little, her first day at Herald Falls High School had been by far the most exciting one yet.  Thanks in part to her run-in with Cheryl, and meeting Luke, her experience had been interesting if nothing else.  Of course, Cheryl and Luke had been the only departures from the standard first day grind.  The rest of her time had been spent meeting with the guidance counselor, finding classrooms and surviving gym class.  When the final bell had rung at a little after two thirty, Arianna had needed to look twice at her schedule to confirm that she was free to leave.  She had fled the building without a detour to her locker.  She had wanted nothing more than to climb onto her motorcycle and feel the wind rushing at her.  
As she secured her backpack to the rear of her bike, her insides trilled.  Riding would give her opportunity to replay the events of the day.  It would free her mind long enough to revisit the better parts of it.  The look on Preppyboy’s face when she’d flicked her cigarette at him was going to be her starting place.  She intended to follow it up with Cheryl crinkling her upturned nose at her in a huff after she’d made plain that she wasn’t the kind of person who tolerated insult from her or anyone else.  Luke’s face had flashed in her mind several times throughout the day.  She’d resisted the image, yet it had recurred more times than she wanted to admit.  He was good looking.  She had seen her share of good-looking guys before, had even dated a few.  But there was something else about him.  She wasn’t sure what it was.  Perhaps it was his smile.  She had found his smile to be pleasant enough.  She liked the way the corners of his mouth turned up impishly, and how his eyes smiled along with his lips.  He was tall and lean, and not pretty at all.  She despised pretty boys, the kind that primped like Hollywood starlets and fretted when a hair was out of place.  She also wasn’t a fan of jocks.  In her experience, athletes were self-appointed royalty.  They reigned over their peers.  And as royalty, the jocks assumed they were entitled to more than the average student as well as maintaining generally arrogant dispositions.  She did not like arrogant people and found an air of entitlement to be loathsome.  Luke did not look like a jock.  The fact that he smoked also suggested he wasn’t involved in sports.  He dressed similarly to her, in darkly colored clothes, and she had noticed tattoos on his forearm that she would have liked to have asked him about.  But she doubted she’d get the chance to see him again, much less talk to him.  His leggy, blonde girlfriend had sent daggers her way with her heavily lined eyes, and would surely not approve of him smoking with her in the woods again.  Arianna placed her helmet on her head and fastened her chin strap and forced Luke, as well as his girlfriend, from her mind.  She’d wasted enough time thinking about him already.  He was taken.  That was it.
She looked into her side view mirror as she slowly backed out of her parking space. As she did so, she glimpsed Cheryl talking to Preppy-boy by a sleek, silver Mercedes.  Cheryl was chattering away and Preppy-boy looked disinterested.  Arianna got the impression the two were a couple.  She contemplated backing up further, lifting her visor and waving at them, but reconsidered.  The road called to her.  So she drove off the campus and onto the county road.  She wanted to test the engine of her bike and feel the world, as well as the wind, rushing at her.  But she was unfamiliar with the area.  Without the ability to anticipate speed traps and upcoming bumps and bends in the road, speeding would lose its edge.  Freedom and a guaranteed adrenaline rush would be replaced by a feeling of recklessness.   She did not want to spoil what promised to be a thrilling ride.  It would come in time.  She would be patient.  In the meantime, she obeyed the speed limit and scrutinized every niche she saw in search of patrol cars.  She passed the gas station she’d stopped at in the morning and was about to turn onto a stretch of tree-lined road when she noticed a figure emerge from the woods a few hundred feet from where she was.  
She squinted and strained to see what it was.  The size and shape seemed human.  As she got closer, she saw that it was a man.  She assumed he was a hitchhiker or that his car had broken down.  Either way, he wasn’t her problem and she wanted to steer clear of him, literally.  She switched into the left lane to put as much distance between them as possible.  Something about the man unsettled her.   She looked at him as she passed and saw that he studied her.  He did not resemble a hitchhiker.  He was dressed impeccably in what looked like designer jeans and a fitted T shirt.  Each clung to his fit body.  He watched her intently.  She felt his eyes on her, even after she’d passed.  The fine hairs on the back of her neck rose and quivered.  She pulled into the right lane and then off to the shoulder, determined to show she hadn’t been intimidated.  Once on the side of the road, she stopped and twisted to look behind her, where he should have been, but saw that he’d vanished.  People didn’t simply vanish into thin air, so she scanned the road, looked left, right and all around.  He was nowhere to be found.   She did not see a car along the road and she hadn’t seen anyone stop either.  A feeling of worry washed over her, worry and anticipation.  Her heart pounded and she felt beads of cold sweat stipple her forehead.  It seemed an odd reaction to have, for her to feel as such after passing a man she did not know on a stretch of county road she was unfamiliar with.  He had watched her and she had watched him.  Nothing extraordinary had happened.  But something seemed oddly familiar about him.  She tried to remember each detail of his face, of his build.  Everything about him stood out.  If she had seen him before, she would not have been likely to forget him.  Yet, something felt familiar.
Arianna waited for a few seconds before pulling back on to the road, just to be sure she hadn’t missed him, to see if she glimpsed him behind a tree.  When he did not reappear, she chalked her nervousness and odd feeling up as consequences of skipping lunch.  She vowed to eat the moment she got home.  
After ten minutes of riding, the trailer park she currently called home came in to view.  She turned down the dirt lane and followed it to her and her mother’s trailer.  She parked her bike on the wooden porch and chained it to one of the banisters.  She doubted it would hold if it were ever tested, but reasoned that some security precautions were better than none.  As she unfastened her backpack from her motorcycle, she felt eyes on her again.  Her head snapped up instinctively and searched the park.  She did not see a handsome mystery man in designer clothes, but she did see a dirty face framed by a small window in the trailer across from hers.  He watched her with wide, unapologetic eyes then smiled when he saw that she was looking at him.  He was missing several of his front teeth and what remained did not hold much promise.  He ran his tongue over his lips lewdly.  Arianna felt her stomach churn.  She found that subtlety was lost on people like the toothless peeper.
“Look elsewhere asshole.  You don’t have a shot in hell with me,” she warned him and he disappeared like a mechanical Whack-a-Mole critter.
Satisfied that at least one riddle was solved, she unlocked the front door and strode in.  The first thing she noticed was that the fat man still slept on the couch.
“Mom!” she called.
“In here, baby,” her mother answered from her bedroom.
“Um, are you aware that fat man is still asleep on the couch?”
“How could I miss him? The guy’s huge.”
Arianna felt her frustration mounting and measured her words carefully.
“Did you try to wake him?”
“Well of course I did!” her mother snapped. “He didn’t budge.”
“Did you check his pulse and make she he’s not, I don’t know, dead?”
“Didn’t need to.  Last time I checked, dead people don’t snore like a chain saw.”
“So what do you plan on doing, Mom?”
“I don’t know.  I figured I’d wait for you to come home and you’d come up with something.  Meanwhile, I’ve been trapped in this room like a prisoner!  I’ve had to tiptoe to the refrigerator, and forget about watching my shows!  It’s been a nightmare.”
“If you shook him and he didn’t wake up, why would you tiptoe to the fridge?’
“Oh Arianna!  Stop interrogating me!  Jesus!  First I’m stuck in this room all day then you come home and give me the third degree,” her mother pouted.
“Give it a rest, Mom.  I’m not giving you the third degree.  I just asked a question.  Don’t worry, it won’t happen again,” she said with the slightest hint of sarcasm.  She was careful to not overdo it.  She did not want to hurt her mother or incite a tantrum.  “I have an idea of how to get rid of your chubby loverboy.  Follow me.”
Arianna marched down the hallway with her mother in tow and stopped in front of the couch.  The man lounged on his side facing her.  His belly drooped over the edge of the couch.  She reached behind him, behind his generous backside and gripped the removable cushion he slept on.   Pulling as hard as she could, she lifted the cushion as high as she could.  The man rolled forward and fell to the floor with an unceremonious thud.
“What the hell!” he jerked awake and muttered.
“Hello.  I’m Arianna.  What is your name?” Arianna asked politely.
“Uh, Artie, my name is Artie Sellers,” he said with breath so foul Arianna suppressed a gag.  He rose to his feet and raked a hand through his flimsy hair.
“Well Artie Sellers, it’s almost four o’clock in the afternoon.  You’ve been asleep on our couch for more than twelve hours and it’s time for you to leave now,” she said firmly but in the same civil tone.
She and her mother watched as he fumbled awkwardly gathering his shoes and shirt.
“Uh, thanks for your hospitality, uh, uh,” Artie bungled and searched for her mother’s name.
“Cathy.  My name’s Cathy,” her mother helped.
“Thanks for a lovely uh, evening,” he blushed and tottered out their front door. 
Once he was gone, Arianna’s mother snorted and laughed out loud.  Arianna couldn’t help but laugh as well.
“That was an interesting way of waking him, and getting rid of him!  Rolling him off the couch like that, I never would have thought of that.  I nearly peed my pants,” her mother managed through giggling fits.  “And then the way you handled him!  ‘Hi, I’m Arianna’ all as pleasant as you please; you’re too much!”
“Well, I try my best,” she said and curtsied. 
Her gesture drew another fit of laughter from her mother.  Arianna found herself laughing as well, but less about the circumstances and Artie, and more about how when her mother laughed uncontrollably, her mouth would open wide and just low, intermittent yelps would escape.  She bobbed her head and clapped her hands, all the while yelping quietly.  The overall presentation resembled a circus seal in a silent movie.  When the outburst passed and her mother gained her composure, she blotted her eyes.  “Here I am, laughing like a loon when Artie could’ve been a serial killer or something,” she said.
“Mom, that’s why you shouldn’t bring strange men home,” Arianna began.
“Please don’t ruin this with a lecture,” her mother protested.
“What do you mean lecture?   You’re worried Artie could have been a killer.  Any of the guys you pick up could be killers.  It’s not a lecture to tell you not to bring them here.  It’s common sense.”
“Don’t take that holier-than-thou tone with me.  You know I’ve been through a lot, and that Artie was just my way of, of, well, blowing off steam.”
Arianna raised an eyebrow at her mother.  “Seriously, Mom?”
“Yes, I’m serious,” her mother said and avoided eye contact.  “What did you do today?”
“School, remember, I told you this morning.  I started school today.  First day in a new school, does it ring a bell?”
Her mother’s eyes swept from side to side as if she were literally looking for the answer.  “I was a little fuzzy this morning.  I may have had a bit too much to drink last night.”
“Ya think?”
“Anyway, how was it?  Were there lots of nice people?  I bet there were.   God I loved high school.  I’d give anything to go back in time and be a teenager again.  Of course, I got pregnant right after graduation, so maybe I would just stick with the high school years.”
Her mother was rambling.  She tapped her foot impatiently and her mother took the hint.
“Oh, sorry,” she said.  “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Was it a good day or a bad day?”
“It was the same day I’ve had three times in the last two years.  Chirpy student council bitch who thought she was better than me had to be put in her place,” she said and began counting the similarities with her fingers.  “Asshole principal, hot guy in the courtyard, boring classes.  And the added kicker is there are a bunch of rich kids at this school.  I can’t tell you how many BMWs and Mercedes were in the parking lot.”
“Huh, never would have thought that judging from this side of town,” her mother said with a half-smile.  “But let’s get back to the hot guy.”
“What hot guy?”
“The one you just mentioned, in the courtyard or something?”
“Oh, yeah, well, he’s not worth mentioning.  I don’t even know why I did.  We had a smoke together and that’s it.”
“That’s it.  He has eyes, this hot guy, right?”
Arianna rolled her eyes at the question before answering, “Yes.”
“And you’re hot too, right?’
“How the hell should I know?  And besides, Luke has a girlfriend.  She’s a bleach-blonde bombshell with a body like a playmate.”
“His name is Luke, huh?  I like that name.  Luke.”
“Whatever, I’ll probably never talk to him again, so this discussion is a waste of time.  Mentioning him was a waste of time,” she said testily.
“Jeez, don’t go getting all worked up about it.  Sorry I said anything.”
She didn’t mean to snap at her mother.  It had been a frustrating day.  Everything that had happened, from the comment on the steps of her school, to Cheryl, to Luke, to the mysterious man on the side of the road, to the pervert in her trailer park, the entire day had been stressful.  And that was without the whole Artie incident.  With him factored in, the day could be considered one for the record books.  
“I’m sorry, Mom.  I’m just…frustrated I guess.  Moving again, the new school, you know, it’s hard.”
“Oh, I do know.  I’ve been so depressed about Carl and me breaking up and him kicking us out and all.  I don’t know where I find the strength to go on some days.  I guess I’m just one of those strong, take-charge kind of people.”
Arianna had so many things she wanted to say, so many instances she wanted to hurl at her mother wherein which she had been anything but strong and in charge.  Artie would have been a prime starting point.  But she did not.  What would have been the point?  Instead she changed the subject.
 “I’m starving.  Is there anything to eat?”
“Umm, I went to the store last night I think.  I vaguely remember chicken, but I think Artie and I took care of that.”
Arianna’s eyes scanned the small living room and she saw that an empty fast-food bucket sat atop the coffee table.  Her mother’s eyes followed hers.
“Ah, there’s the empty bucket.  Yep, we finished it,” her mother said peering into the tub.  She then lifted an empty pretzel bag from the floor.  “And we ate the pretzels too apparently.  Let’s look in the fridge.  I think there may be some bologna.”  She watched as her mother opened the fridge and bent down to look inside.  “Hmm, we have jelly.  But I don’t see any bologna.”
“That’s fine.  We have bread and peanut butter right?”
“Of course we do.  What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t have peanut butter and jelly and white bread for my baby?”
Arianna did not answer.
“Let me make it for you,” her mother offered and began searching the drawers for a knife.
She paused and stared at her mother as she opened drawers and cupboards, unsure of what to say.  Cathy Rose was not exactly Susie Homemaker and hadn’t cooked or prepared a meal for her in as long as she could remember.  Dinner, if any, usually consisted of whatever either of them picked up in their travels or after work.  She would have loved a home cooked meal, couldn’t really remember what one tasted like.  But she had to admit, her mother’s offer felt nice.
“Okay.  Thanks Mom.  Mind if I go have a smoke while you make it?”
“No, you go ahead, baby.  I’ll make your dinner and you go smoke.”
Her mother smiled at her warmly and her previous frustration melted away. She almost felt sorry for her.  
“Thanks,” she said again then turned and riffled through her backpack until she found her pack of cigarettes and her lighter.   “I’ll be back in a sec.”
“Take your time.  I’ve got everything under control in here.”
She stepped outside and lit her cigarette.  The sun hung low in the sky and the air had cooled.  She wrapped an arm around her waist and allowed the elbow of her other to rest against it.  She took a long drag from her cigarette and thought about her day.  Luke popped into her head again for what felt like the hundredth time since they’d met.  But it was immediately followed by his scowling girlfriend.  She closed her eyes briefly and shook her head.  Instantly, another face appeared in her mind’s eye, one with vaguer features and attached to a larger, sturdier looking body.  The man on the side of the road had also plagued her thoughts.  She was not sure why, or what it had been about him that had struck her, how his eyes had followed her, and how he had disappeared.  It was as though he had vanished.  And there had been something oddly familiar about him.  She shook her head a second time certain she was finally losing her mind.  The reality of the situation was that he likely hadn’t been looking at her at all, but past her, and that he hadn’t disappeared, but had returned to whatever he had been doing in the woods previously.  Hunger and sleep-deprivation had probably caught up with her and gave the illusion of a situation that simply hadn’t happened.  Regardless, she felt confident she would never see the man again.  She would go inside, eat her sandwich, take a hot shower and get some rest.  Another day of school awaited her and was just hours away.  A feeling deep inside her warned her that she’d need all the rest and strength she could get for the days ahead. 

