The Wardens Boxed Set Page 3

  I knew she could no longer stand this home we had in the desert. It reminded her too much of my stepfather. The emotional distress was too much for her. This change might actually give her the life she had before he ever came into our lives.

  I didn’t blame her. I may have never really warmed up to the man, but my mother claimed that she had loved him, even though he had cheated on her for three-quarters of their marriage. Again, the curiosity was still there when I considered how their relationship had changed in the last few years. Especially in how she had looked at him before he was sent overseas. It was just so different to how it had been ten years before.

  “Let’s do it.”

  “Are you sure?” Finally, she mustered a smile.

  “Yeah,” I said as she threw her arms around me and hugged me tightly. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “I found this beautiful house online,” she said happily. “It’s large, so there’s more than enough room and a huge backyard. It will be perfect for a garden.”

  “You and your green thumb,” I laughed.

  I hadn’t seen her excited in a long time. We danced around the kitchen as she sang one of her happy songs. My mother spoke Italian fluently, so when she sang it was always in Italian. I’m not sure if it is the language of the angels, though, or if it was just something that my mother enjoyed. When she finished the song she pulled me into another big hug.

  “You will not regret this, Dawny,” she said, clasping my face in her hands.

  “Oh, I’m sure I will on some level,” I joked.

  She gave me a sour face and then danced off to the phone to call the Pastor and accept the position.

  ***

  So that became the plan.

  On my eighteenth birthday we packed everything up in a U-Haul truck and moved from Texas to Missouri. We were starting over. It was my senior year and, lucky for me, I got to go to a new high school. No friends, no enemies and, most of all, no more reputation.

  Part Two:

  Inside The Fire

  Chapter Four: First Day Stalker

  So there we were. It was August in Missouri. The weather wasn’t too hot, but it was super humid compared to the dry heat of Texas that I was accustomed to. We had found a house in a small town outside of Midvale. It was large for the two of us, but Mom made it feel like home in no time.

  She gave me a few weeks to adjust before enrolling me in school. I pleaded with her to just let me finish my last year of high school online. That way I wouldn’t have to deal with any negativity from other students. She thought it was “ridiculous” and demanded that I have social interactions with other teenagers, like any normal girl my age. She was tired of me always hiding from the world. I needed to become an individual. So what if they chased me down with pitchforks and torches? I would do as my mother said.

  I woke up on the first day of school with the feeling of dread in my stomach. You know, the one that digs so deep you swear you can feel it in your intestines. It is not my most favorite of feelings, to be honest.

  I don’t do well meeting people because I don’t know which side of me they will get. The mood swings can happen so rapidly that I don’t even know which side of me is coming out. I’m always trying to pinpoint it, but just when I think I have it, I find out I’m wrong.

  However, there was no choice that morning except to get out of bed and get dressed. So I did my morning yawn and stretch and pulled myself out from under my warm bedspread. Then I jumped in the shower and got dressed quickly. I was standing in my room doing my makeup and trying to figure a way to talk my mother out of making me go that day when I heard her bellowing through my door.

  “Dawn!”

  She was calling from the kitchen. I could hear her banging pots and pans around, which meant that she was attempting to make me breakfast. She had read somewhere that it was a custom to make children breakfast every morning before school. Half the time I had to take mine on the go. It was a nice gesture, but I would have liked to know what book she had read before she arrived on this planet.

  I rolled my eyes and pulled my hair back into a ponytail. First day of senior year, first day of failing to meet expectations, and first day of faces I had no real wish to see. I had left the few friends I had back in Texas. I was in no rush to replace them with new ones.

  Needless to say, I hadn’t been a member of the popular crowd. I could never understand why they called them popular anyway. Nine times out of ten they were hated by a majority of the school. I suppose that by itself could make you popular, mind you, even when people are thinking of stringing you up to the ceiling fan in the science lab and watching you dangle.

  I’m more of a loner, a lone wolf if you want to get technical. Except I’m not a wolf, though if you have followed me up till now you’ll realize that I’m not quite human either.

  “Jesus, Mom! Do you have to yell?”

  I reached down and grabbed my red messenger bag from the floor. I took one more glance in the mirror, then stuck my tongue out at my reflection, realizing this would be as good as it got. A lot had changed over the last three months. For instance, my eyes seemed to have developed a mind of their own. One day they were a dark chocolate brown and the next they would be almost blue. Because these changes happened at the least opportune moments I had to create an excuse each time it happened. I had told my old friends I wore colored contacts to match my brooding personality. They all bought it.

  My hair had been blonde at the start of summer, but now it had turned jet black and hung in waves to the center of my back. My mom said it was the stress that caused it. She also mentioned that my mood had changed, which could be another reason my appearance had taken on such a dark aura. I tend to appear as I feel, I suppose. Since I was always in a state of constant confusion, my body had no clue what it was supposed to do.

  My skin, however, was one thing that never changed. It was pale, almost transparent. No matter how hard I tried to get color from the sun it would never happen. That didn’t mean that I wasn’t sensitive to sunlight. Not like it burned me to ashes or anything; it just wasn’t the most comfortable feeling, and it made my fingers tingle.