Chapter 6

Morning was announced with the continuous beeps of Arianna’s alarm clock.  Normally, the sound would have been unwelcome, but on this day it had provided relief.  It interrupted the nightmare she’d been having the entire night.  Her sleep had been filled with terrifying images of burnt flesh and the sound of a girl screaming.  She had woken several times, twisting and writhing, feeling intense heat, heat unlike any she’d ever felt before.  Each time she had gone back to sleep, she’d expected the dream to have ended.  But it had not.  It had continued.  Dreams – good or bad – had never continued for her in the past.  There had been times when she’d wanted nothing more than to return to Brad Pitt who waited for her on his motorcycle, but had been unable to.  Yet this one, this awful nightmare, had refused to end for the entire night.   Some of it lingered still.  She was wide awake, but kept with her the feeling she’d had, a panicked feeling that was laced with what could only be described as guilt.  She did not know why.  But now, and in her dream, she had felt somehow at fault.  
In the light of day, of course, none of it made sense.  Try as she may to remember the exact details of her nightmare, she could not.  Disjointed pieces of it flashed in her head like black-and-white film running through an old projector.  Images, horrific yet blurred, wound around her mind illogically.  Determined to not dwell on a dream that was little more than brain garbage, Arianna sat up and kicked her covers off.  Her pajamas felt damp and her skin felt cold.  She ran a hand through her hair and found that it, too, was moist.  She was covered in sweat and needed to shower again before leaving for school.  She groaned aloud.  Showering would set her back at least ten minutes.  Ten minutes lost in the morning translated to her missing breakfast.  She quickly gathered the clothes she would wear and dashed down the short hallway into the bathroom.  She grabbed her toothbrush, turned on the shower and began brushing while she waited for the water to warm.  As the water ran and heated, the mirror above the sink began to fog.  Little by little, condensation accumulated on the lower edges of it and crept up slowly.  She watched as her reflection was unhurriedly consumed by opaque vapors, and the panicked feeling she’d felt during the night returned.  Her heart began to beat wildly, her mouth went dry and she refused to blink.  All of a sudden, she began to feel hot.  Her feet and legs blazed as if she stood submerged to her hips in a cauldron of boiling water.  The feeling traveled up the length of her body slowly, insidiously.  She was about to scream, the inexplicable heat she was feeling too intense to withstand a moment longer, when a knock at the door ended it all abruptly.
“Baby, you in there?” her mother called.
“Uh, yeah,” she said and took a deep breath.  “Who else would it be?’
“Ha, ha wiseass.  Are you going to be long in there?  ‘Cause I want to get an early start on my job hunting.”
Arianna breathed deeply again and opened the door, “I’ll be quick.  And I’m glad you’re looking for a job today.  I’m doing the same after school.”
“Good, good,” her mother said and looked at her strangely.  “Are you okay?  Your face and neck are all red and your hair is sweaty in front.  You look like my mama when she was having a hot flash.”
Arianna ducked her head down and looked at her feet embarrassedly.  “No hot flashes for me, just hot in here.  I’m jumping in the shower now.  I’ll be out soon,” she said and shut the door.
She stripped out of her tank top and sweatpants and stepped into the shower.  Warm water, cooler than her body temperature, felt refreshing.  She would have liked to relax beneath the stream for several minutes, but needed to rush.  She washed her hair and body, combed in conditioner then rinsed a final time before turning off the faucet, climbing out and wrapping herself in a towel.   She dressed and arranged her hair in a thick braid down her back.  She would be cold going out with a wet head, but did not have time to blow-dry her hair.  
“Bathroom’s all yours,” she called to her mother from the hall. 
She grabbed her boots from her room, slipped into them then headed to the kitchen.  A jar of peanut butter sat on the counter and she took a spoon from the drawer and scooped a heaping spoonful of it onto a piece of white bread.  It wasn’t the best breakfast in the world, but it was something to put in her stomach.  She ate it as she gathered her books, jacket and backpack.  
“Bye,” she yelled and walked out the front door.  
She shoved the last of her peanut butter sandwich in her mouth, put her helmet and backpack on and sat astride her motorcycle.  Rain had fallen the night before.  The sky was still cloudy and overcast and she hoped more rain had not been forecast for the day.  Her bike performed well in the rain, but maneuvering it in driving rain was a challenge.  It was also generally unpleasant to get soaked.
Luckily, the sun peeked through thinning clouds in some spots and promised clearing as she traveled along increasingly familiar streets.  Houses and shops stood out as recognizable landmarks.  She felt confident she would be acquainted with the town of Heralds Falls in no time.  She passed an intersection and the stretch of road where she’d seen the mystery man.  Her eyes scanned the woods for movement.  Nothing stirred as far as she could tell and she felt relieved.   The gas station she’d stopped at the previous morning was up ahead in less than a mile.  She glanced down at her fuel gauge to see if she needed to stop.  The needle hovered around the halfway mark.   When her eyes returned to the road after taking them off it for a split second, a figure loomed in the distance once more.  
The same figure she’d seen the previous day appeared impossibly, from nowhere, and waited, watching.  She could feel his eyes on her.   The fine hairs on the back of her neck rose and quivered.   For reasons she could not explain, she felt afraid, threatened.  She glimpsed in her side view mirrors and checked for oncoming cars before twisting the accelerator handle toward her.  The bike lurched forward, and the world charged at her.  Her speed increased from the forty-five miles an hour to more than sixty miles an hour.  She did not look in his direction as she passed, but knew he watched her.  When finally she’d passed him and was at what she felt was a safe distance from him, she decelerated slightly and twisted her upper body to look over her shoulder at him.  She expected to see him standing there still, facing her expressionlessly as he had the day before.  But he was gone again.  He had disappeared.  
Arianna’s pulse began to race.  She reached for the brake lever on her right handlebar, the system that controlled her front brakes, and squeezed it gently.  At the same time, she stomped down on the foot pedal the activated her rear brakes.  Only something had gone wrong.  She felt it immediately.  She had braked too hard on her rear brakes and not enough on the front.  The tires of the bike tried in vain to grip blacktop slickened from overnight rain, but skidded as the back end of it kicked out.  Both the motorcycle and Arianna slid along the pavement.  Metal shrieked in protest.  Sparks rose and evaporated like fireflies in a night sky.  Her shirt and sweater lifted and the ground tore at her skin like innumerable razor blades, slicing and chafing every exposed part of her.  The world fell silent.  A blur of colors rushed at her.  Greens, grays and brown, all melded together in a jumbled mess.  She was rolling, tumbling into wet grass and down an embankment.  
The embankment was not steep and she landed hard on her back.  Every part of her ached and smarted.
“Holy shit,” she said to no one, shocked that she was alive. 
She lay there, still, for several seconds, afraid to move, afraid that movement would confirm she’d broken several bones.   Sound returned to her and suddenly the world was alive with sound.  A car horn blared, birds squawked, and fallen leaves rustled.  The rustling of leaves made her heart race dangerously.  She wondered if perhaps the mystery man was approaching.  A sudden urge to survive superseded her fear of broken bones and she sat upright quickly.  To her surprise, the stabbing pain she’d assumed would accompany serious injury did not follow.  Even the blistering pain she’d felt as her bare skin had scraped along the road had dissipated.  Leaves crunched again close by, too close by for comfort.  She snapped her helmet off and looked to her left expecting to see the man from the side of the road, the man who’d watched her and disappeared, but saw instead a plump, gray rabbit.
“I survive a bike accident but Peter fucking Cottontail almost gave me a heart attack,” she mumbled and stood.
The rumble of a car engine and voices could be heard from the ridge she’d careened over seconds earlier.  Someone approached.  A slim form dressed in dark clothes dashed down the grassy hill.  Arianna looked down at her clothes.  She supposed she should not have felt self-conscious.  After what she’d just been through, grateful should have been all that she felt.  But looking down at her torn, muddied clothes, she felt vulnerable.  The back of her pants had been completely shredded and revealed her thong underwear, and what was left of the back of her shirt and sweatshirt could not be used to cover her exposed skin.  
As the person approached, she realized he looked familiar.  She knew him.  Luke rushed toward her, and stopped several yards from her, recognition touching his features. 
“Holy shit!  Arianna, is that you?”
“Uh, yeah, but don’t come any closer, please, my clothes are ripped to shreds and my ass is hanging out,” she said.
“I saw your bike go down.  I saw you wipe out in a massive skid.  How the hell are you standing?  And why are you worrying about your ass?”
Arianna laughed.  She couldn’t help herself.  She stopped abruptly when she looked up and saw another familiar face.  Blonde hair glowed like a halo backlit by emerging sunlight.  Luke’s girlfriend glowered down at them from the road.  Arianna felt confident she would not venture down the hill.  Though the slope was not steep, her high heels were, and certainly not conducive to hiking down wet earth.
“Seriously,” Luke said and took several steps toward her.  “How the hell did you survive that?”
She thought for a second.  “Honestly, I have no idea.”
“How did it happen?  I mean, I saw most of it.  I saw someone on a motorcycle, you, just totally skid out.  No other car.  No collision.  What happened, you lost control of it?”
Arianna wanted to tell him she’d been twisting her body dangerously to look behind her at some man who appeared and disappeared from the side of the road.  Of course, that would sound ridiculous and he’d think she was insane, so she kept it to herself.  Not even her nutty mother who believed in horoscopes and Ouija boards would believe her claim, much less a boy she’d just met.  
“I thought I saw something, an animal I guess, and I tried to brake to avoid hitting it.  I didn’t brake hard enough in front and overcompensated with the rear.  Next thing I knew, I was skidding across the pavement.”
“Damn,” he said and raked a hand through his dark, spiky hair.  
“Oh shit.  What time is it?” she asked in a panic.
Luke checked his cell phone.  “It’s seven forty.  Why?”
“I’m going to be late on my second day,” she mumbled.
“You should be dead, or at least seriously fucked up right now, your bike is totaled, and so far you’ve worried about me seeing your ass and being late for school.  Am I missing something, or are you crazy?”
She chewed her lower lip and pushed errant hairs that escaped her braid from her brow. “When you put it that way, I guess I’m crazy.”
Luke took several more steps, slowly closing the distance between them.  “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want you to get in trouble at school or anything, and I’d love to see your ass, but I don’t know, I thought you’d be more freaked out than you are.”
“I am, trust me,” she said.  “The whole thing was just crazy.  And I’m so very flattered by your ass remark,” she said sarcastically.  
Luke laughed, and she liked the sound of it.  But a quick glance up the hill reminded her that he was taken.  Never one to ignore the three-hundred pound blonde gorilla in the room, Arianna decided to comment on the heavily lined eyes that watched them.  “I’m sure your girlfriend wouldn’t like to hear you say that either.  She looks like she’s ready to kill me just for talking to you.”
“My girlfriend?” he asked.   “I don’t have a girlfriend,” he said then followed her gaze with is eyes to the road.  “You mean Stephanie?”
“Is that her name?” she said and heard the edge of jealousy in her own voice.  “What are you guys if she’s not your girlfriend, friends with benefits?” she asked coolly.
“Eww, no!  Benefits?  No! That’s gross!”
“What, hot blondes aren’t your type?”
“Hot blondes?  Stephanie’s not hot!  She’s my sister!”
Arianna felt a trickle of relief seep through her.  “Your sister?”
Then, as if on cue, Stephanie waved him toward her angrily.
“Your sister is waving to you.  And she seems pissed,” she said smoothly.
“She’s always pissed.  It’s some sort of personality deficiency,” he said and turned to her and gestured with his index finger.  He turned back to Arianna and said, “She has two moods: bitchy and pissed.”
“Not much difference between the two if you ask me.”
“Oh, there’s a difference.  Trust me,” he said and quirked an eyebrow at her.  “But we can discuss Stephanie later.  Right now, you’ve got to come with me,” he said stooped and picked up her helmet then reached out a hand.  His hand cupped her elbow and he gently led her forward.
“Wait, what? Where? I can’t go anywhere without my bike,” she protested and allowed herself to be led slowly up the hill.  “Or with my ass hanging out.”
“Here, take my jacket,” he said and removed his lightweight jacket.  She tied it around her waist immediately.  
“Thanks,” she said.  “At least one problem is solved.  Now I’ve got to get my bike taken to a repair shop.”
“Lucky for you, I have a pickup.  We can put the bike in back and worry about the rest later.”
“First of all, I’m going to worry about it all day.  I’m not exactly loaded and this accident is going to set me back a lot of money, money I don’t have.  And second of all, there’s no way you and me can load my bike into your truck by ourselves, and I doubt Stephanie is going to help.”
“Don’t worry.  There are other cars up there that stopped,” he said and didn’t address her other concerns. “I’m sure someone will help loading it.”
“More cars?”
“Yeah.  Just two or three, though.  It was a pretty big thing, you know.  And once they see it was a girl riding, a girl that looks like you no less, any guy around will line up to help.”      
As they reached the lip of the slope she’d tumbled town, she saw flashing lights, a decrepit pickup truck and two other SUVs.
“Fuck Luke! We are so late now,” Stephanie snapped.  “Let’s go.  She’ll be fine.  The police are here.”
“Nice to meet you too,” Arianna snapped back.  “I’m Arianna, by the way.  I saw you yesterday, remember?”
Stephanie seemed surprised that she had answered her in the same tone, that she’d had the nerve to be huffy right back.  
“Yeah, I remember you,” Stephanie replied, the edge in her voice softening slightly.  Then to Luke she added, “We’re going to be late.”
“Then we’ll be late ‘cause I’m going to load her bike into the back of my truck.”
“What?  No!  I’m on academic probation as it is!  If I’m late,” she let her voice trail off.  Stephanie eyed Arianna, allowed her gazed to examine her tattered clothes.  “Jesus, there’s not a scratch on you, but your clothes are shredded to shit.”
“I know,” Arianna added solemnly.
“I have a bag in the back of Luke’s truck, clothes and stuff.  We’re about the same size,” Stephanie said in a much gentler tone.  “You can change on the way, if you’re not too modest,” she added with more bite.
“Modest?  My whole ass is hanging out right now.  The only thing between it and everyone right now is your brother’s jacket.”
“And what a lucky jacket it is,” Luke called from the distance.
“How the hell did he hear that?” Arianna asked.
“Who the hell knows?  He’s a pervert like every other guy.”
“I heard that! And thanks, sis!”
“Huh,” Stephanie said and ignored Luke’s comment.  “Looks like he got a few guys to help him load your bike.  I guess looking like that,” she said and gestured to Arianna.  “Well, I’m sure it helped.”
Arianna wasn’t sure how to respond.  Stephanie’s comment sounded more like an accusation than a compliment, so she let it slide. 
Once the bike had been loaded into the back of Luke’s pickup and the other men had left, Luke chatted with the police officer who had stopped.  They spoke briefly and Arianna watched as Luke pointed to her then, with the officer, approached.  
“Arianna, this is Ricky, I mean Officer Arnold,” he said then added.  “Sorry man.  Still hard to think of you as a cop, you know?”
Officer Arnold rolled his eyes and nodded.  He looked about twenty.  Pudgy and baby-faced, he seemed genuinely uncomfortable in his uniform.  “Uh, ma’am, I mean miss,” he stumbled.  “Are you all right?  The bike was in pretty bad shape.  Are you in need of medical treatment?”
“No, no, I’m fine,” Arianna answered honestly.  “I don’t know how, but I’m okay.”  
“Um, I’m not even sure what to do here,” he said.  “I guess you can give me a statement, you know, tell me what happened and I’ll write a report.”
“Okay, sure,” she said and proceeded to tell him the same story she had told Luke, that she’d thought she’d seen an animal and had swerved to avoid it.  
“You’re lucky to be alive,” Officer Arnold said when she’d concluded then added, “Later Luke”
“Later Ricky!”
“You girls ready to roll or what?” Luke asked.
Stephanie rolled her eyes and sighed loudly as she climbed in the passenger side.
“Here Arianna,” Luke said and opened the driver’s side door.  He moved his seat forward and she saw that the cab had a second row.  She climbed in and sat uncomfortably next to a duffle bag.
“Sorry.  There’s not a lot of room back there.  Just put your legs up on the seat,” Luke said.
“Thanks,” Arianna replied.  Then to Stephanie she said, “Are the clothes you said you’d lend me in this bag?”
“Oh yeah,” Stephanie said, annoyance lacing her words.  “There should be a pair of yoga pants and a T-shirt.”
“Thanks,” Arianna said.  “You’ll get them back tomorrow, washed, of course.”
Arianna opened Stephanie’s bag and took from it the two pieces she’d been offered.  She untied her boots and slid them off before tugging her tattered leggings off.  The cotton and spandex material was in shreds and she was left with just her thong underwear, which did not offer much in the way of coverage.  She had placed Luke’s jacket over her pelvis and began sliding the yoga pants up her legs.
“I am so jealous of that jacket,” Luke said.  She glanced up and saw that he’d been stealing glimpses of her.
“Hey! Eyes on the road!” she ordered.  “No more accidents today.”
“It’d be worth it,” he said and smiled mischievously.
“Oh God, kill me,” Stephanie groaned loudly.  “You’re such a douche, Luke!”
  Though she had feigned annoyance at his peeking, Arianna was secretly thrilled that Luke had tried to see her as she’d dressed.  She pulled off her shirt confidently and didn’t bother trying to hide behind his jacket.  The front of the truck jerked as she tugged the tight T-shirt over her head.
“They’re just boobs, idiot,” Luke’s sister admonished.  “And they’re in a bra!”
He looked at Arianna in the rearview mirror again.  “And I missed them!” he complained.
Stephanie laughed.  Her laughter was a surprisingly pleasant sound, sweet and mellifluous.  Arianna didn’t know why, but she had half-expected Stephanie’s laugh to be a maniacal cackle instead of the honeyed sound it was.  She found herself laughing as well. 
When the laughter died down and just the radio broadcast crackled from the ancient speakers and filled the truck, Arianna began to think about the accident.  She closed her eyes and the entire scene replayed in her mind.  She saw the man on the side of the road, saw his face.  Though she did not know him, she was convinced she had seen him before.  She did not know where or when, just that he was familiar to her.  It was hard to imagine that a man that looked as he did would not be more memorable.  Men who looked like models didn’t exactly constitute the vast majority of the male population.  She racked her brain, struggling to place where it was she knew him from, yet came up empty.  She decided to focus on the other question that plagued her: Why hadn’t she been hurt?  She had felt pain as she’d scraped along the road.  She had ached at every bump as she’d tumbled down the embankment.  Yet there was not a mark on her, not that she could see at least.  No blood, no bumps or bruises, not a scratch.  It did not make sense.  Her brain reasoned that it wasn’t possible for her to walk away from the accident unharmed, but she had.  
She opened her eyes and Herald Falls High School came into view.
“You okay?” Luke asked her.
“I’m fine, why?”
“I saw you with your eyes closed, that’s all.  Don’t die or anything, okay? We don’t want Officer Jumbo to lose his job.”
“You mean Officer Arnold,” Stephanie corrected.
“Ooh, so protective,” he teased.  “You must love him!”
“Shut up, asshole,” Stephanie hissed.
“Don’t worry.  I think I’ll live,” Arianna interrupted their bickering.  “I was just resting my eyes.  The adrenaline rush wore off I guess.”
And it had.  The trembling charge she’d felt earlier had left her.   What remained were questions, too many questions.  Each weighed upon her with leaden heaviness.  Chief among them was her escape from the accident unscathed.  That point nagged at her, demanding attention like a willful child.  It had also birthed yet another issue: she could not remember ever being hurt.  As far back into her childhood as she could recall, she had never been injured.  No broken bones, no stitches, no trips to the emergency room.  It wasn’t as if her mother had been watching her every moment of the day either.  To the contrary, her mother had let her roam freely.  And she had been a daring child, climbing trees, skate boarding, inline skating, ice-skating.  None had produced a scratch worthy of so much as a plastic bandage.  
Her recollections were interrupted by Luke’s truck rumbling to a stop in the rear parking lot.
“We’re here.  Welcome to paradise,” he said sarcastically.
“Or where happiness comes to die,” Stephanie added.  “I’m off.  See you later.”
“Yep,” Luke replied.
“Bye.  And thanks again,” Arianna said.
“Whatever,” Stephanie added uncomfortably before walking away.
“My sister, the wordsmith,” Luke said.  “We’re really working on her social skills.”
He smiled, and Arianna smiled, too.  Luke had an easy way about him.  She felt comfortable around him.  
“Thanks,” Arianna said to him.  “You really saved my ass today.”
“Literally,” he said and leaned as if looking at her backside.
Her pulse quickened a bit and butterflies filled her stomach.
“You know what I mean,” she said.  “If you hadn’t passed by when you did, I’d still be back there with Officer Arnold and God-only-knows-who else. So thanks for stopping, and for helping.”
“No need to thank me.  Thank whatever force let you live today.  Man that was a nasty wipeout.”
“You don’t need to tell me,” she said in agreement.  “I got lucky, very lucky.”
“Speaking of getting lucky, meet me here after last period,” he said and flashed a playful smile again.  Amusement danced in his eyes. 
“Excuse me?” she asked sharply.
“I’m just joking around.  I’m assuming you’ll need a ride, right?” he said. 
“Yeah, but no one’s getting lucky, got it?”
He laughed.  “All right, point taken.  Can’t blame a guy for trying, right?  But kidding aside, I’ll meet you back here after school, and take you wherever you need to go, okay?”
“Yeah, that would be great.  Wow, that’s really nice of you, but,” she began.
“And don’t freak out about the mechanic thing,” he interrupted as if reading her thoughts.  “I know a guy who fixes bikes, and he’ll take care of it for you, no problem.”
“Really?” she brightened.  “Are you serious?”
“Yep, I’ll introduce you to him at my place after school today if you want.”
 “Yes! Please!  That would be great.  I was supposed to go job hunting, but that can wait ‘til tomorrow.  I’ll need that job to pay your guy!”
“He’s cheap.  Don’t worry,” he smiled broadly, a warm smile that she swore made his gray eyes shimmer.  “Be here at the end of the day.”
“You got it!”
He hesitated for a moment and searched her eyes. A strange expression touched his features, flickered there for a fraction of a second, as if he wanted to say something else to her.  But instead he turned and walked away.  Alone, she slung her backpack, now frayed and ragged-looking, over her shoulder, and began her second day at Herald Falls High School.

Chapter 7

God had made plain His disdain for witchcraft.  Exodus, Deuteronomy, Galatians and Revelation all spoke of forbidding a witch to live, and prohibited the use of divination, sorcery and witchcraft.  Howard Kane knew of each verse in the Bible that condemned heretics.  He could quote them all by heart.  He had also heard the Lord’s voice speak them through him.  
Though God had not communicated with him in some time, signs had abounded.  He lived his life, ever vigilant and sensitive to more subtle messages from his Maker.  Vigilance and sensitivity combined with technology had enabled his latest endeavor.
He drove along a narrow, winding road.  Wind-driven rain pelted his windshield and his wipers struggled to clear it.  Gusts whipped and lashed at the treetops on both sides of the street, sending fiery red and orange leaves in every direction like burning embers and rocking his SUV.  But he never doubted the capability of his Chevy Suburban, or the envoy that tailed him.  
He glanced up into the rearview mirror and glimpsed his fleet of three identical vehicles behind him.  Together, they were on a mission, a divine mission.
Weeks of poring over information received from his network of followers had resulted in his current outing.  A report had come to him, from a very loyal and dedicated source, that a small group was planning an initiation ceremony.  They had intercepted several cryptic e-mail exchanges and learned where and when the ritual was to take place.  Gatherings of witches for the purpose of ritualistic behavior, introductory or otherwise, implied the formation of a coven, and covens of witches were a dire threat to humankind.  Perhaps their gathering had been instigated by the Sola in an attempt to unite forces with others of far lesser strength, others who possessed meager powers by comparison, but powers, nevertheless.  She would rank highest among them, and have the authority to preside over their disgraceful service.  He, and the others who followed in their trucks behind him, were en route to end the ritual by any means necessary.  They were headed to destroy the demons.  If she were there, he would destroy her as well.  
A turnoff ahead signaled the entrance to a long driveway.  He did not bother signaling, but veered off the main road and on to the gravel lane.  Muddy impressions made in the pebbles meant that the witches had already arrived, and had likely begun their pagan rite.  Howard’s insides pulsed, infused with righteous power, the power he thrived on to conquer wickedness.
He parked his truck at the end of the driveway, before a crumbling house.  Built in the early 1900s, the building had been a rumored spot for every kind of imagined depravity.  Some said it was haunted.  Others claimed it was a house used for satanic ceremonials.   But none of the rumors mattered now.  After all, everything he’d heard, every rumor, was just that.  The proceedings that were likely under way were supported by facts, evidence, and not mere speculation.   Howard looked up to his rearview mirror again and saw that his followers had already exited their vehicles.  He stepped out as well.  As his feet hit the stony pathway, the rain slowed to a fine mist then ended abruptly.  He raised his eyes heavenward and saw that clouds, unhurried minutes ago, now raced across the sky.  Patches of blue could be seen in some spots.  Undoubtedly a sign from God, the weather was predictive of his upcoming victory.  The earth around him had been doused in heavenly water, purged of its sin and left clean.  The parallels were remarkable, how the Lord made clear his plan, miraculous.
Two men approached him, a father and son.  Mark Andrews and his son MJ had been loyal servants for more than a decade.
“Brother Howard, the e-mail said they were meeting in the basement,” Mark said.
“Ah yes, very fitting that they’d conduct their wretched business on the lowest level of the house,” Howard commented.
“I guess they like to be that much closer to Lucifer,” MJ spat.
 Mark put a hand on his son’s broad shoulder and squeezed.   “That’s why we’re here, son. To cast them from their shadowy depths and shine the light of God on them.”
Howard beamed at Mark and MJ.  They were such bright and benevolent servants.  The others joined Mark and his son and gathered around him.  After he’d given his instructions, they entered the derelict house.  
He led them through the front door.  There was no need to worry about surprising the witches.  They’d likely known of Howard and his men’s arrival; had sensed it.  Innumerable dust particles scattered as thin rays of light sliced through the darkened entrance.  He immediately noticed several sets of footprints in the thick layer of dust on the wood floors.  He followed them to what used to be a kitchen where they disappeared abruptly.   
“They’re here.  I can feel it,” he whispered.  And with his words, God sent him another sign.  The smell of incense assaulted his nasal passages, its woodsy musk thick and heavy.  He closed his eyes and forced himself to inhale deeply, to breathe the filthy scent.  “Yes, they are near, very near.”
He took several steps toward a door that looked no larger than a pantry closet and the scent intensified.  He pointed to a wooden door and nodded.  Mark stepped forward and slowly turned the handle.  The door opened inward, and he expected its hinges to creak in protest.  To his surprise, it opened silently.  Before them was a narrow, stone staircase.  Howard began descending the staircase, into the darkened bowels of the house.  Up ahead, he saw a red glow that swelled and diminished intermittently.  The smell grew stronger still and he fought the urge to hold his breath.  And then he heard it.  Voices chanted, murmuring forbidden words, summoning ancient evil.  The sound of the incantation filled the air.  He turned and looked to Mark who was just a step behind him and nodded solemnly. 
At the bottom of the steps, he and his men rounded a corner, and before them stood a hideous display of blasphemy.  Five sinners in all chanted at the vertices of a pentagram drawn in chalk on the concrete floor.  Candles and incense burned, suffocating the room with unholy light and fragrance.  Around the pentagram, a circle had been traced.  Just outside the perimeter of the circle, a blue book with a silver pentagram inscribed at its center sat on the dirt-coated floor.  He knew it well.  Widely held as the most thorough and respected authority on witchcraft, it was a mark of defilement in his eyes, a blasphemous reminder of man’s frailties.  In it pages was the despicable history and philosophy of witchcraft, as well as powerful spells and ritual instructions.  To the novice, the book was a veritable how-to book for the induction into the ungodly practice.  To the experienced sorceress, it was a reference guide that had long since been committed to memory.  Beside it sat a notebook with the words “Book of Shadows” scrawled across it in loopy handwriting.   The Book of Shadows was a common term for a witch’s journal.  It was where she would record each of her rituals and their outcomes, along with her profane journey down the path of evil.  He loathed to touch such offensive works, but needed to confiscate them as evidence for his congregates.  But before he reached for the book, before he made his presence known, he searched his soul and tried to sense the Sola’s presence.
He closed his eyes and held his hands out at his sides, palms facing upward.  He felt her existence thrumming through his core like a constant current of electricity, coursing through his very being.  She was near; of that he was certain.  But he did not feel the charge of her growing power.   The energy he sensed in the room was different from that of the dangerous seer.  The energy of the room, concentrated in the encircled pentagram was latent, its force as yet untapped.  He opened his eyes and noticed that one of the cloaked conjurers watched him.  
“Who dares to conjure evil in this house?” he boomed.  No one answered, but five sets of eyes now stared at him.  “Who is the high priestess of this ritual?” he demanded again.
One of the hooded fiends lowered her cloak.  “I’m not a priestess or anything,” she answered.  “But I am hosting this ceremony.”
Her face was smooth and round, childlike, yet had been tainted by dark makeup.  He guessed she was perhaps eighteen years old.  
 “Ceremony,” Howard said and stooped to pick up the blue book.  “You call gathering together to summon darkness a ceremony?  This is an abomination, an offense against God!”
Howard scanned the faces of the cloaked children.  He searched with his soul, with God’s gift, and realized they were not the devil’s disciples; they possessed no genuine power.  They were just misguided teenagers intrigued by unholiness.
Howard paused and took a deep breath. “Whose book is this?” he demanded but no one answered right away.  “Whose book is this?” he boomed a second time.
  “That’s my book,” the baby-faced girl said in a voice that quavered, betraying the confidence she’d feigned.  A silver earring looped through her nostril quivered and reflected the candlelight, and he noticed that her dark hair was streaked with scarlet strips.
He stepped toward the girl, closed the distance between them and removed his own hood.  She gasped and he took her plump face in his hand and squeezed her cheeks.
“Take your fucking hands off her!” another male voice shrieked.
Howard glanced back to his men and nodded.  All twelve stepped from the shadows and drew their weapons.  He returned his attention to the girl.  One hand held her face while the other clutched the book.  He raised it and placed it close to her face.  “You see this?”
She nodded.
“This is a book of witchcraft.  Are you a witch?”
“N-n-no,” she stammered through welling tears.
“Then what is the meaning of this?” he shouted inches from her face.
The girl cried.  Blackened tears fell from her eyes and formed sinister rivulets down her cheeks.  
“You are nothing more than an impostor,” he growled.
“I-I-I- know,” she sobbed.
“Where did you get this?” he asked her and held the book to her face again.  
She did not answer, but wept uncontrollably.
“Where?” he shouted.
“Online; I-I got it online.”
Howard swallowed back the bile rising in his throat and took a deep breath to calm the rage that scorched inside of him.
“You are not a witch,” he said through his teeth and squeezed her cheeks harder.  “None of you are!”
“I-I-I know.  There’s no such thing,” she blubbered.
Anger shot through him like a lightning bolt.  His body began to tremble and he squeezed even harder.  “Foolish child,” he condemned.
 He stared into her eyes.  They were the eyes of a scared and reckless teenage girl.  His peripheral vision confirmed that all present were scared, foolish teenagers.  None held powers.  None were witches.  But Howard felt no pity for the girl or her friends.  They had chosen freely to experiment with darkness.  They had turned from the light, from God.  And he could not ignore such an affront.  He could not forgive it.  
“This is a sin.  You are all sinners!” he said and dropped the blue book to the floor.  It landed with a thud and he felt the girl flinch beneath his grip.  With his freed hand, he reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved his blade.  In one quick motion, he thrust it into the girl’s stomach.
A stunned hush blanketed the room then was quickly slashed by cries of terror and pleas.
“What have you done?” a voice shrieked.
“Oh my God,” another voice sobbed.
“Please don’t kill us too,” a male voice begged.
“I cannot allow for such blasphemy to go unpunished.  This is God’s will,” he said solemnly.  Warmth spread over his hand and a large crimson stain grew over her abdomen, saturating her shirt and expanding to the waistband of her pants.  In the warmth of her waning lifeblood, he felt infused with calm and peace.  He was carrying out God’s work.  Righteousness filled him.  He felt dizzy, giddy even, and weightless.  Tears filled his eyes, the Holy Spirit overwhelming him.
“Kill them,” he calmly instructed his followers.  “Kill them all.”
At his command, shots rang out and echoed though the old house.  Tears streamed down his charred, leathered skin.  Pure joy filtered through him like sunlight.  He relished in the moment and muttered, “I heard you, Lord.  I hear you.”
He pulled his blade from the girl and returned his attention to his men.  All of the sinners had been shot dead.  None lived.  Smoke filled the room and through its hazy veils, he saw that some of his men looked weary.  He recognized their need for divine inspiration.  
“Sometimes we have to fulfill commands that are unpleasant on the surface.  But rest assured that at their core, the activities here were unholy, and had to be punished.  These were not children of God.  They had strayed and sought out dark forces.  They sought out Lucifer.”  He paused and heard “Amen” muttered several times then continued.  “These sinners needed to fall,” he said and enriched his voice with virtue.  “They will be examples to others who might consider following them.”  His men nodded in agreement.  He raised his voice, honesty and morality ringing out like a bell heralding a new day, and said, “We are God’s soldiers.  We must be strong and carry out His will, however difficult it may seem.  We will leave these bodies, as they are, around the very symbol of their ungodliness.  They will show the world what happens to those who trespass against the Lord.”
“Amen!” Mark said and gripped his son MJ’s shoulder.  “Amen son.”
Howard watched as MJ’s eyes surveyed the room, the blood that had splattered against the concrete walls and seemed to dance in the flickering candlelight.  A smile tugged at the corner of the boy’s mouth and he looked to Howard and said, “Amen.”  With his loyal followers and God on his side, Howard knew the Sola’s days were numbered.  She, like the sinners he stood before, would fall.