  “Dawn, do not use the Lord’s name in vain. How would you feel if every time he got upset he cursed you?”

  This was my mother’s number one pet peeve. She really didn’t like the Lord’s name to be used in vain in front of her. I had no qualms with cursing or being sacrilegious. I think that was the dark side of me making its presence known.

  I giggled as I entered the dining room. As usual my mother had made a royal feast: pancakes, bacon, eggs and toast all laid out on the table. I looked at her and smiled. I appreciated how much she was trying to make my life as normal as possible.

  “Geez, mom, you think you’re feeding a small army?”

  There was so much food and only two of us.

  She always did this, cooking like it was our last meal. Maybe one day it would be, if the stories she told me were true. I don’t think she ever meant to scare me. She just told me that everything wasn’t always going to be peaceful. Sooner or later someone would figure out who and what I was. When they did, it would change all our lives for good.

  “I suppose I got carried away,” she admitted as she looked at the table.

  Her blue eyes were still so sad.

  She’d been extremely tired of late, more so than in Texas. She was constantly praying to go home. I believed she thought that if she was accepted back in Heaven she would see her husband again. I know she missed it, the whole being in God’s glory bit. It would be nice not having to worry about anything, always knowing that good would triumph over evil, no matter what the issue.

  However, in the real world that wasn’t always the case. It seemed to me that more often than not evil beat out good. The little guy lost and the big guy, with his vile smile, was triumphant. When there was a flip in the scale it would drain my mother emotionally. The one thing she could
n’t grasp was humanity.

  I never knew how to respond to her crying. I suppose my darker side relished it on some level. At the same time, I could also feel the guilt rising in nauseating bursts through my stomach and chest. Regardless of what I was feeling I always understood my mother’s maternal instincts. Hearing her cry at night would rip me in two. She was my mother, and she had been thrown out of Heaven for falling in love with a demon. I always felt to blame for my mother’s fall. If she had never been pregnant with me she would never have been forced to come to Earth.

  I glanced at the clock. I had twenty-five minutes to get to school and ten miles to drive. I grabbed one handful of bacon and one of the pancakes, kissed my mother on the cheek, and threw my messenger bag over my shoulder.

  “Put the rest in the fridge, Mom. We can have it for dinner or something. I have to get going or I will be late.” I took a big bite of the pancake before turning to leave.

  “Okay, honey, have a good first day.” She hesitated a moment too long. I could sense the wheels in her head moving. “Please don’t scare the other students.”

  For the last two years I had been struggling with the reputation of being a witch. I mean a real witch—a mistress of the dark arts. A few minor altercations had occurred, nothing huge, but I had been implicated in each of them. Someone usually ended up getting hurt, and it was always me who got the blame, whether I had something to do with it or not.

  Someone light the pyre, we have a live one here!

  ***

  The first time it happened was when I was in tenth-grade English. The girl in front of me had it out for my best friend. Her little clique of pink-clad, rich bitches had been making comments about my best friend’s mother less than a month after she had died. The rumor was simply that my friend’s mother had been so ashamed of her daughter she had taken her own life. I know it sounds stupid now, but to an angry sixteen-year-old they had been fighting words. It was the first time I revealed my gifts, and it was completely by accident.

  I was sitting at my desk, thinking about how I wanted to hurt the girl in front of me for saying those awful things. Suddenly these bruises appeared on her arms, the side of her face, and around her neck. It was the most amazing, and yet horrifying, thing I had ever seen. She screamed these high-pitched screeches of pain. All I could do was sit there and stare, amazed by what I had done. A couple of students noticed me staring so intently and, just like that, my reputation as a witch was established.

  I tried not to explore the power that surfaced that day. It had ways of messing with my mind, of making me darker than I wanted to be. I made a vow to only use this one when I found it absolutely necessary. Still, it only takes once for people to start thinking you will do it to them.

  The hallways cleared for me and my friends. Students ran away squealing if I even looked at them. I had the face of an angel, but everyone feared me. They were afraid I would turn them into a newt or a frog, I’m sure. My mother didn’t find it amusing in the least and forbade me from using my gifts in public. I was sixteen and I was powerful, but I only used my gifts when I knew nobody was looking.

  I had few issues with the group of princesses after that. They left me and my friends alone for the most part. But other students were not always so quick to learn. You know what? I had my fun with them. I relished the joy of bringing pain to those who brought pain to me and mine. I may have taken the rumors too much to heart, gone a little too far with them.

  Our move to Missouri was about change, however. I would step away from that perspective and see Midvale as something different. I would ignore the fact that we had moved into the center of the Bible Belt and work solely on morphing myself into a better person. I would do it for Mom. I had to do it. There was no other option available.

  ***

  After twenty minutes in the car and two minutes of telling myself to go inside, I made my way into the admissions office of Midvale High School. It wasn’t a large school; in fact, it was rather small compared to my last institution of learning. It was old, though. The first smell that hit me when I opened the door was mildew and it made me gag. I opened the door to the admissions office and stepped inside.