Chapter 8

Starting the day by losing control of her bike and careening down a stretch of road on her back had not been Arianna’s first choice of ways to begin her day.  She felt safe assuming that the accident would be the lowest point of her day, and that anything else that happened thereafter couldn’t possibly be worse.  Not even her second day at her new school.  In fact, thanks to her new friend, Luke, Herald Falls High School didn’t seem half bad, even though she was forced to face it dressed like a prostitute.  She ran her hands down her abdomen and touched her borrowed clothes.  Luke’s sister had surprised her with her generosity, but in her clothes, she felt less like herself.  She felt vulnerable.  Though she’d never shied away from wearing tight clothing, the thin material of Stephanie’s yoga pants left little to the imagination.  Every curve of her body was on display.  The T-shirt she’d borrowed was more fitted than the ones she normally wore as well.  The cotton and spandex blend of the fabric stretched and strained across her chest and hugged the contours of her breasts.   She wished her sweater had fared better so that she could have covered up with it.  She’d wanted to ask Luke for his, but he’d done so much for her already.  His offer to connect her with an inexpensive mechanic to fix her bike was more than she could have possibly expected, not that she’d expected anything that had happened earlier in the morning.
The morning, and the accident, was still so fresh in her mind.  Each time she blinked, she saw a glimpse of it.  The world rushing at her as her bike spiraled out of control, scraping along the asphalt, rolling down the hill, and the strange man on the side of the road.  Images unceasingly presented themselves, but none more disturbing than the man.  The stranger on the side of the road had distracted her, and had arguably instigated her crash.  But she did not want to think about him.  Not now.  She had a long day ahead of her. 
Pulling one of two large doors toward her, she pushed the mystery man to the back of her mind, replaced by a sudden need for nicotine.  She could not remember when she’d had her last cigarette and felt a distinct edge encroaching on her temper.  Walking toward her first period class, she decided she’d sneak out at her first opportunity to the small clearing.  Even if she only managed a few drags, the nicotine would mellow the irritability she felt.  She dug through her bag and found her course schedule wadded at the bottom.  She smoothed the creases as best she could and saw that her first class was just a few doors from where she stood.  Few students lingered in the hallway.  The first bell had rung while she had been in the parking lot with Luke.  The ones that remained watched her, though they tried to do so discreetly.  She would have loved to stare each of them down, freeze them out with her hardest look, but there was no time.  She jogged to her class and crossed the threshold just as the second bell rang.
Everyone was already seated.  Arianna looked at roughly twenty-five or so sets of eyes.  And they were all on her.  All looked unfamiliar, save for one.  Cheryl Charles narrowed her green eyes at her and smirked.  
Arianna resisted the urge to walk to her desk and wipe the stupid grin she wore right off her face, and probably would have, had her teacher not begun to speak.
“Oh, hello there,” he began in a soft voice.  “My name is Mr. Bates.  Welcome to American History.  You must be Arianna Rose.”
“Yep, that’s me,” she said and took her lower lip between her teeth.
“Good to meet you.  We have an empty desk back there,” he said and pointed to a desk in the last row.
Arianna walked to the back of the classroom and felt eyes on her as she passed.  Some of the looks were approving.  The boys she’d passed let their eyes travel the length of her body and generally rested on her chest.  The attention was flattering.  There was no doubt about it.  But it did not go over well with the girls in the class.  A few huffed and rolled their eyes and Arianna silently cursed Stephanie’s available wardrobe.  
Once she’d finally made it to her desk and settled in, she looked up and noticed another familiar face.  The boy she’d flicked her cigarette at, Preppy-boy, sat at the desk next to Cheryl.  Both had turned in their seats slightly and eyed her.  She met Cheryl’s gaze first and watched her unwaveringly.  After she realized Arianna was not going to look away, Cheryl returned her attention to the front of the room and shifted uncomfortably.  Preppy-boy gave up as well and followed Cheryl’s lead.  Mr. Bates began his lecture and twenty-five boring minutes into class, everyone was broken into groups.  Neither Preppy-boy nor Cheryl had been assigned to her, but their group had met beside hers.  
More than once, Arianna heard Cheryl remark to Preppy-boy muffled words then laugh and look in her direction.  Anger began to boil in her like molten lava.  She did not know if it was Cheryl’s arrogant smirk, or her body’s need for nicotine gnawing at her, but she could not recall ever feeling as riled as she did in that moment.  Each time she laughed, Cheryl tossed her head back and slung her blonde hair over one shoulder.  The hair toss, the exaggerated cackle, and that smug smirk incensed Arianna.  It felt as though every cell in her body teemed, alert and alive, and on edge.  She balled her fists and put them in her lap, her nails digging into the skin of her palms so deeply, she was certain she’d drawn blood.  She heard the word “slut” hissed and saw Cheryl stand and brush her hair off her shoulder followed by another girl chiming in and adding, “She really does dress like a slut.”
“I hope you’re not talking about me,” Arianna said aloud and looked directly at the girl.
The girl did not reply.  She lowered her gaze to her textbook and stared at it as if it were the last thing she’d read.  Cheryl, however, had become suddenly emboldened.  She looked at her and tipped up her chin, “Arianna, why would you ever think we were talking about you?  The outfit perhaps,” she said and raked her eyes over her before cackling again.
An indescribable feeling shot through Arianna’s body, like a bolt of lightning streaking across the sky.  It jolted each of her senses and all she could think of was humiliating Cheryl, knocking her from the high horse she’d placed herself on.  Her pulse pounded in her ears and her breathing became short and shallow.  Words escaped her fleetingly and she envisioned Cheryl on her ass.  She took a deep breath to calm herself and was about to utter a sharp retort as Cheryl squatted to seat herself in her chair again.  Arianna stared at the chair, concentrated hard on it and focused all of her rage, all of her energy toward it.  She wanted nothing more than for the chair to glide back, away from Cheryl.  She lifted her hand to brush a lock of hair from her forehead and noticed that her fingertips tingled and watched as, impossibly, the chair shot out from behind Cheryl, slid of its own volition more than twenty feet.  Cheryl’s backside landed against the floor with a thump, and judging from the expression on her face, the fall had hurt more than her rump.  The entire class laughed. 
“Ow! Oh my God! Ouch!” she squealed and stood slowly.  “What the hell!  You people are not funny!  Not funny at all!  Which one of you did it? Huh, which one?” she accused her group.
No one took credit for kicking her chair out because no one had.  Arianna had seen the chair move by itself.  Or had she?  Searing pain exploded in the back of her head.  She raised a hand and tried to massage the overwhelming ache and found that the tingling had stopped.  She wondered whether the massive headache was nicotine withdrawal or possibly a concussion.  Or perhaps she was going crazy.  Fortunately, the pain subsided quickly, and as the laughter subsided and it had been determined that none of the people in her group had kicked the chair out from beneath her, Cheryl glanced over her shoulder at Arianna.  Only this time, her haughtiness was tinged with embarrassment.   Arianna was the one to smirk this time around, and though she was left with a dull smarting at the base of her skull and the distinct possibility existed that she was injured or losing her mind, she felt that either way, Cheryl had gotten what she deserved.
Mr. Bates quickly regained control of his class and silenced any remaining chatter.  The rest of the period wore on and Arianna’s headache wore off.  When the bell finally sounded and ended American History, she gathered her belongings and bolted out the door.  A quick glance at her schedule confirmed that her next class was two doors down the hall.  When she arrived there, a note had been posted on the door that her teacher had needed to leave unexpectedly.  The class was instructed to report to either the library or computer lab for study hall.  But she had no intention of doing either, not right away at least.  Enduring a fifty-minute class in the throes of a nicotine fit had been next to impossible.   She did not intend to ignore opportunity when it presented itself.  She needed a cigarette.  She dashed down the hallway and found the alcove that led to the clearing in the woods.  She pushed open the door and noticed that it did not fully close.  A rock had been wedged near the bottom hinge.  She smiled and realized someone had borrowed her idea.
The sun was strong for the late-October morning.   Although she wasn’t particularly fond of her tight T-shirt, she was grateful it was short-sleeved.   With one hand reaching into her backpack digging for her box of Camel Lights, she stole across the leaf-littered grass to the tree line.   When finally concealed by a formidable maple, she placed her cigarette between her lips and lit it.  She inhaled deeply and felt the smoke fill her lungs, the nicotine entering her system.  She felt immediately calmed, and a bit lightheaded, but not unpleasantly so.  Her accident earlier in the morning, her run-in with Cheryl, as well the bizarre chair incident moments ago, seeped from her and was replaced with quiet calm.  The area around her, bathed in golden light and bejeweled with brilliant treetops, was peaceful.  But the sound of damp leaves swishing in the distance ended her peacefulness.  Growing nearer, it meant that she wasn’t alone.   She peeked out from around the trunk of the maple she hid behind and did not see anyone.  She guessed animals had made the noise and returned her attention to smoking.  
“Hey,” a voice whispered in her ear unexpectedly.
“Holy shit!” Arianna jumped and dropped her cigarette in the wet leaves.   She turned, her heart slapping wildly against her ribs, and found a pair of familiar gray eyes staring at her.  “Luke,” she breathed and clutched her chest.  “Are you trying to kill me?”
“I thought you heard me coming,” he smiled.
“I heard something, but I looked and didn’t see anyone.”
“Guess it’s my ninja skills,” he said and winked.  She did not know whether to be touched or embarrassed by the fact that he’d remembered their first conversation in such great detail.  She chose to do neither and decided to change the subject.
“You’d better hope that wasn’t my last butt,” she said referring to her fallen cigarette.  She began rifling through her bag and Luke stepped closer.
“Here,” he said and placed one of his between her lips.  He stood close to her, with only about a foot of space between them, and smelled of soap and deodorant.  She enjoyed his clean scent, his nearness. He lit her cigarette with his lighter, all the while staring at her mouth.  She felt her insides begin to tremble slightly and removed the cigarette from her lips, the sudden need to busy her hands overwhelming.  She exhaled upward then watched as a veil of smoke descended slowly, shrouding and obscuring Luke’s features.  When the smoke had cleared, she saw that he smiled again, his lively gray eyes sparkling.
“Thanks,” she said.  “What’re you out here all day?”
“No. Well, not all day.  Normally, I’d wait ‘til later.  But someone decided to crash her bike this morning and interrupt my morning cigarette and coffee.”
“Who would go and do something that awful to you?” she said then added, “What an asshole.”
“Ah, you know, maybe ‘asshole’ is too strong a word; rude, might be better.  But she’s really hot, so I let it slide.”
Arianna was not accustomed to compliments or flattery.  Guys she’d dated in the past had shown her their appreciation of her appearance in rather obvious ways, and while she did not prefer their methods to Luke’s, it had been all she’d ever known and come to expect.  Luke wasn’t like other guys she’d dated, though.  He was far different.  The tattoos and scars that marked his ropey arms were betrayed by the kindness in his eyes.  He looked at her and smiled, a wicked, crooked smile, yet his eyes brimmed with anything but wicked intentions.  
She was about to make a snappy comeback about the rude comment when voices echoed from beyond the trees.  A male voice said something inaudible and was followed by both male and female laughter.
“Come on,” Luke said and took her hand.  He gave it a gentle squeeze then tugged and led her away from the maple.  “I want you to meet some of my friends.”
“Luke, I don’t know about right now,” she began to protest.
“Why?” he interrupted.
“Well, I don’t know,” she balked.  “I’m not dressed like I normally do.”
“Oh stop,” he said and pulled her slightly.  “No one cares how you’re dressed.  I mean, you look smokin’ hot, don’t get me wrong, but they’re not like that.” 
She allowed herself to be led briefly, another unfamiliar action.  She walked alongside him deeper into the woods.  Luke let go of her hand and disappointment at his gesture nipped at her.  He wasn’t her boyfriend. She didn’t know why it had bothered her.  He was just a guy she’d met the day before who had helped her out of a tough spot.  She’d only known him all of one day.  So what if she’d thought about him all evening and most of the afternoon after she’d met him.  Big deal, he was good looking and had kind eyes.  She’d avoided disappointment when it came to guys her whole life.  By insulating herself against caring or getting deeply involved, she’d safeguarded herself against vulnerability, against heartbreak.  
Slogging through soggy leaves, she pushed the fleeting feeling of disappointment from her mind and silently promised herself that after he introduced her to his mechanic, she’d thank him and offer him some form of payment for his help then distance herself from him.  She walked beside him and approached his friends, but knew she was alone.
“Hey guys,” Luke said.  “This is Arianna.  Arianna, this is Ryan, Mike, Bulldog, Christa, Carrie and Beth.”
“Hey, how’s it goin’” Arianna said.  Luke’s friends stood, seemingly at ease and all smoking in a circle.
“Good to meet you,” Ryan, a stocky guy with brown hair that grazed his shoulders, said.
“What’s up?” Bulldog said and looked every bit of his nickname.  Broad-shouldered and brawny, Bulldog looked well equipped to handle himself in a fight.  Scars on his face and arms hinted that he’d seen his fair share of brawls.  He smiled at Arianna and raked a hand through the sandy-colored stubble that covered his head.
Mike nodded as did Christa and Carrie.  
“Where are you from?” Beth asked casually.
“Where am I not from is more like it,” Arianna said and raised her brows.  “The last school I was at this year was up in Rockdale.”
“This year?” Beth asked and here blue eyes widened.  “Shit, that sucks.”
“How many times have you moved?” Carrie asked.  
“Since high school?”
“Oh shit,” Carrie answered.
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Arianna added and took a drag of her cigarette.  
“Oh man, I gotta go,” Mike announced.  “Second period’s already half over.”  He then kissed Carrie on the cheek and said, “Later!” to everyone.  Before he’d walked to the edge of the wood where the trees gave way to grass, he turned and called out, “You comin’ tomorrow night, bro?”  
Arianna wasn’t sure to whom he was speaking.  When Luke answered, “You know I am,” her question had been answered.  “Hey, you wanna come out with us?” he asked her.
She wasn’t sure how to answer, but figured a group get together was conducive to his feelings for her.  Not a date, just a group of friends hanging out.
“Um, I guess.  Where’re we going exactly?”
“To Blue Ivy.  It’s a club on the edge of town.  Eighteen to party, twenty-one to drink, but we all have IDs,” Christa answered.
“Yeah, I gotta take my girl out and show her a good time every now and again,” Ryan added.
By Arianna’s count, Ryan and Christa were together as were Mike and Carrie.  She felt confident, however, that Beth was not with Bulldog.  She guessed Bulldog had to be more than six-foot-two inches tall, every inch of him solid.  Beth, on the other hand, looked as though a stiff wind would blow her away.  Extremely thin and petite, Arianna wondered whether Beth could even shop for clothing in the adult department.  Her mind refused to believe that such an odd pairing could happen.  She smiled and remembered she hadn’t gotten all the information she’d needed.
“Count me in,” Arianna said then remembered her bike.  “Shit, count me out.  My bike is totaled.”
“You ride?” Ryan asked and looked impressed.
“Yep.”
“That’s hot,” Bulldog said and Beth elbowed him in the gut.
“What kind of bike do you have?” Ryan asked.
“Well, before this morning, I had a Kawasaki, older model, of course, but it was in decent shape.”
“I can take you,” Luke said nonchalantly.  “Stephanie’s probably coming too, so if you don’t mind riding in back and listening to her bitch, come with me.”
She wasn’t sure how to respond, couldn’t get a good read on Luke.  One minute he seemed to be into her, and the next, he seemed cool.  Regardless, she had no intention of letting herself get involved with him.  He could be cute and charming all he wanted, she would just keep him at arm’s length and be his friend.
“Uh, sure.  That sounds good I guess,” she said in an equally casual tone.  
“Cool,” he said.  “We can work out the details later, at my place.”
“All right.  I’d better get going.  Don’t want to push it on my first day.  With my luck, Mr. Wood is personally looking for me as we speak,” she said and the group chuckled.  “Later.”
Arianna turned and began walking away from Luke and his friends.  As she trekked through the wet leaves, she felt a breeze blow.  The trees did not stir though.  In fact, the woods seemed eerily still.  Yet, a warm wind whispered at her back, tickling her senses.  She spun around and half expected to see the man from the side of the road standing behind her, watching as he had earlier and the day before.  But no one followed.  Not even Luke.  He had remained with his friends.  The annoyingly persistent hint of disappointment that had wormed its way into her thoughts now edged again.  She picked up her pace and was about to step up onto the single concrete step that led to the double door when a voice called out to her.
“Hey! Hold on a sec,” Luke said and jogged to close the distance between them.  “Damn, you walk fast,” he wheezed.
“What’s up?” she asked coolly.
“I don’t know, nothing.  I just wanted to walk back with you,” he said and smiled warmly. 
“Oh, it didn’t seem that way,” she said and caught herself sounding pouty.  “You seemed like you wanted to stay.  And besides, you give me too little credit.  I can find my way back you know?” she joked and returned his smile. 
“I’m sure you can.  I never mind watching you walk away either.  I just, I don’t know,” he said and let his unfinished sentence hang in the air.
And there it was again.  Was he flirting with her, or was that just what he did with every girl?  Why did she care?  She shouldn’t care.  She refused to care.  
“I have to get to class,” she said.  “I’m sure second period is half over by now.”
“Oh, yeah, you’re probably right,” he said and she saw an emotion she couldn’t name dim his features.
“I’ll catch up with you later, okay?”
“Sounds good,” he said and brightened.
He lingered a second longer and leveled his silvery eyes at her.  He looked as if he were about to say something to her when Ryan jogged up.
“I’ll see you later, Luke,” Arianna said before turning and walking inside.

Chapter 9

The second day of school had begun terribly, but mercifully, had passed quickly.  Arianna had been grateful for how fast the day had passed.   She had not seen Luke since second period in the woods, a fact that irked her for unclear reasons.  He had not been in the cafeteria at lunchtime, but she’d seen his friends.  Though she hadn’t wanted to, she’d wondered where he had been, adding to the irksome feeling.  Now, as she waited by his pickup truck, she wondered still.  She glanced around the parking lot and watched as other students hopped into their cars and took off, eager to leave.  She was eager to leave as well, but perhaps not as much as her classmates.  They were likely headed to more exciting places than she was; at least she imagined the ones in the fancier cars were.  She was not headed anywhere that would qualify as even remotely exciting.  To the contrary, her prospects were rather depressing.  Meeting with Luke’s mechanic while harboring the fleeting hope that the price of repairing her totaled bike would not be ridiculously expensive made her feel nauseated.  She had originally planned to look for a job so that she could help with household bills and have a little spending money.  Now, however, she guessed every dime she’d make in the coming months would go toward fixing her bike.  She would know for certain soon enough.  That’s if Luke ever showed up.  The final bell had rung more than ten minutes ago.  She’d assumed Luke would be the first person out of the building; that he’d be leaning against his truck waiting for her.  But he hadn’t been.  His truck, with her banged-up bike in back, had been the only thing she found when she’d rushed to the rear lot.  No Stephanie; And no Luke.
People parked in surrounding spaces stared at her suspiciously.  She fished around in her backpack and tried to look busy.  Her hand landed on her phone and she pulled it out.  She checked it quickly for a text message from her friend from Rockdale, Lily.  Lily hadn’t messaged her in more than five days.  That was a record for them.  Lily had been the closest thing to a best friend Arianna had ever had.  And now she hadn’t heard from her in almost a week.  Warning whispered in the air and brushed against her skin like a faint breeze.  Her insides fluttered briefly and she froze, concentrating on the feeling so completely that she blocked out the sounds of the parking lot.  Her mind focused on Lily, and the strange sense of portending beating inside her.  
Suddenly, a hand grasped her shoulder.  Arianna spun around, her concentration broken, and she pushed the hand off her shoulder.  Luke reeled backward and stumbled, catching himself before falling against the car parked beside his.  She’d just grazed his hand, yet he’d felt the need to lurch and stagger melodramatically.  After waiting for more than ten minutes only to have him scare the crap out of her, she was not in the mood for fooling around.
“Damn, girl!” Luke said and feigned shock.  “You’re freakishly strong.”
“You need to stop sneaking up on me!”
“Sneaking up on you?” he asked and his expression changed.  “What do you mean?  I called your name twice.  Didn’t you hear me?”
“No,” she said and paused, her thoughts retuning to Lily.   Heat crept up her body and flushed her cheeks.  “No I didn’t.  I guess I flaked.”
“With the morning you had, I guess you’re allowed to do more than flake,” he said and reached a hand out to touch her shoulder again.  “Dare I, or am I gonna get thrown around again?” he asked and looked at her with exaggerated fear.
“Shut up,” she said playfully and felt her annoyance dissipate.  “Where the hell have you been?  I’ve been waiting here like a moron for like, fifteen minutes.”
“Sorry to make you wait,” he said then looked at his shoes.  “I was getting things set up with the mechanic.”  
“Whatever,” she said.  He seemed genuinely sorry and she simply did not feel angry enough to give him a hard time.  “Everything went okay?”
“Yep.  Are you ready to go?”
She considered making a snide comment about being ready for the last fifteen minutes, but chose not to, opting instead for, “Absolutely.”
Luke reached into the front pocket of his jeans and grabbed his keys before unlocking the passenger side door of his truck for her.  “My sister, Miss Personality, won’t be joining us this afternoon,” he said as he tugged at the handle.  The door screeched open and she climbed in.  “I’m sure you’re all broken up about it.”
“I vaguely remember her mentioning something about that this morning,” Arianna admitted and fought the smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.  His actions, unlocking and opening the door for her, hadn’t exactly been the pinnacle of chivalry, but they were the closest she’d come to actually being on the receiving end of gentlemanly gestures.  He climbed in beside her and started the truck.  The engine started easily, rumbling to what she guessed was a reliable start.
“What’re you smiling about?” he asked her.
She hadn’t realized the smile had won out against her efforts.  “What?” she fumbled.  “Oh nothing, just uh, Cheryl today.  Something funny happened in first period.”
“Cheryl’s never been funny,” he said seriously.  “Ever.  Mean, yes.  Funny, no way.”
“I’ll give you that,” she said.  “I’ve only known her for two days and funny is definitely not a word that comes to mind.  The word bitch does, though.”
“Agreed, now what happened that was funny?”
Arianna debated telling him what Cheryl had called her, wondered whether she could confide in him.  She wanted to, and did not like that she wanted to.  Deciding against it, she left out the part about Cheryl calling her a slut and the fact that for a moment there, she believed she’d used her mind to move the chair out from under her.   
“Cheryl was about to sit down after standing up and flipping her hair around and lecturing the group she was in, when out of nowhere, the chair slid out from behind her.  She went to sit back down and she landed on her ass.”
Luke laughed out loud.  It was a pleasant, hearty sound that made her laugh as well.  
“Oh shit,” he said through laughter.  “I would have loved to have seen that.  Shit, I know people who would have paid to see that!”
“I take it she’s only popular with her clique?”
“Hell, I don’t even think they like her.  Was her boyfriend, Paul, sitting next to her?”
“Paul?  You mean Preppy-boy?”
Luke erupted again with his infectious laughter.  “Preppy-boy, huh?  I like that.  I usually just call him douche bag, but I’ll try out Preppy-boy.  I think teachers will appreciate that one more.”
“You asked if he was sitting next to her,” she said and was curious to know where he had been going with that.  “Why?”
“My guess is, he shoved the chair away.”
“But he’s her boyfriend.”
“Yeah, exactly my point,” he said and laughed again.  “If you spent you’re free time with that uppity bitch wouldn’t you want to drop her on her ass every now and then?”
“I would. No doubt about that.  But aren’t she and Preppy-boy the same, I don’t know, species.  They’re both from planet privileged.”
“Oh I like you,” he said through laughter.  “Shit.  I’m glad I met you,” he added and she glimpsed him looking at her from the corner of his eye.
They had been driving for less than five minutes when they pulled out onto the main road near the accident site.  A shiver slithered up her spine and she stopped smiling.  As if he sensed her anxiety, Luke said, “Feel free to smoke.”  He reached onto his dashboard and grabbed a pack of Marlboros.  He pulled two cigarettes from the red pack and offered one to her.  
“Thanks,” she said.  “Don’t mind if I do.” 
She put the cigarette between her lips and was about to reach into her bag for her lighter when a flame appeared before her.
“I’m seriously trying to woo you here,” Luke smiled and lit her cigarette for her.
She smiled and rolled her eyes as the flame touched the tip of her cigarette.  “So this is what wooing is,” she said playfully then added, “Huh, not bad.  Not bad at all.”
They chatted about their classes and teachers they had in common as his truck rattled along for another five minutes before he pulled in to his driveway.  The gravel-filled path was more dirt than gravel and several tires dotted the dying crabgrass on either side of it.  The driveway ended in front of a detached garage which neighbored a white clapboard house with peeling paint and gutters that drooped dangerously.  
“Welcome to Casa Rand,” Luke said and she swore she detected embarrassment in his tone.  She knew for certain that if he saw where she lived, he would not feel embarrassed.  “Need to use the bathroom or anything?”
“Actually, I do.  If you don’t mind,” she said.
“No problem.  Just please, look past the junk.  No one should be home, but certain people in my house don’t clean up after themselves.”
“Hey, no judgment here.  Mess or no mess, I just need to pee.”
Luke laughed.  “God, I like you,” he said and shook his head.
He climbed out and she followed him across the yard to the front door.  A screen with several holes in it stood ajar and the front door looked like a kindergartener could kick it in.  Yet, Luke selected a key from his key ring and unlocked the front door.  The smell of marijuana and another strong, chemical-laden scent hung in the air.  She tried not to inhale too deeply for fear of getting high off of some unknown drug cloud.  Pot she could live with, but whatever else had been cooked or smoked smelled horrendous.  Luke noticed it too.  It would have been impossible not to.  He scanned the room and his lips formed a hard line as he shook his head.  “Damn it,” he muttered and she saw the muscles around his jaw flexing.  She wanted to reach out to him, to comfort him, but figured nothing she could do could help.  
“The bathroom’s down this way,” he said tightly and began walking to the left, toward a short hallway.  
Arianna did not want to stare, but it was hard to ignore what was before her.  A stained, plaid, upholstered couch that sagged on one side occupied the majority of the room flanked by a floral recliner and a straight-back wooden chair.  Directly in front of the couch was an oval wooden coffee table atop which sat a lighter, a hypodermic needle, a blackened spoon and several pieces of aluminum foil.  Beer bottles, rolling papers and fast-food wrappers also littered the table, but had been pushed to its perimeter.  The image was sad really, but not as sad looking as the half-naked woman who looked to be in her mid-fifties and was sprawled out, likely stoned out of her mind, on the floor between the couch and table.  Arianna tore her eyes away from the haunting image and followed after Luke.  He pointed to the first door and said, “Bathroom.”
She went inside and quickly shut the door.  Water stains spotted the ceiling and the sink faucet dripped incessantly. She relieved herself and washed her hands quickly, eager to return to Luke.  When she opened the door he waited for her, the warmth gone from his face.  They walked outside and he did not bother locking the door.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said addressing the obviously strung out drug addict in the room.  “I called ahead and she said she wasn’t going to be here.”
“Who was that?” 
“My mom.  And in case you didn’t notice, she’s a fucking addict,” he spat.
“Luke, I’m sorry,” she said.
“Yeah, me, too,” he said tightly.  She was clean for all of four days, longest she’d ever gone.  And now this.”
She could see the hurt in his silver eyes, could feel it.  She stared at him, focused on him, on his life, and was suddenly consumed by it.  She was Luke at eight years old, seeing life through his eyes.  She saw a dark-haired woman with dark circles around her eyes and marks up and down her arms.  The woman was shouting and shaking her then stormed off.  Another imaged flashed before her and it was the same woman lying still in a pool of vomit.  She desperately wanted to help the woman but couldn’t; was never able to help her.  Her palms slickened and a bead of sweat trickled between her shoulder blades.  Fear and helplessness pressed her from every angle.
“Arianna!” she heard Luke call and felt his hand on her arm.
“What,” she said panting.
“What the hell!  You spaced out on me.  Are you okay?”
“You’re mom, she overdosed when you were eight?” she blurted out.
His silvery eyes turned to hardened pewter.  “Yeah,” he said reluctantly.  “How did you know that?”
Her mind raced, searching for a viable response.  “Well, uh,” she fumbled.  “She’s an addict, right?” was all she managed.
“Yeah, but where’d you come up with eight from?”
“I just pulled it out of nowhere, a guess really,” she said and her heart raced dangerously.
“Huh, pretty lucky guess,” he said and offered a sad smile.
Her heart slowed slightly.  “So when’s this mechanic supposed to come?”
Luke arched an eyebrow at her and his face brightened a bit.  
“What?” she asked.  “I don’t get it.  Why are you looking at me like that?”
“There is no mechanic,” he said and scrunched his features as if bracing to be hit.
“What?  No mechanic?  You lied to me?”
“Well, no, not exactly.  I’m the mechanic actually.  I’m going to fix your bike.”
Arianna closed her eyes and exhaled.
“I’ll take you to and from school until it’s finished and I’ll only charge you for parts.  Come on, you have to admit that’s a sweet deal.”
Arianna thought it would have been a great deal, if he were a mechanic.  
“You seriously are a mechanic?”
“I’ve been fixing cars and motorcycles my whole life. Trust me.  You’re better off with me than some dude at a garage.”
She cringed.  She didn’t have much of a choice.  Her funds were limited, and if she were to take it to a repair shop, they’d double the cost of the parts and add labor charges to her bill.  She simply couldn’t afford such an expense.  “All right, but what’s the catch?”
“The catch?  There’s no catch.”
“So you want nothing from me, nothing at all.  Just money for parts?”
“Well, that and,” he said and his voice trailed off.
She narrowed her eyes at him.  “That and what?” she asked suspiciously and hoped he did not have some depraved list to rattle off.
“It’d be nice to have some company while I worked,” he said and tried to sound offhand.  She breathed a sigh of relief as he continued, “You could come here some days after school and hang out with me.”
“I could do that I guess,” she said.
“And I promise you won’t see what you saw today again.”
She didn’t think he’d mention his mother again.  His comment refreshed her memory of her earlier experience.  It had not left her, but she had been distracted by his conversation.  The sensation she’d felt had placed her in his past, it had been as if she were visiting his life in clips through his eyes, feeling what he’d felt at that time.  Her insides shook at the recollection.
“Are you okay, Arianna?  You don’t seem like yourself.”
“I’m fine,” she answered absently and looked at the ground.  She looked up and saw his concerned expression.  “Seriously, don’t worry about me.  You’ve been through a lot of shit, still going through it.  The last thing you need to be doing is worrying about me.”
“Thanks,” he said and started walking toward his pickup truck.  He opened the back of it and ran to the garage.  When he returned, he dragged a wide, wooden plank.  He rested the plank against the back of the truck and made a makeshift ramp.  Then he climbed into the back of the truck, lifted the bike so that it stood on its wheels and walked it down the ramp.
“Luke, that doesn’t look safe,” she protested.
“I’ve done this before.  Don’t worry!” he called, but her breath still caught in her chest when he reached the midpoint of the ramp and it bent impossibly without breaking.  She held her breath until he’d reached the ground below.
“See!  I’m fine!” he said proudly.  He smiled and she was happy to see that some of its sincerity had returned.  He pushed the bike to the door of the decrepit garage.  “Here, hold this,” he told her and gestured for her to balance the bike.  While she did, he lifted garage door.  Beyond it was innumerable tools lined along the walls, all neatly arranged in size order.  Two chests with several drawers had been placed against the far wall which she assumed held more tools.  The garage had been more neatly organized than his house; that was for sure.  It was clearly the area he presided over, the area he took pride in.  He withdrew the kickstand of the bike and placed it near the center of the space then set about collecting tools from the chests.  She watched how confidently he moved, how purposefully.  
“I’m gonna get a look at her and see what the real damage is here.  Do you want anything to drink, a soda or something?”
“I am a little thirsty,” she said and regretted sending him back into the house.  “But it’s no big deal.”
“I have soda in the fridge over there,” he pointed to a miniature refrigerator tucked in a corner.  “It’s not like I have to go back inside or anything,” he said more quietly.
“Then yes, I’d love a soda.”
“Okay.  Can you grab me one, too?”
“Hey!  What happened to the wooing?” she asked with mock irritation.
“You mean you’re not fully wooed?” he said and matched her tone.  “Shit, you’re quite the princess aren’t you?”  He sighed exaggeratedly then walked to the refrigerator.  “Fine.  A soda for the lady.”
“Whoa, whoa, who said I was a lady?” she said and winked mischievously.
“Are you flirting with me?” he said with inflated inquisitiveness.
“I do believe I am,” she replied and batted her eyelashes for affect.
 She heard herself giggle and silently chastised herself for being so girlie and silly.  But she felt happy, inexplicably happy, despite being in a garage that resided beside a house with the drugged out mother of a boy she liked.  And there was the matter of what had brought her to the garage in the first place: crashing her bike.  She allowed her gaze to drop and concentrated on a stray thread that stuck out of one of her boots.  Luke crossed the garage and delivered her drink to her.  
“Here you go.  It’s not diet or anything.  I hope that’s okay,” he said and handed her a red can.  She looked up at him and reached out her hand to take the can.  When she did, his hand grazed hers.  It was not an unpleasant feeling and sent a small shiver up her arm.  
“Thanks,” she said and he held her gaze, his silvery eyes dancing.  He smiled and raked a hand through his dark hair before sitting down on an overturned bucket beside her.  She opened her soda and waited for him to say something, all the while her insides stirred at his nearness.  He placed the can he held in his hands on the floor between his feet and turned to face her.  She strained to see him in her peripheral vision before stealing a glance at him.  When their eyes met, he leaned in toward her as if he were going to kiss her.  She stood and walked toward his work bench, effectively evading his kiss.
“These are cool,” she said nervously.  “What do they do?” She’d heard the words come out of her mouth and died a small death, cringing at how stupid she’d sounded.  Of course, she knew what a hammer, screwdrivers and saws were for.  And it wasn’t as though she’d never kissed a guy before.  She kissed many guys before, and gone a lot further than kissing.  But Luke seemed different than other guys at times.  When they were alone, he was sweet and silly, and kind of a gentleman.  Around his friends, he was a bit harder to read.  
“Well,” he said and lifted a hammer.  “This is a hammer.  You hit things with it, like nails and sometimes your thumb if you’re not paying attention.”  He smiled and winked at her as he inched closer.
“I know what they do,” she admitted and felt heat creep up her neck.  
“You just wanted to get the hell away from me,” he said still smiling.  “I get it.” 
“No, not really.”
He turned and leaned his back against the bench, not looking at her.  He folded his arms across his chest.  With the sleeves of his shirt pushed up, she could see his tattoos more clearly, the colors and elaborate artistry.   She stepped back and reached out her hand and pulled one of his arms forward.  With her fingertip she outlined the outer edge of a serpent of some sort.  He seemed to like her touch because she noticed that goose bumps arose on his forearm. 
“What is this, a snake or something?” 
“No.  It’s the tail of a dragon,” he said and pushed his sleeve up farther.   His arm was lean, but muscled, nevertheless.  She doubted he lifted weights and that the bulge of his biceps and forearms was a result of the work he did in the garage.  
She traced the long, curving tail of the dragon then looked up to find a pair of silver eyes trained on her.  They looked like pools of moonlight, mysterious, yet vulnerable, and contradicted everything else about his appearance.  Something deep within her was drawn to him intensely, and she wanted to act on it.  She did not hesitate a second longer.  Without considering it any further, she rose up onto her tiptoes and kissed Luke.  She pressed her lips to his, and found that his lips were deliciously warm and soft.  Surprised, but seemingly pleased, nonetheless, he reciprocated.  He kissed her sweetly at first, almost chastely.  But the feel of his lips instantly became like a drug to her.  She need more.  She nibbled at his bottom lip temptingly and he immediately responded, reading her need and answering it.  He crushed her mouth with his and wrapped his arms around her waist.  He pulled her body close to his.  She felt his heart racing against her chest.  Warmth filled her as his hand slid up her back and grazed the side of her breast.  Fueled by the brush of his hand, she pressed her body closer to him and felt his tongue slip between her lips, darting and probing.  His hands went up further and cupped her face briefly before moving to her hair.  
His fingers tightened in her hair and he pulled her closer.  Her body was already too tight against his, yet she did not care.  In fact, she felt it was not tight enough.  She urgently wanted to be closer still.  To her surprise though, his fingers relaxed a bit in her hair and slid down once again.  They stopped at her lower back and found the small strip of skin that hadn’t been covered by Stephanie’s T-shirt.  The roughness of his fingertips against her lower back made her wish he’d run them over every inch of her body.  She arched her back pushing her chest against his and kissed him more passionately, more fiercely, until his mouth left hers and followed the line of her jaw then explored the length of her neck.  She heard herself moan in delight.  He kissed and tantalized the tender skin of her neck, making his way back up from her collarbone until his teeth grazed her earlobe.  She shivered, felt her body come alive.  She moved her hands from his hips up his back and dug her nails into his shoulders as he continued to kiss just below her ear.  The stubble of his chin swept along her neck, eliciting more moans from her.  She dropped her hands down to his lower back and lifted the back of his shirt, wanting the feel of his bare skin against her hands, against her body.  He dropped his hands as well and gripped her backside firmly.  Every part of her ached with want and she began to lift his shirt.  As she did so, her bag began to roar like Godzilla, her mother’s ringtone.
“Shit,” she muttered and felt the desire and urgency that had assembled within her moments earlier, begin to evaporate.
“Can’t you just ignore it?” he breathed in her ear, tempting her to do just that.
“No, it’s my mom.  She never calls me.  God only knows why she’s doing it now,” she said as she reluctantly pried herself from him and hurriedly crossed the garage to her backpack.  She rummaged for her phone for several seconds before she found it and answered.
“Hello mother.  You have shitty timing,” she said.
“Hi baby,” her mother said in a voice undoubtedly thickened with alcohol.  “I’m in a bit of a jam and could use some help.”
“What kind of jam?  Are you all right?” Arianna asked suddenly worried.
“Well, I just left the bar,” she began.
“Of course you did,” Arianna replied curtly.
“And I went to start my car, but it won’t start.”
“First of all, you shouldn’t be driving in the condition you’re in.  And second of all, when’s the last time you gassed up?”
There was a pause on the other end of the phone followed by giggling.  Arianna looked up and saw Luke looking at her.  “I’m sorry,” she mouthed to him.  He lifted his chin to ask if everything was okay and Arianna shook her head slowly.
“Oh baby! You’re not going to believe this,” her mother crooned.  “I’m all outta gas.  Silly me!  Think you could scare some up and bring it to Joe’s Bar?”
“If I had my bike, that would be tough to do.  But since I don’t even have that,” she started but didn’t bother finishing her sentence.  What good would it do to tell her drunken mother about an accident that had happened hours ago?  Her mother would likely just find a way to make it about her and Arianna would end up consoling her mother over something that happened to her.  “Never mind.  I’ll be there soon,” Arianna said and ended the call.
“What was that all about?” Luke asked as he came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. 
“My mother is drunk at a bar and was about to drive home, but realized she has no gas,” she said and blew out an exasperated breath.  She wasn’t used to sharing her problems with anyone.  “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to take me to the gas station then drop me at Joe’s Bar, would you?” 
He did not groan or complain, but disappointment was evident in his eyes.  “Sure, no problem,” he said.
“Are you sure?  You’ve done so much for me already.  I feel funny even accepting help from anyone, let alone a new friend.”
“I’m not your friend,” he said and looked longingly at her.  “Everything I do is to try and get in your pants,” he said and smiled mischievously.  
She playfully smacked him in the arm and said, “Really!  Keep trying!”
“Oh I think I was pretty close before,” he said and slapped her on her backside.  
She contemplated arguing, but he was right.  She would have given in to her desire if her mother hadn’t called. 
“Well,” she stammered.
“Well what? No smartass comeback?”
“Well, no, not right now,” she said and tapped him on his arm again.
“All this hitting is getting me going again,” he joked.
“All right, all right.  Let’s go before my mother makes a new friend I’ll have to kick out in the morning again.”
He did not say another word but smirked and gathered his stuff.  They left the garage and he locked it up as well as the front door to his house.  In the truck, he was far more somber.  They drove and talked about movies and music until they reached that gas station.  She filled a tank he’d lent her and they promptly left and headed to Joe’s Bar.  In the parking lot, she found her mother leaning against the car talking to a dangerous looking character whose face and neck blazed in an unhealthy shade of red.  He rocked from one foot to the other as he spoke to her, as if teetering on the brink of toppling over.  Arianna called to her mother and the man left quickly.  Luke filled her mother’s gas tank and with a quick peck on her cheek, left Arianna with her mother.  Her heart clenched slightly as she watched his taillights fade in the waning rays of daylight.  The last thing she’d wanted to do was fall for any guy.  She’d avoided it her entire life.  Yet Luke had wandered into her life just two days earlier, and was slowly making her feel as she never had before.  
Arianna watched as the sun grudgingly relinquished its grip on the day, as if too tired to continue as the furnace fueling the autumn warmth and allowed itself refuge in the horizon.  Breadths of pink and purple streaked across the sky and twilight befell the earth.
“What a beautiful sunset, baby,” her mother slurred and returned Arianna to reality.  
“Yeah, mom,” she replied absently and started the car and drove out of the parking lot of Joe’s Bar.

Chapter 10

The sun had set and darkness began to overtake the earth.  Howard looked out briefly from the vestibule of his church.  The world around him glowed in an ethereal shade of blue.  Dusk had settled.  Preternatural stillness had hushed the birds and bugs.  All that remained were cyan shadows, and silence.  Beyond the door, out in the eerie void, he could feel her.  She was near.  He was sure of it.  And she was growing stronger each day.  Like a low hum deep within his core, her essence reverberated through him.  He knew he was closing in on her.  
Howard slammed the door of the Soldiers of the Divine Trinity Church shut and locked it.  He passed through the narrow enclave to another set of doors that opened into the sanctuary.  Once inside, he dipped his hand in a large basin of Holy water, crossed himself and genuflected.  He walked briskly down the aisle, past more than a dozen pews and stopped just before the altar.  He knelt and crossed himself again and remained bowed in prayer.  With his eyes closed, he concentrated, listening for God’s words to direct him, to guide him on the path of righteousness.  
His path had been filled with innumerable detours thus far, but none could be considered a waste of his time.  Diversions strengthened him, reinforced his belief in divine influence.  The incident at the abandoned house the day before had been a shining example of a deviation resulting in the fortification of his faith.  Being able to make an example of misguided fools a day earlier had proved a worthwhile endeavor.  The deaths of teens tampering with witchcraft would surely save lives in the future.  Others seeking to summon dark forces, as well as full-blooded witches who walked among them, would learn of their demises and heed the warning they signaled.  
Taking the lives of the teens had not been a direct order from God.  His Maker’s words had not commanded him.  In fact, he had not heard the speech of the Lord in several days.  So Howard had been forced to infer what God would have wanted him to do, his decision based on countless other situations when he had been instructed to example others, others who hadn’t been true vessels of evil, but had been pupils of evil.  He knew the Lord would have wanted the teens destroyed, just as He had in the past.  Howard also felt confident that, despite the taciturnity of God, despite the numerous tests and obstacles presented to him, he would do what was right for humanity.   
Tests were not new to Howard.  He had been tested his entire life, beginning when he was a boy.  His father had been a soldier of God as well, had fought to rid the world of evil.  But the law of man had seen fit to take his father from him at a young age.  The law did not understand what his father had been up against, still did not understand.  Every law-enforcement agency on the planet shared the limited view that only human beings killed and committed atrocities against other human beings.  They did not embrace the existence of the underworld, that demons of every kind roamed the earth and hunted humanity.  But he embraced that wherever lightness existed, darkness followed; with good came evil.  Howard had the vision, and so had his father.
When Howard had been just eight years old, his father had been arrested and sentenced to life in prison for murdering a family who had just moved to the neighborhood.  Kneeling before the altar of his church conjuring the painful memories of long ago, he squeezed his eyes shut and remembered his father’s arrest, how police had punished and locked away a servant and soldier of the Lord.  His father, Howard Kane, Sr. had been incarcerated for dousing the new family’s house in gasoline, boarding the doors shut and setting it on fire.  The blaze had burned for hours, consuming everything it had touched except for the concrete foundation it had sat upon, including a husband and wife and their three small children.  The family had been black; a fact that had only been of importance to the rest of his neighborhood, law-enforcement agents and the media of that time.  The police department and newspapers had fixated on the color of their skin, had accused his father of a racist act.  The men with him had been members of a discriminatory group called the Ku Klux Klan and the police had claimed his father had been a member too.  Others in the neighborhood had alleged to have seen his father fraternizing with Klan members, and had charged he had been an active participant in their organization.  But Howard had known better.  He had known his father had shared his prophecy.  His father had told him as much.
He had visited his father in prison.  Guards had had the patriarch of his family dressed in a bright-orange jumpsuit, shackled and cowed like a common criminal.  He remembered the sickliness of his father’s pallor, the pale clammy look of his skin.  But neither had left as lasting an impression as his words had on that fateful day.  Strong and clear, his father’s voice had resounded with truth when he’d told him not to believe the newspapers or idle gossip.   He’d told him the family he’d killed had been corrupt and that he had done a service to mankind by cleansing the world of their existence.  Howard had listened intently to his father, especially when he’d told him that God had instructed him to kill the family, that they had been pure evil.   
Howard had never bothered to ask if they had been witches.  The thought had never occurred to him, not then.  He hadn’t heard God’s voice in his ear yet.  All he had been told was that his father had destroyed evil, and that was all he’d needed to know.  But his father’s explanation hadn’t ended there.  His father had more wisdom to share.  He had told Howard that he would have to make a very difficult decision in the near future, that he would be put to a test.  Howard had asked what that task would be, but his father had said he could not tell him.  
A few weeks after his visit to the state penitentiary, his father had been killed by other inmates.  As it had turned out, other inmates, black inmates, had been fooled into believing his father had been a racist who’d killed an upstanding family.  His father had died, unceremoniously, stabbed to death in the shower room.  The other inmates hadn’t known the truth; that the color of evil’s skin had been, and always would be, irrelevant.  So they had taken the life of one of God’s warriors, his father.  
At eight years old, Howard had been left with only his mother.  Still, his stomach churned at the thought of her.  After his father’s death, his mother had transformed into a sinful woman who had poisoned her body with drink and drugs and had allowed her body to be used by any junkie who had offered her a nightly fix.  Relegated to his room, he had begun reading the only book he’d owned: the Holy Bible.   Night after night he had read from it, and just shy of one month after his father’s murder, he had read the Bible from cover to cover.  Certain sections of it spoke to him more than others.  Exodus, Deuteronomy, Galatians and Revelation had been of particular interest to him.  He had absorbed the vital messages communicated in each.  They condemned witchcraft and sorcery, and the evocation of spirits. They denounced heresy.  Every single night he had read the word of God, had absorbed it like a dry sponge absorbing water.  He had prayed each day and night, begging God for strength and guidance, all the while his mother had panted and moaned in the next room with a different overnight friend.  Every day that he’d prayed, he’d thought he’d felt something, an inexplicable sensation that had filled him with utter peace.  That peace had calmed him daily, and had made sleep possible while his mother had become inebriated and cavorted with a steady flow of men.
One night, however, his peace had been interrupted abruptly.  He had awoken to strange sounds unlike the sighing and huffing he’d usually heard in other parts of the house.  The light bulb above his head had begun flickering.  He had wondered whether it had been an electrical surge, or something more nefarious.  When the bulb had hissed and sputtered, he had believed his unspoken question had been answered.  He had leaped from his bed immediately, had felt a cold sheen of sweat cover his entire body and he had dashed down the hallway to the living room.  Experience had taught him to never surprise his mother when she was with a man.  She had not liked it when he’d done that, and had beaten him badly on more than one occasion.  She had even allowed one of her friends to beat him as well.  He dared not surprise her again and incur her wrath, or anyone else’s for that matter.  He had crept slowly to the den and saw that his mother and two men had gathered around a board, a Ouija board, he’d learned later.  He had stared in shock and horror as he saw his mother chanting to spirits, summoning them from the pits of hell.  They had laughed as though their godless actions had been a joke.  But in that moment, when Howard had looked into his mother’s eyes, he had seen the truth.  She had been one of them, one of the evil ones that stalked humankind.  
His father had warned him of the evil that lived among them.  Howard had run off to his room, away from the incantation, away from his mother.  In the safety of his room, he had dropped to his knees and implored God for guidance.  And on that day, God had answered.  God had given him his first order.  
With his task fresh in his mind, Howard had waited several hours until his mother and the friend she’d selected to share her bed had slept before he had snuck downstairs and selected the largest, sharpest carving knife from a drawer in the kitchen.  He had snuck back upstairs and stole into his mother’s bedroom.  Howard had hovered over the sleeping man first then drove the knife into his heart.  The man’s eyes had opened for an instant.  He’d flailed and shouted, waking Howard’s mother, before life had escaped him.  His mother had awoken and had been shocked.  She’d begged him to put the knife down, to leave her unharmed.  Though he had not threatened her immediately, her inhuman sense had told her otherwise.  He had drawn back the blade and, trembling, had plunged it into her chest.  He had pulled it out, only to return it again and again, thrusting the sharp blade in and out of her flesh.  
Killing his mother had been the toughest job he’d ever undertaken.  He had stood beside her bed long after her lifeblood had left her.  Only when he had been certain she had been dead did he leave the room and return to the kitchen.  He had picked up the telephone and called the police to tell them what he’d done.  When the police had arrived, they had stared at him in disbelief, had marveled at his ability to compose himself at such a young age after he had killed his mother and her lover.  They had been fools, all of them.  They had not known he had been chosen by God to war with evil on Earth.   He had heard the words “psychopath” and “sociopath” mentioned several times that night.  He had not known what those words had meant when he had been eight years old, but he knew now.  He had not suffered from a personality disorder then and he certainly did not suffer from one now.  His missions had never been spontaneously violent or aggressive acts for which he hadn’t felt remorse.  They had been well thought out, well planned acts for which he hadn’t felt remorse.  God had charged him with destroying wickedness.  He neither mourned nor repented the death of the wicked.  And evil still walked among man, prowling in the shadows, scavenging for souls.  The Sola, a seer of the devil himself, lied in wait.  She was the lone huntress, sent from the depths of hell by Lucifer himself, to unite those who bowed to darkness on Earth and overtake humanity.  But Howard would not allow that to happen.  
Kneeling before the altar of his church, a feeling began to stir.  Familiar and welcome, it spread from the center of his body and traveled, tingling and prickling, to the tips of his fingers and toes.  The sensation pulsed from his core, shivering and vibrating to every part of him, invigorating him with renewed conviction and faith in his mission.  God was not speaking to him, but he could feel Him, feel His divine commands, and feel His righteous might.   Howard Kane knew he must find and kill the Sola, utilize his Lord’s support fast, and rid the world of her foul existence.

Chapter 11

More than twenty-four hours had passed since Arianna had kissed Luke in his garage.  Twenty-four hours that had included a restless night of sleep followed by a school day.  School had been uneventful and the day had lapsed painlessly, and quickly; perhaps too quickly.  Now, she stood in her room and was charged with the task of deciding what to wear to a nightclub in the neighboring town of Shadow Hills with Luke and his friends.  
Typically, Arianna did not concern herself with fashion trends or what other people wore.  She’d always worn what she liked and what she felt looked best on her.  Price always had a hand in her decision making as well and often dictated where she shopped, or if she shopped at all.  To her, her wardrobe was just a compilation of stuff, necessary elements of her existence like eating and sleeping.  Of course, she wouldn’t refuse nicer clothes if they were to ever magically appear in her closet, but such a phenomenon was out of the question, as unrealistic and unlikely as her landing a date with Ryan Gosling.  Besides, she’d learned early on that pining for things she couldn’t afford was nothing more than a painful waste of time.  Still, as she looked at her clothes she couldn’t help but feel a little depressed.   All had been affected by time.  Some had faded, while others had not maintained their original shape.  She did not own an outfit she could get excited about, or one she felt Luke would get excited about.  So she settled on a spandex miniskirt and a striped top that hung off one of her shoulders.  She slipped into her black motorcycle boots and stepped back to appraise her appearance.  Unexciting and comfortable at best, her outfit would never place her on a best-dressed list, but she felt at ease in it.  She didn’t feel as if she were pretending to be something she was not.  True, the black fabric of her skirt had washed out somewhat, as did the black in the stripes of her shirt.  But the lighting in clubs was usually dim and she highly doubted anyone would notice.  
Satisfied that her outfit was as good as it could be, she ran a brush through her hair and was about to start her makeup when a knock at the door startled her.
Within seconds of the knock, her mother’s face appeared in her doorway.  “Hey baby,” her mother said.  Going out tonight I see.”
“Yep,” Arianna said, terrified her mother would ask to come along as well.
“So I take it that adorable guy who came to my rescue will be there?”
She didn’t bother correcting her mother that it was her who had paid for the gas and drove her home because she had always been too absent-minded to keep tabs on the fuel gauge.  “Yep, he’ll be there,” was all she said tightly.
“Does he have a name?” her mother continued.
“Luke.  His name’s Luke.”
“And does Luke have an older brother, or young uncle who will be joining you tonight, or, maybe perhaps in the future?’
“Mom!” Arianna groaned.  “Seriously?”
“What?  Can’t a girl ask if her daughter’s boyfriend knows any available cuties?”
“Luke is not my boyfriend, first of all.  Second of all, and I want to be really clear about this, I am not going to ask him to fix you up with anyone, okay?  And lastly, the term is hotties, not cuties.  If you insist on using slang, get it right.”
“Okay, okay. No need to go getting all huffy, baby.  Jeez, what’s your problem today?”
Arianna could easily rattle off a list as long as her arm about what was troubling her.  At the top of it would be that her mother had refused to grow up and she was getting tired of bailing her out of jams like kicking out slovenly overnight guests who’d slept on their couch for the entire day, or meeting her in a bar parking lot to refuel the car she’d intended to operate when drunk.  Throw in the fact that she couldn’t get in touch with the only friend she’d made in her gypsy life of moving from place to place after each of her mother’s failed romances and the reason for her alleged huffiness became clearer.  But she knew her mother was incapable of handling difficult or profound discussions.  She never had been.  Even now as she looked at her mother pouting over her refusal to play matchmaker with a boy she’d just met, she couldn’t help but pity her, how even the slightest hint of confrontation sent her into a complete tailspin.  Her mother was used to getting her way.  But that didn’t stop Arianna from feeling bad for being sharp with her.
“I’m sorry, mom.  Things have been rough the last couple of days,” Arianna admitted.
“I know what that’s like,” her mother said.  “I’ve been climbing the walls with loneliness these days; just stuck here, all alone, day after day.  I could really use some companionship.”
Her mother’s strong suit was certainly not subtlety.  She intended to guilt Arianna into fixing her up with someone.  But what her mother didn’t know was that Arianna had no intention of giving in to guilt as she so often did.  
“You’ll make friends, mom,” Arianna consoled and felt as though the roles should have been reversed.  “Once you start working you’ll meet people, women and men.”
Her mother offered a weak smile. 
“By the way,” Arianna continued.  “How did you make out with the job search yesterday?”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” her mother brightened.  “I got a job at Super Mart!  I start on Monday.”
“That’s great, mom.  You see, things are already getting better.”
“Yeah, and let me tell you, the assistant manager is a hottie, as you say,” her mother said and winked.  “And I didn’t notice a wedding band, not that that ever stopped me.”
“Oh jeez,” Arianna muttered.
“Did you find a job after school yesterday?”
Arianna arched an eyebrow at her mother, shocked that she’d even remembered that she’d planned to look for a job, let alone directed the conversation from herself to her daughter.  She was tempted to look outside to see if pigs had begun flying as well.
“Well don’t look so shocked, baby.  I listen to you when you talk,” her mother said and beamed with pride.
Arianna leveled a gaze at her and she quickly qualified her statement, “Okay, most of the time I listen when you talk,” her mother said and rolled her eyes like a child who’d been caught by his mother with his hand in the cookie jar.
“No,” Arianna answered honestly.  “I didn’t.”
“How come?  That little savings you got stashed in the toilet tank is not going to last you much longer,” her mother warned.
“I know,” she said then added, “But I had an accident with the bike and it’s totaled.”
“What!”
“Yesterday morning, I was on my way to school and I thought I saw something on the side of the road.  I turned after I’d passed and lost control of my bike.  The bike is totaled.”
Her mother’s face was aghast, horror etched her every feature.  Arianna’s chest tightened immediately as worry marked her mother’s face.  It wasn’t until her mother began to speak that she understood the horrified look she wore.  “I can’t believe you didn’t call me!  Why didn’t you call me?  Why am I the last person to know?  I’m always the last person to know everything!”
“I’m fine, mom, by the way.  Thanks for asking,” Arianna mumbled.
“Well of course you’re fine.  You’re sitting right here talking to me!  I, on the other hand, think I lost a few years of my life just now,” her mother said and placed her hand over her heart dramatically.  “My chest is hurting all of a sudden.  I hope I’m not having a heart attack.”
“Should I call an ambulance?” Arianna said and called her mother’s bluff with syrupy concern in her voice.  
“No, no,” her mother panted.  “I think I’m okay, for someone who was just told that her daughter had an accident and she wasn’t told about it until the day after.”
“Sorry for leaving you out of the loop, mom, but as you said, I’m fine and sitting right here.”
“Thank God for that,” her mother sighed and Arianna felt herself soften slightly.  But her softening was short-lived.  “I mean really, baby, you need to be more careful.  What would I do without you?  I need you.  So don’t go killing yourself on me.”  
And like that, her touching mother-daughter almost-moment had vanished.  “And you love me and all that stuff, right?” Arianna said sarcastically.
“Well of course I love you!” her mother snapped indignantly.   “How could you even say that to me?  After all I’ve been through you’d think I wouldn’t need to prove myself to my own daughter.”
“No, no. No one’s asking you to do anything like that,” Arianna added and did not bother trying to conceal the edge in her voice.
“Good, because I won’t.  I gave you life and that was proof enough.  And I’ve sacrificed a lot, too.  My breasts have never been the same since.  Do you know how tough dating was with a baby?”
“No mom, I don’t.  Enlighten me,” Arianna said flatly.
“Really tough, that’s how.  Most men didn’t even want a woman with that kind of baggage. Fortunately, I look like I do, or I would have been home with you every day and night,” her mother added in expectation of sympathy.
“Yeah I know, who would want to do something crazy like, I don’t know, raising their child, when there’s a whole sea of men out there waiting to be Cathy Rose-ized,” Arianna spat and did not temper the acid in her voice.
“You make fun, baby, but you don’t know what you were like.”
Arianna thought her head would pop off her shoulders, anger welling and brimming dangerously.
“Oh, so it was my fault you weren’t interested in being a parent?”
She thought for sure her inflammatory remark would draw some sort of rebuttal, an “I loved being your parent, baby,” comment, or something close to it.  But her mother, absorbed in her own recollections, was not the least bit interested in comforting her daughter.
“You used to get into all sorts of trouble, always climbing trees and cabinets.  One time, when you were about seven or eight, you and the neighbor’s kid climbed up onto the roof of the trailer we’d been living in and,” 
“Hold on a sec,” Arianna interrupted.  “I was always climbing things, and clearly you were not around to stop me, didn’t I fall and get hurt all the time?”
“Well if you’d let me finish my story instead of being rude and interrupting, you’d find out.  So anyway, there you were, up on the roof of our trailer, and I came home from the neighbor’s house after enjoying a card game and cocktails only to find you up there.  You and that little girl with the buck teeth, oh, what was her name, Emily, Amy, Mary?  Oh I wish I could remember!  You remember her, right?  She had frizzy, red hair and big ole buck teeth like a beaver,” her mother rambled.
“Mom, focus please!”
“Oh, yeah, so you and the frizzy-haired girl were up on the roof holding hands and, I don’t know how it happened, but you both slipped, together.  Both of you fell from the roof down to the gravel below. And I was sure you’d have to be taken to the hospital.  Of course, I looked a fright from a few too many drinks, so I wanted no part of that.  Me and the neighbor ran over to you girls.  Frizzy was a mess, you know, howling bloody murder in pain and all.  She’d ended up breaking her leg, both wrists and had a concussion.  But not you.  You had not a scratch on you.”
Arianna could not believe what she had heard.  She knew she ought to say something, to tell her mother how severe the accident had been and how she should have been seriously injured, but reasoned it would be pointless. 
“Not a scratch on me?” Arianna asked to be certain her ears had heard correctly.
“Not a scratch,” her mother confirmed. “You never got hurt. After all your shenanigans, all your dangerous stunts, you never broke a bone or needed stitches. Guess you were born under a lucky sign or something. That’s why when you wanted to buy that bike of yours when you turned sixteen, I didn’t argue.  With all the luck you’d had through the years, I figured you’d be safe.  Guess your luck ran out, huh, baby.”
She nearly bit her fist to stop herself from screaming at her mother that she was wrong, dead wrong, that she was not merely lucky, that she had survived a series of childhood accidents as well as what would have been a fatal motorcycle accident a day earlier, and that she’d possibly moved a chair with her mind. No, lucky signs had nothing to do with what she had experienced.  Something else entirely had been going on.  She just didn’t know what. 
“I guess it did,” Arianna said absently.  
“Now you’ll have to be extra careful once the bike gets fixed,” her mother said solemnly.
Watching her mother’s grave expression made Arianna wonder how exactly her mother had lived to be in her forties believing that luck and luck alone, had prevented her daughter from death over and over again.  She guessed that most other parents would have, at the very least, marveled at their child’s ability to cheat death once before shielding them from it in the future.  Not her mother, though.  Her mother had watched her fall from the roof of trailer with a friend who’d sustained serious injuries that had included a broken leg and two broken arms as well as a concussion and chalked her lack of injuries up to being born under a lucky sign.  In all fairness, most other parents wouldn’t have allowed their eight-year-old to roam free unsupervised in a trailer park and end up on the roof of one of those trailers in the first place.  Most parents would have questioned the fact that she had remained unharmed a little further, would have sought answers from a spiritual source perhaps.  But most parents were not like Cathy Rose.  Most parents did not view their child as a burden preventing them from having a more active dating life.  Arianna felt her blood pressure rise.  Her fingertips began to tingle as they had in class when Cheryl’s chair had shot out from beneath her.   She tuned back in and listened to more of her mother’s ramblings and felt the tingling strengthen.
“And then there was the time I let you cook for me and a friend,” she said with a laugh.  “You were maybe five and I was with, I think his name was John or Joe, something with a J, and we had you make us some fried chicken.  You were doing all right until you started frying the breaded pieces.  You pulled a chair up and started tossing drumsticks and wings into the frying pan and scalding hot oil splashed all in your face.  I thought for sure you’d disfigured your face, that not only would I have a daughter no man wanted around, but an ugly one at that.”  Her mother paused to laugh again, as if the story she told were somehow a funny or cherished memory.  “Luckily, your face was fine.  I have no idea how that happened because when I touched that pot, I burned my hand, see?” she pointed to a minute scar on her left thumb. 
“Yeah, I see it, mom,” Arianna replied.  The tingling had spread and grown.  She felt as though a current of electricity had charged every part of her.  Suddenly, she felt as though she needed physical distance between her mother and herself.  “Look, we can stroll down memory lane some other time.  Right now, I have to get ready to go out.”
“Oh, okay,” her mother said.  “I guess I’m just so lonely and starved for companionship, I didn’t realize I was holding you up.  I’ll let you finish getting ready.”
Arianna felt her body begin to tremble.  Her mother was actually attempting to guilt her into taking her along on her first night out in months on the heels of bragging about being a negligent parent. 
“Shut the door behind you,” Arianna said coolly.
“Think of me while you’re out having a good time,” her mother added pitifully and Arianna wanted to shut the door in her face.
“Okay, mom,” was all she could manage.  
The door shut finally and her mother was safely on the other side of it.  Arianna blew out a breath of air then inhaled deeply again.  After several deep breaths, the trembling had subsided and her hands felt steady enough to handle a mascara wand without poking her eye out.  That is, if her lucky sign had not, in fact, failed her.  The thought of such nonsense riled her again slightly.  She quickly pushed it to the back of her mind and tried to concentrate on the task at hand, and the night ahead of her.
She applied two coats of mascara and some eyeliner before grabbing an empty purse from her drawer, stuffing some cash, her cigarettes and her fake identification in it and leaving.  She passed her mother sitting on the couch in the living room as she headed toward the front door.  Her mother sat with a blanket draped across her shoulder sipping a large glass of wine.  Her intention had surely been to guilt her further, a final look-at-me-I’m-so-depressed effort.   But Arianna would not bite.  Instead, she called a quick “See you later!” to her mother and closed the door behind her.  
Outside, the air was crisp and cool.  The distinct autumn chill promised an even colder night.  She pulled a cigarette from her purse and lit it while she waited for Luke to arrive.  As she smoked, she tilted her chin upward and looked to the sky above.  Constellations ornamented the navy expanses like innumerable diamonds affixed to a velvet backdrop.  The sky was so stunning, the stars so bright and numerous, she felt dizzied slightly, but smiled regardless.  She’d see a great many things in her short life, had experienced far too much even, but none of it had etched away at her appreciation of nature, at her sense wonder.  She’d wanted to be an astronaut when she was a little girl.  That was why she had been atop the trailer when she was eight.  And the little girl had not been Amy, Emily or Mary.  Her name was Avery.  She had been Arianna’s best friend.  Her conversation with her mother prompted her to remember an event she’d blocked from her mind for many years.  Her best friend Avery’s serious injuries, and the trailer climbing that had caused it, had been the reason Avery’s parents had forbidden her from playing with Arianna ever again.  They had blamed Arianna.  After all, Arianna had not been harmed.  But their daughter had been.  The only eyewitness to the fall had been Arianna’s drunken mother.  
Arianna’s heart raced wildly in her chest, her memory suddenly vivid.   She was about to turn and walk back in to the house and forget about going altogether, feeling that her mood had been irreparably soured when the rumble of a truck engine stopped her.  Headlights sliced through the darkness and approached slowly then stopped in front of her trailer.  The door opened and the overhead interior light illuminated Luke’s face.  And he wasn’t alone.   
Stephanie occupied the passenger seat looking impossibly beautiful despite the unflattering lighting and the sour expression she wore.
“Hey,” Luke said as he rounded the front of his truck.  “You look nice.”
“Thanks,” Arianna replied and wondered why he didn’t kiss her on the cheek or anything.  A day earlier they’d shared an intense and passionate kiss, but since then, there hadn’t been any hand-holding, hugging, nothing.  Now, with his sister perched in the front seat and her relegated the back seat, there was no chance of even an accidental brush of hands.  Between her mother’s reminiscing and attempted guilt trip and Luke doing nothing short of pretending like what happened between them in his garage had never happened, Arianna found herself missing her bike more than ever.  If she had her bike, she would have canceled with Luke in favor of a nice long ride to clear her head.  But she did not have it.  Instead, she bumped along in Luke’s pickup truck for twenty minutes until they reached Blue Ivy nightclub in Shadow Hills, a seedy town in an even seedier neighborhood that straddled the border between theirs and the next.  
Two cars had followed them the entire trip.  Ryan and Christa had trailed in his Honda CRX with Bulldog, Beth, Mike and Carrie not far behind.  Stephanie had planned to meet friends there and had hitched a ride with Luke.  After parking in a small lot just past the entrance to the club, everybody jumped out their cars, eager to get inside.  Bass rumbled deeply, growling like thunder from beyond the walls of the club, pulsing like an immense heart issuing its rhythmic beat.  
“Let’s do this!” Ryan said enthusiastically and Christa rolled her eyes at him.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to get my drink on!” Mike said.
Everyone started moving toward the club slowly.  Stephanie hung back and pulled at Arianna’s arm to stay.
“Hold on a sec,” she hissed.  “I got something.”
Arianna couldn’t imagine what, and was afraid to ask.  She waited as Stephanie searched her purse then finally produced two white tablets in a plastic bag.  “Thought you might want to do a little ex before we go in,” she said and offered a tablet to Arianna.
Ecstasy was not a drug Arianna was interested in trying.  She’d smoked pot before, but that had been the extent of her experience with drugs.
“No thanks,” Arianna said and handed Stephanie’s bag back.
Stephanie studied her for a moment and Arianna anticipated a snide comment or pressure, but none came.  Instead, Stephanie shrugged, popped the tablet into her mouth and caught up with the rest of their group.  
The line to get into Blue Ivy was long, but moved quickly.  Within ten minutes, they were inside wading through a sea of people grinding and writhing to the roll of booming bass.  Bulldog led the pack, and much like a bulldozer, pushed his way past people until a path had been cleared for them that led straight to the bar.  His intimidating size and appearance, complete with a square jaw, deep-set eyes and countless scars, discouraged anybody from protesting their prime position.  Pressing his luck further, as well as his substantial form, Bulldog managed to secure a small table for them to stand around close to the bar.  
In the far corner of the club, they had a view of the dance floor.  Packed with scantily clad girls gyrating and rubbing up against eager guys, the dance floor was crowded.  Arianna was not known to dance and she doubted Luke was much of a dancer either.  She preferred drinking at clubs and watching others dance.  
“What’re you drinking tonight?” Luke shouted in her ear over the loud music.
“Beer,” she answered.
Luke smiled then shouted, “You’re a cheap date.  I like you more and more every time I see you!” and smiled.
Arianna smiled too, but not because of his joke.  She smiled at his use of the word date.  Luke disappeared toward the bar with Bulldog.  Though the bar was just a few feet away, they were immediately swept away on a wave of people and carried in the current.  They returned several minutes later with a round of drinks for everyone.  Luke sidled up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist.  His body moved to the music faintly and rocked hers pleasantly.  She enjoyed the feel of him pressed against her, feeling his heartbeat against her back, his hard body.  
After the second round of drinks had been finished, Luke left her with Stephanie to go get another.  She watched him as he left then allowed her eyes to scan the crowd.  As she did, her breath caught in her chest.  In the distance, near the wall farthest from her, she spotted a familiar face.  The man she’d seen on the side of the road not once, but twice, in the last three days watched her.  She wondered what the hell he was doing there, why he was following her, so she grabbed Stephanie by the elbow and urged her forward.
“Come on Stephanie,” she said and tugged her arm.
“What the fuck!” Stephanie protested.  
“Come on!  I think I see someone I know,” Arianna said.
“So? What the hell does that have to do with me?”
Arianna didn’t want to argue.  She just wanted someone with her when she confronted him, a witness that he existed, that he was real.  She quickly searched her mind for a reason that would motivate Stephanie.
“It’s a guy I know.  He’s single and loaded, but I guess I’ll see him another time.”
She could practically see Stephanie’s brain working.   She tossed a lock of platinum blonde hair over her shoulder and took Arianna’s hand and began moving through the crowds.  A sea of swaying bodies, changing faces and snippets of shouted conversations became disorienting.  Unsure of which corner she’d seen the mystery man in, she stopped.
“What are you doing?” Stephanie yelled.  “I thought we were going to see your rich friend.”
“I think he left already,” Arianna fumbled for an excuse.  “Since you took so long to come with me,” she added and worried she would suffer Stephanie’s wrath at any second.  When it did not come, she nearly sighed aloud in relief.
“I need a smoke,” Stephanie said.  “Let’s dip outside, okay?”
Arianna glanced around nervously.  “What about Luke and the others?” she asked.
“We can’t take our drinks outside, and I’m not leaving them lying around here,” Stephanie cautioned.
“Gotcha,” Arianna replied.
Stephanie turned and began leading them toward the perimeter of the club in search of an exit door.   They stumbled through throngs of people until they found one and opened it.  
“Wait,” Arianna said to Stephanie as she stepped out.  “What if we can’t get back in this door?”
“We’ll go around to the front if we have to.  Our hands are stamped.” 
The door led into a dimly lit alleyway.  Sodium vapor lamps provided meager light as well as an eerie jaundiced glow.  Dumpsters lined the walls and added to the depressing ambience.  
“This is gross,” Arianna said.  “Let’s go back in and go out front to smoke, you know, where there’s no garbage or rats.”
“Whatever,” Stephanie answered curtly.
Arianna tugged the handle to the metal door and, as she expected, the door had locked from the inside.
“Great.  We’re locked out,” Arianna said sarcastically. 
“Who gives a shit?” Stephanie said with a slurred voice as she lit her cigarette clumsily, the ecstasy and alcohol clearly affecting her coordination.
“Um, I do.  It’s not safe back here.”
“Don’t be such a chickenshit.”
“Call me whatever you want, we’re not staying back here,” Arianna said then added, “One of us has to use her brain here.”
Arianna took a step forward to lead her and Stephanie out of the alleyway when a sound halted her.  She stopped and listened intently.
“What the fuck! First you wanna go.  Now you wanna stay.  Make up your mind!”
“Shh!” 
Arianna listened again and heard footsteps approaching.  Fear slithered like a serpent down the length of her spine and raised bumps on her skin.  Her heart began to race, adrenaline flooding her system to flee from what she perceived as danger.
“What?” Stephanie questioned belligerently.
“Shut up!” Arianna hissed as the footsteps sounded closer.  “Someone’s coming,” she whispered.
“Someone’s already here,” a male voice called.
“We were just leaving,” Arianna said and ducked her head down.  She grabbed Stephanie by her wrist and yanked her along.
“What’s the rush ladies?” the voice said again and two men stepped out from the shadows. 
Grungy and bedraggled looking, both men looked as though they could benefit from a shower with soap and a stiff-bristled brush.  Heavily tattooed and clad in jeans, they looked as if they’d seen and committed their share of violent acts.  One wore a gray bandana on his head and a black leather vest while the other had illegible tattoos scrawled across his neck.
“I said what’s your hurry?” neck tattoo asked in a gravelly voice.
“We have friends inside.  Came out for a smoke and got locked out,” Arianna answered and tried to sound calm.
The man with the gray bandana stepped away from the man with the tattooed neck and approached Stephanie.  Arianna felt her heart slamming against her ribcage as he raked his eyes up and down their bodies, circling and stalking them like prey.  Neck tattoo advanced as well.  The closer he got, the more hideous he became.  Silver jewelry pierced the skin of his face and ears and jingled softly as he walked and he blinked often, his nearly lashless lids straining over eyeballs that protruded.  His tongue continually darted from between his thin lips like a snake sniffing out its next meal.  Both men looked as if they were high on something.
“Aren’t you both just a pleasant surprise?  So pretty to look at,” neck tattoo hissed and ran his serpentine tongue over his lips again. 
“Thanks,” Arianna said flatly and slid a glance at Stephanie.  “But we’re leaving.  Our friends are waiting.”  Stephanie looked terrified and trembled so violently her large hoop earrings quivered.  
“I don’t think so,” neck tattoo warned and closed the distance between him and Arianna.  He cuffed her upper arm, his grip on it vice-like.  “They can wait.  We’re just getting to know each other.”
Arianna tried to wrench her arm from him and scream, but he clapped his hand over her mouth and slammed her against the brick wall behind her.  With the pressure of his hand pinning her face and head to the wall, he used his other to pull a small rectangular object from his pocket.  He pushed a button on it and a shiny blade appeared.  He pressed it to Arianna’s throat and said, “If you make another sound, I’ll slit your fucking throat.”
Arianna could hear her blood roaring in her ears.  The man pushed his knife against her skin and she felt the sting of skin breaking.  All the while, he stared into her eyes, his own completely devoid of any sentiment whatsoever.  From the corner of her eye, she saw Stephanie move, attempt to run.  But the man with the bandana grabbed her before she’d taken more than two steps.  He slammed Luke’s sister against the far wall and Arianna heard her head connect with the brick wall with a sickening thwack.  Stephanie slid down the wall slowly until her body slumped to the ground.  
“That’s all right,” bandana man said.  “She doesn’t have to be awake for this.”  He then crouched down over her and lifted up her miniskirt.
“Like what you see?” neck tattoo said to Arianna, and ran his tongue up her neck.  Bile rose in the back of her throat and she thought she might vomit, fear fighting to purge the beer from her stomach.  “Now you be a good little girl,” he ordered her and she felt his hands touch the hem of her miniskirt.  He raised it high and revealed her thong underwear.  “Oh, I like those,” he laughed approvingly.
Suddenly the sodium vapor lamps brightened considerably, transforming from a sinister, jaundiced glow to a bright, near-white hue that pulsed all around her; through her. The world suddenly buzzed and the fear she’d felt seconds earlier melted away. 
“You think I’m gonna just let this happen,” she spat.
“I like it when they struggle,” neck tattoo said confidently, but the look on his face betrayed his confidence.  He looked shocked by her lack of fear.
Spurred, Arianna felt her muscles bunch and strain, burning to move despite the weight of his body against her.  An odd but not altogether unfamiliar sensation whispered through her body, gently at first then gained momentum immediately until it throbbed through her veins with more force than her lifeblood.  The man who sought to rape her had not noticed the changes that were occurring.  He did not sense Arianna’s transformation.  But she had, in fact, transformed.  She no longer felt fear unlike any she’d ever felt before.  She no longer wanted to flee.  She wanted something else entirely.
Her stomach roiled angrily as if somersaulting over a slithering serpent that moved unendingly inside her gut.  The scent of garbage from the surrounding trash bins in the alleyway intensified, but was overpowered by a different scent: Blood.  The metallic stench of blood hung in the air like mist, overwhelming her, fueling her.  Her vision, shrouded moments ago by tears and darkness, now saw clearly that blood dripped from a wound on Stephanie’s skull.   Fury shook her body and the urge to kill the man before her as well as the one who hovered over Stephanie overtook her.  Kill or be killed. The words passed through her with the tremors that shook her, vibrating and echoing through her core.  She shoved her hands forward with strength and energy she should not have had and the man launched backward.  She swept her arm up and to one side and the man’s body moved, as if he were a marionette on a string guided by her hand, and slammed against the brick wall of a neighboring building.  She heard loud snaps, bones no doubt, and several of them, when his body met with the wall.  In the instant that it had happened she’d wondered how she could possibly hear his bones yielding on impact.  But the thought had been fleeting.  The hum inside her encompassed any reason she’d possessed and drowned it out completely, and she was filled with the urge to punish the man she seemingly controlled.  She retracted her hand quickly and watched as he lurched forward, impossibly, his feet not touching the ground.  Then she flicked her wrist away from her body and he smashed against the wall once more.  A vile thrill of excitement trilled inside of her as his form met with the wall a second time.  She watched as the man with the neck tattoo fell to the concrete unmoving, his leg jutting out from beneath him unnaturally.  
Feeling her blood roaring through her veins, she turned her attention to the man with Stephanie.  Stephanie’s underwear had been torn from her body and the man with the bandana had begun to unzip his pants.  He produced his own blade and pressed it to Stephanie’s neck.  “One more step and I’ll kill the bitch,” he said.
At his threat, Arianna’s breaths came in short, shallow pants and she felt as though a black hole resided deep in the pit of her belly, one that could never be filled.  Her eyes burned with red-hot heat as if both were glowing embers.  Everything in her field of vision was bathed in crimson.  She saw the man crouched over Stephanie freeze.  He looked at her, shocked and confused.  
“What the fuck?” he shouted.  “You’re eyes!  You’re eyes are r-r-r-red!”  Fear laced each of his words, but Arianna felt nothing for him.  “Stay back or I’ll cut her!” he said again and pressed the point of the blade so that it produced a thin rivulet of blood.  Stephanie began to stir and regain consciousness, undoubtedly in response to the pain of the blade pricking her throat.  
The coppery scent of blood filled Arianna’s nostrils once again, burning the back of her throat.  All she wanted was to avenge her friend who lay littered on the ground like refuse, her skirt lifted to her waist and her underwear torn off.  The man had intended to rape her, to strip from her that which was not his to take, her dignity, her worth.  But Arianna would not let that happen.  Her body shook as a ripple of ire passed through her, flaring to the tips of her fingers, tingling and burning.  She raised her hands quickly.  As her fingers lifted to the height of her shoulders, heat flashed from their tips and felt like it was arching in a scorching stream.  The man rose to his feet, but not fast enough to evade her all-consuming rage.   Her scarlet sight watched as he burst into flames.  He rose to his feet and scampered away from Stephanie whose eyes fluttered, flames licking every part of his body.  He screamed and writhed, tried to pat the flashes of fire that rose and fell like the breaths of a great beast.  He howled in pain and pleaded for help as the flames grew larger and encompassed him.  But Arianna did not offer help and she did not want him to feel reprieve.  She wanted him to feel the fire of hell and burn.     
Arianna’s felt her own chest rise and fall, her breathing strained and labored.  She looked to Stephanie who had awoken to the sight of a burning man before her.
“W-what’s happening?” Stephanie asked groggily.
Arianna didn’t bother answering any questions.  She grabbed Stephanie and pulled her to her feet with strength that began to drain from her, leaving in its wake pain, indescribably intense pain.  Every part of her ached.  She tugged on the handle of the door they’d exited.
“It’s locked, remember?” Stephanie said.
Arianna yanked it as hard as she could and the felt the lock surrender.  Thumping bass poured out from the opened door and they stepped into the darkness.  The effort of opening the door had sapped what little strength had remained.  She shivered, panicking about what she’d just seen, what she’d done.  Her brain could not process what had just happened, her strength, her power.  The club began to spin in lopsided circles and disgust ate at her.  Had she killed both men?  In the moment, she hadn’t cared, had actually wanted them gone, permanently.  She felt the energy inside her waver and a swelling sting swept through her, tearing at her insides, branching from the center of her body and shooting out.  Stephanie let go of her hand and pushed through the crowd leaving Arianna alone.  The music and voices around her seemed to murmur, suddenly muffled as if she were hearing them from underwater, distorted and indistinct.  Her knees threatened to give way beneath her, stabbing pain radiating from her gut.  
She hunched and clutched her stomach about to drop to the floor and curl into a ball against the blinding pain she felt when a pair of warm hands cupped her face.  And just as suddenly as the pain had come, it receded like a wave.   She looked up to see who held her face and drew in a sharp breath when she saw him.  Tall and broad-shouldered with golden hair and blue eyes that penetrated the dimness of the nightclub, the man’s touch calmed her, yet evoked a stirring of warmth in her torso that expanded and touched the tips of her fingers and toes.  Faint light from a roving spotlight shined behind him, haloing his exquisite shape, and if he’d whispered in her ear that he was an angel, she would have believed him.  
“Let’s get you out of here,” he said in a voice as beautiful as he was.
For unclear reasons, she did not fight or protest.  The man she’d seen on the side of the road twice, the same one she’d seen before she’d gone outside with Stephanie, took her hand in his and stepped forward.  
“Who are you?” she managed.  “What do you want from me?’
“You know who I am, Sola.  And who I am does not matter.  Who and what you are is all that matters.”
“What?  What does that mean?” she asked.
“Take my hand and I’ll show you,” he replied.
He pulled her close to him and the world around them disappeared, the club, the people, the tables, everything vanished from sight.  Light burst into her mind, brilliant white light, and she was on a roaring wave.  The warmth she’d felt moments ago filled her so fully she thought it would burst through her arms and legs.  Warmth, comforting, enveloping warmth charged the center of her being.  She was light. She did not feel pain or fear.  Her worries disappeared like grains of sand in the wind.  She was free.  

About the Authors

Jennifer and Christopher Martucci hoped that their life plan had changed radically in early 2010.  To date, the jury is still out.  But late one night, in January of 2010, the stay-at-home mom of three girls under the age of six had just picked up the last doll from the playroom floor and placed it in a bin when her husband startled her by declaring, “We should write a book together!”  Wearied from a day of shuttling the children to and from school, preschool and Daisy Scouts, laundry, cooking and cleaning, Jennifer simply stared blankly at her husband of fifteen years.  After all, the idea of writing a book had been an individual dream each of them had possessed for much of their young adult lives.  Both had written separately in their teens and early twenties, but without much success.  They would write a dozen chapters here and there only to find that either the plot would fall apart, or characters would lose their zest, or the story would just fall flat.  Christopher had always preferred penning science-fiction stories filled with monsters and diabolical villains, while Jennifer had favored venting personal experiences or writing about romance.  Inevitably though, frustration and day-to-day life had placed writing on the back burner and for several years, each had pursued alternate (paying) careers.  But the dream had never died.  And Christopher suggested that their dream ought to be removed from the back burner for further examination.  When he proposed that they author a book together on that cold January night, Jennifer was hesitant to reject the idea outright.  His proposal sparked a discussion, and the discussion lasted deep into the night.  By morning, the idea for the Dark Creations series was born.
The Dark Creations series, as well as the Arianna Rose series, are works that were written while Jennifer and Christopher continued about with their daily activities and raised their young children.  They changed diapers, potty trained and went to story time at the local library between chapter outlines and served as room parents while fleshing out each section.  Life simply continued.  And in some ways, their everyday lives were reflected in the characters of each series.  
As the story line continues to evolve, so too does the Martucci collaboration.  Lunches are still packed, noses are still wiped and time remains a rare and precious commodity in their household, but it is the sound of happy chaos that is the true background music of their writing.  They hope that their work, though penned for a young adult audience, will be appreciated by the young of every age, and that all enjoy reading it as much as they enjoyed writing it.

Books by Jennifer and Christopher Martucci:

The Dark Creations Series (A YA paranormal romance series)

Dark Creations: Gabriel Rising (Part 1)
Dark Creations: Gabriel Rising (Part 2)
Dark Creations: Gabriel Rising (Part 1&2)
Dark Creations: Resurrection (Part 3)
Dark Creations: The Hunted (Part 4)
Dark Creations: Hell on Earth (Part 5)

Coming Soon:
Dark Creations: Dark Ending (Part 6) 

The Arianna Rose Series (A paranormal romance series)

Arianna Rose (Part 1)
Arianna Rose: The Awakening (Part 2)
Arianna Rose: The Gathering (Part 3)


We’d Love To Hear From You…

For information about upcoming releases (or just to say hi!) please visit our website at http://darkcreationssaga.com 

Thank you so much for reading!

Love,
Jennifer and Christopher Martucci

Oh, One Last Thing Before You Go…

When you turn the page, you may be given the opportunity to express your thoughts on Facebook and Twitter automatically.  If you enjoyed our book, would you take a second to click that button and let your friends know about it?

If they get something out of the book, they’ll be grateful to you, and we will be, too!

Thank you so much!

Love,
Jenny and Chris
Enjoy an excerpt from Dark Creations: Gabriel Rising (Part 1)


Chapter 1

Melissa Martin paced about her room nervously until a trio of beeps startled her.  She froze and looked in the direction of the sound.  It had come from the cell phone in her purse, and had seemed far louder than usual.  She rushed to her bed where her bag sat, hoping another set would not ring out, and quickly retrieved her phone.  She pressed a single button and her display screen brightened.  A small envelope icon in the lower left corner indicated that a message awaited her.  She was fairly certain of who the message was from, but checked, nevertheless.  
Kevin Anderson had sent two simple words to her via text message.  I’m here was all it said.  And with those two words, her plan had been set in motion.  
She inhaled deeply and put her phone back in her bag before crossing her room and placing a hand on her doorknob.  She turned it slowly, all the while willing it to twist silently.  When it had rotated as far as it would go, she pulled it toward her and opened the door.  She scanned the hallway beyond her room and found it dark and still, and saw that her father’s bedroom door was shut.  Satisfied that he was sleeping, she closed her door, tiptoed to her bed and grabbed her purse.  Her heart thundered in her ears and her hands shook as she moved to her window.  She knew she ought to hurry, that Kevin was waiting for her, but paused briefly to consider what she was doing.  She looked out, beyond the pane of glass she stood before, beyond her own reflection, into the blackened sky.  The sky seemed darker than normal, foreboding, as if it wished to warn her to stop, to stay inside.  She knew that that was exactly what she should do, stay inside, and forget about Kevin.  Her stomach ached and quivered.  She knew what she was about to do was wrong, that the consequences could be devastating.  She had a good sense of judgment, after all.  But she ignored it, as well as the worry that teemed inside her.
Pushing the worry to the back of her mind, she swallowed hard, placed both hands on the sill of her window and raised the pane first, then the screen.  A gust of cold air rushed in.  She hadn’t seen the treetops stir, didn’t know it would be a windy night, yet a strong blast of air had sent her lavender curtains fluttering and billowing so wildly, they had covered her face and temporarily obscured her vision with their flimsy fabric. The unexpected squall ended as mysteriously as it had begun, however, and left her wondering whether it, like the unusually dark sky, sought to convey some cosmic message.  
She shook her head and rolled her eyes at the thought of cosmic messages, and guessed that nerves, and nerves alone, were responsible for such thoughts.  After all, neither the elements nor the cosmos cared whether she went or not.  Her father would, though.  She was sure he would not appreciate her skulking off in the middle of the night to meet Kevin.  And if she were caught doing so, he would not trust her again anytime soon.  
The thought of losing her father’s trust halted her, but not for long.  Her phone beeped again as if impatiently urging her on.  Without further thought and despite her reservations, she climbed out of her second-story window out onto the frost-coated roof of the garage.  She slid down its length on her backside until she reached the edge.  After carefully avoiding contact with debris in the gutter, she grabbed hold of an outstretched tree limb.  The limb belonged to an old oak that grew alongside her house.  She climbed onto it and began carefully navigating the network of branches deep within the tree until she reached the lowest branch and dropped to the frozen grass below 
She took a few timid steps and looked over her shoulder at her house.  Save for the faint glow her nightlight radiated in her window, the house, and the tree, were enveloped in darkness.  Cold crept up her body from the icy lawn.  She turned from her house, wrapped her arms around her shoulders and wished she’d worn a heavier jacket, or perhaps had forgone the meeting entirely.  Either way, she was out already and she did not turn back.  Instead, she stole across her lawn and rushed down her street.  She moved so quickly, she hardly noticed the humble, uniform houses on Blackstone Drive.  Her own home, small and modest like the ones it neighbored, grew smaller and smaller in the distance until it disappeared.  She neared the edge of her neighborhood in the unassuming community of Harbingers Falls, New York and immediately saw Kevin’s car. 
His sleek, black Infiniti G37 Sport Coupe was unmistakable.  Undoubtedly freshly washed and waxed, she reached out for the passenger side lever, careful not to mar the flawless finish, and the internal lights illuminated the interior.  For most, the overhead lighting would have been unflattering, but not Kevin.  Kevin was arguably the most popular boy at Harbingers High School, and for good reason.  He captained both the basketball and football teams, maintained a solid B plus average in his academic studies and was charming beyond his years.  Women of all ages swooned and fawned over him.  He was beautiful.  He towered at six-foot-four-inches tall and weighed a substantial two hundred and twenty-five pounds.  But despite his powerful physique, he was wide-eyed and fine-featured with looks that flirted with feminine prettiness.  His eyes were a deep, chocolate brown and fringed with long lashes.  He wore his sandy-blond hair styled expertly into a spiky faux-hawk.  His face rivaled any movie star she had ever seen.  And if his face and body were not enough to frenzy the women around him, his unique smile put them over the edge.  When he spread his full lips and showed his blindingly white teeth, his smile revealed a single dimple in the center of his right cheek.  This anomaly provided genuine character to his near-perfect appearance.  
He flashed his signature smile at her as she seated herself in the passenger side of his car.  But something about the way that he smiled seemed forced, phony even.  For reasons that were unclear, she found it cocky.
Her guess was that his womanizing career had entitled him to that cocky smile. His reputation was no secret to her, or anyone else for that matter.  But she had long since considered herself invulnerable to his lures, to his charm.  Yet, she was sitting with him in his car on a school night when she should have been home sleeping.  And she had defied her father.  Her temples began to pound and she replayed his courtship of her, how he’d been so polite and sincere.  He’d said all the right things, had expressed interest in her interests.  He had sought her out, selected her over the multitudes jockeying for his attention.  He had made her feel special.  But she did not feel special any more.  In fact, as he smiled at her, he seemed smug, and she felt certain she had manufactured most, if not all, of his sincerity.
“Hey,” he said cheerfully. “I’m so glad you decided to come.”
A moment of pure panic seized her.  She suddenly wanted nothing more than to slip out of the car and teleport back to her house.  Of course, neither was an option.  Instead she muttered, “Yep. Me, too,” and stared at the clock mounted on the dashboard.  It read 12:08 p.m.  Her stomach sank to her feet.
“You look hot.  And you smell phenomenal,” he said and raised his eyebrows mischievously. He then surprised her by leaning across the center console and brushing his nose against the nape of her neck.  He inhaled the sweet blend of vanilla, caramel and coconut, her signature fragrance, that she had applied perhaps a bit too generously.  She supposed his gesture was meant to be some kind of seductive move to entice her.  But she did not feel roused in the least.  Rather, the fluid, flagrant way he flirted annoyed her.  He was smooth, too smooth.
“Thanks,” she replied halfheartedly. “So, where are we going,” she asked hoping to change the subject to a platonic topic.
“I was thinking we would go over to the Rec Center and hang out, you know, and get to know each other better.”
She shuttered at the thought of going there.  By day, the East Fallkill Recreation Center was a designated area for activities.  At night, however, it was a popular haunt for local teenagers.  Beer and various other alcoholic drinks were brought and consumed in abundance, and sexual intercourse, in all its forms, invariably occurred.  Melissa guessed that talking was the last thing that he wanted to do.  She immediately tried to rebuff his invitation.
“Why don’t we go to the diner in town?  We can talk there, and eat.  I’m starved,” she suggested.
Kevin tipped his head imploringly in Melissa’s direction and pushed out his lower lip in exaggerated disappointment.
“I was really hoping we could talk privately.  You know, just the two of us.  I want to be with just you.”
He reached his right hand over the center console and gently squeezed her knee.  Instead of promptly removing it though, he let his hand linger a moment too long. She felt her stomach churn nervously.  She wanted to tell him to forget about it, that it was the diner or home for her, but felt powerless to reject him outright.  Doing so would instigate social repercussions she did not want to endure.  His reputation for womanizing went hand in hand with one that was less familiar, and not discussed as often.  His penchant for revenge was eclipsed only slightly by his flirtatious ways.  She felt compelled to agree with him.
“Fine, I mean, whatever,” she heard herself say.  “The Rec Center it is. But I can’t stay long. If my dad gets up and sees that I’m gone, he’ll ground me until graduation.”
“Wow.  He sounds tough.”
“You have no idea.  Since my mom died, he takes the whole parenting thing way too seriously,” she chattered nervously.  “I mean, it’s like extreme parenting or something.  He has to know where I am every minute of the day.  He worries so much.”
She felt like she had to exaggerate her father’s protectiveness to set some kind of time constraint on their time together at the Rec Center.  Her father was a perfect excuse.  
“I’m surprised you came out tonight.  All the other times I asked, you said no,” he said ignoring the comments about her father.
“You can thank Daniella for that.  She talked me into it.” 
Daniella, one of Melissa’s best friends, was largely responsible for her agreeing to meet Kevin.  Daniella, ever the romantic, had helped convince her that Kevin was something he was not.  She would not blame her friend in the morning, but intended to dispute her every fanciful idealization of him.
Thoughts of the next morning, and yearning for the evening to end already, swirled in her head. She did not dare speak of them.  Instead, she sat quietly as he drove, and became increasingly uneasy as they approached their destination.  When he finally pulled his car into the driveway of the East Fallkill Recreation Center, her stomach roiled anxiously.  He tested the engine of his sports car and sped down the long pathway past tennis courts, baseball fields, a stout concession building and a football field, before reaching a play area.  Just beyond the playground, the pavement extended into an expansive lot.  Both the lot and the playground were poorly lit and provided little exposure during the infrequent police patrol spotlight searches.   
He slowed then stopped and shifted the car into park before switching off the headlamps.  She felt nauseated and dizzy, and contemplated calling it a night when he leaned toward her without warning.  She did not know if he was moving in for a kiss, but was relieved when he rested his elbow on her arm rest.  He touched his index finger to her chin and smiled his blindingly white, single-dimpled smile, then said, “Hey, I’m sorry about your mom.  How old were you when she died?”
She stiffened at his touch, at his mention of her mother.  Her mother was not a subject she was comfortable discussing in general, much less with someone unfamiliar.  She reluctantly answered, “I was seven.”
“Huh.  That must have been rough.  I bet she was as beautiful as you are.” 
Melissa felt her cheeks flush and was grateful for the extraordinarily dark night sky. She did not like shameless flattery together with mention of her mother.  She contemplated a curt response, but came up empty.  Try as she may, the words she longed for, ones that would put him in his place, would not come. As she tried to formulate a retort, Kevin surprised her.  Without warning, he closed the distance between them and pressed his lips to hers. 
At first his kiss was confident and gentle.  Quickly, however, it transformed from being unexpected to offensive.  His lips began crushing hers.  His tongue probed for hers as his hands seemed to multiply, and explore intimate parts of her. 
Her body went rigid.  He was advancing on her too quickly, and without permission.
“Hey! Quit it, Kevin!” she exclaimed and pulled away from him. 
He backed off, but only slightly.  He leaned in to kiss her again and cupped her breast in his hand.
“I’m serious! Get off!” she continued more forcefully.
“I just find you so beautiful.  I have a hard time behaving myself,” Kevin argued impishly and made no effort to remove his hand.
“I want to go home!  Now!” she yelled and shoved his hand off her.
“Are you kidding me?  What are you some kind of tease?  You come here in the middle of the night with me, looking the way you do and smelling the way you do and expect me to act like a saint?” he accused.
Her mind reeled.  She couldn’t believe he was actually accusing her, as if she were wrong for not wanting to be groped. “Hey, don’t blame me. I thought we came here to get to know each other better, like you said.”
“Ha! That’s cute. I love the naive act,” he said bitingly.
“Naïve,” she started but was interrupted.
“Yeah, I think you need to go home now.  I’ll take you home, gladly.” 
She didn’t understand why he was being so mean all of a sudden.  He had wanted to be with her.  He had made the effort to get her with him in the weeks leading up to the present.  None of it made sense.  She did not know what to do and wondered whether she should get out of his car and walk home.  He seemed abnormally angry given the circumstances.  Her hand grazed the lever on the passenger side door.  She was about to pull it when he switched on the headlights and slammed the gearshift into drive.  He stepped on the accelerator and his well-equipped sports car responded immediately.  The car lurched forward and sped down the driveway and out on to the main road.  Once on the main road, he obeyed the speed limits, but they traveled silently.  
The silence was so laden with tension, Melissa felt like screaming.  By the time they’d reached Blackstone Drive, the frustration she’d been feeling had risen to a point where she did not trust herself to speak without crying.  Kevin stopped the car several houses away from hers and turned off the headlights.  
He did not say a word.  And he did not flash his trademark smile.  Instead, he stared straight ahead.  She looked at him searchingly, but he refused to meet her gaze, so she climbed out of the car.  She had just shut the passenger side door when he abruptly pulled away.  She watched him go, watched him reach the stop sign at the bottom of her hill and turn his headlights back on.  She heard the sound of spinning tires kicking up gravel as he sped off into the night.  She stood for a moment, after his car had vanished, and felt the tears she had held back for the entire car ride well.  She tried to blink them back, but it was no use.  She cried silently as she turned and began walking up her hill. Her night had been disastrous.  In her heart, she had known it would be; she just hadn’t wanted to admit it.  As she approached her house, she realized her disastrous night was about to get much worse.
Nearly every window was lit.  Only her bedroom window was dimmed by her father’s silhouette, which disappeared as soon as he saw her.  Her heart sank as she walked up her driveway to the front door.  It opened before her key was in the lock.
“I would ask you where the hell you’ve been, but I already know,” her father began. “Do you know how worried I was? What were you thinking? I thought you were smarter than this. Boy was I wrong!”
Her father was not a temperamental man. He was not prone to outbursts. The fact that he was shouting at her meant he was monumentally angry with her, and disappointed.  Tears threatened anew.
“Dad, I’m so sorry. I know how angry you are,” she attempted.
“Angry?” he interrupted.  “You think I’m just angry?  I’m beyond angry!  Angry was an hour ago!  I was worried sick about you!  I woke up coughing and went to the kitchen for a drink of water.  When I passed your room and you weren’t there, I assumed you were still up.  Imagine my surprise and horror when I realized you were gone! I didn’t know what the hell had happened.  I was about to call the police but tried Alexandra instead. She said she didn’t know where you were so I called Daniella.  She answered the phone by asking how things went with you and Kevin tonight.”
He knew everything, or almost everything.  He stood before her with his hands on his hips glowering at her.  She had never realized how intimidating her dad looked before, how his thick muscles and barrel chest strained against his T-shirt and how a large vein protruded like a lightning bolt down his smoothly shaven head when he was angry.  Perhaps she only saw him as the gentle man he was because he had not been angry with her in as long as she could recall.  She began to cry.
“I made a mistake, a horrible mistake.  I’m so sorry.”
Seeing her tears, her father softened. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “I’m disappointed, Missy. I’m not going to lie. I love you, but I really don’t like what you did.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“You’re only seventeen. What were you thinking? What kind of guy wants to meet you in the middle of the night? You could have gotten yourself hurt, or killed.”
“Or mauled,” she said under her breath louder than she’d wanted.
“Mauled,” he asked and she saw the anger flash in his eyes. “What do you mean mauled?”
“Nothing, I meant nothing.”
“Don’t lie to me again,” he warned.  “Did he hurt you, this Kevin guy?  Which Kevin was it, Kevin McNally or Kevin Hartwig? Was it that jackass jock Anderson?  Whichever it was, I can take a drive over there right now and let him try to maul me!”  
“No, no Dad. Everything’s fine,” she lied and felt warmth spread across her cheeks.  She was unaccustomed to lying to her father.  “I was just, uh, supporting your argument.”
He did not seem convinced.  “Melissa, you broke my trust once today.  Do not try for a second time. When you lie to me I can’t trust you or protect you.”
The last thing she had wanted was to lose his trust, though she’d known it was a consequence from the start.  She hated herself for being so stupid earlier, for choosing to do something that threatened the trust between them.  She had been wrong, plain and simple.  And earning her father’s trust back would not be easy.  She cried quietly.
“Get some sleep, Missy.  We’ll talk in the morning,” he father offered with a pained look.
“Aren’t you going to ground me ‘til I’m thirty?” she asked through sobs.
“Nope. I doubt it. I don’t think you’ll be sneaking out to meet that jerk, or any other, anytime soon.  But in the meantime, I’m calling Ronnie and Frank tomorrow to see about chopping down that old oak by your window,” he said and winked. “Love you.  And please don’t pull any crap like this again, okay?”
“Okay,” she breathed and watched as her father disappeared upstairs.  She waited a moment before going up to her room. Once she heard his door shut, she ascended the staircase and went straight to her room. She sat on her bed and a fresh wave of tears washed over her.  She felt shame for her bad behavior, and agonized over the days to come, days that included Kevin.  He sat at the desk behind her in third period English class.  The thought of him looming a desk away after the evening they spent together made her cringe. In a few short hours, she’d be forced to face him.  She desperately wished she could rewind the night to the moment she’d received his text.  She would have made an excuse, or told him her father was awake, anything to have avoided the whole ordeal.  But she knew that time continued, that there was no rewind button in life.  If there were, she’d go back even farther, to when her mother had been alive. She slumped down on her bed and allowed her body to fall back against her pillows.  She closed her eyes and willed the night away. And the night vanished.  Within seconds, deep, velvety oblivion enveloped her and she drifted off into a dreamless sleep.