  The lady behind the desk hesitated before coming to the counter to speak to me. I couldn’t blame her. The girl standing before her was dressed in black from head to toe. I even had a dark ring of black eye liner around my dark brown eyes. It probably didn’t help much that when I smiled it looked like I was about to devour someone’s soul.

  Thanks Dad, much appreciated.

  “How may I help you, dear?” Her accent was thick and you could tell she hadn’t been further than the woods her whole life. She didn’t smile, and she didn’t frown, Hell, she didn’t even make eye contact.

  I looked at my hands, trying to hide a smile. It was amusing how uncomfortable she was becoming the longer I stood there saying nothing.

  “I’m Dawn Weathers. My mother enrolled me last week,” I muttered in an attempt to seem shy.

  The woman smiled one of those fake pageant grins and went back to her desk, then returned with a sheet of white paper. She set it down on the counter and scooted it towards me. It felt like she was afraid she might contract some horrific disease from me if we made physical contact. I let out a soft giggle and she looked at me, confused. I shut my mouth and just grinned at her. She fidgeted nervously.

  “Your first class is down the hall, room 203. Just go on in. They are expecting you.” She took a deep breath, like she had been holding it this whole time.

  “Thank you.” I gave her another smile, then left the office with the piece of the paper in my hand.

  The walk was short, but the door seemed much larger once I got up to it. I fought the urge to bolt and sucked up my pathetic fear before stepping into the classroom.

  You could have heard a pin drop. I glanced around. The faces of the girls staring at me were all so pretty I felt like I was a cockroach on their turf. The room swam in pastel as I approached the teacher and handed her my schedule. She smiled sweetly at me. She read what was written on the page and then handed the schedule back before touching my shoulder.

  “Class, this is Dawn Weathers. She just transferred here from Texas.” Her voice was sweet and flowed like honey, thick and rich.

  The class, on the other hand, continued to stare, transfixed and hostile. All except one. Back row, third from the left. Brown hair and blue eyes. He was staring like the others, but instead of horror he was actually smiling. I looked at him with curiosity, interested.

  “In the tradition of new students, Miss Weathers, please let everyone know something about yourself.”

  I know the teacher meant well, but the unease of standing up in front of everyone was starting to get to me. I looked at her, pleading with my eyes not to make me speak in front of these people. She ignored my plea and instead motioned for me to go ahead.

  “Um, I’m Dawn,” I muttered. “I just moved here with my mother a few weeks ago.” I didn’t know what else to say. Public speaking was never my forte.

  “Tell us, Morticia, how you are able to walk in the sun?” said one of the girls in the front row, giggling.

  The teacher shot her a warning glance as the class erupted into laughter. I felt my face burn but responded by casting the girl a toothy grin. Inside, I fought the urge to make her burst into flames. The teacher gestured towards the only empty seat, which happened to be in front of the boy with the blue eyes.

  “I wouldn’t worry about them,” he whispered over my shoulder as I sat down. “The sheep will come to slaughter soon enough.”

  His breath was cold against my skin. I fought the impulse to turn around and look at him: I knew that it would only draw attention. There seemed something almost magnetic about the boy behind me. I felt drawn to him like a mosquito to a bug zapper.

  I smiled to myself and, without looking at him, replied under my breath. “Who will be the man with the axe?”

  I h
eard him give a muffled laugh.

  “I was hoping it would be you,” he replied.

  I could feel his eyes boring into the back of my head. Was he having the same issue I was right now? Was he feeling some imaginary pull and not understanding what it was?

  The rest of the day was rather quiet. No other teachers made me stand up in front of class. No other students gave me stupid vampire names. Well, I shouldn’t say they didn’t, exactly. They just didn’t do it to my face. Passing them in the hall was another story altogether. Vampira, Morticia, and Lady Death were among my favorites.

  ***

  It’s tough being continually torn apart by internal conflict. One second I felt powerful and amused by my secret strength. The next I was suddenly guilty and afraid. I concentrated more on trying to figure out which emotion was tied to which parent than I did on where I was placing my feet. And that proved to be a mistake.

  I was walking out the door of the school at the end of the day when I collided with someone, face first. I groaned and stepped back, dazed and rubbing my nose. When I looked up I found myself staring into those blue eyes again. I was in a trance. My heart pounded, my palms started to sweat, and my knees shook.

  He was over six feet and thin, maybe one hundred and fifty pounds. His blue jeans were faded at the knees and he had on a white t-shirt. He smelled like Heaven. I realized I was staring and tried to avert my eyes before he noticed, but it was too late. A smile spread across his lips. It really was a remarkable smile. I just stared at the way his mouth curved. It was so enticing. I couldn’t help a love-struck smirk making its way across my face.

  What’s wrong with me?

  “You should watch where you are going,” he said, stuffing his hands in his pockets.

  He waited for a response, but the words just wouldn’t come out of my mouth.

  “You mute?” he teased. Then he stepped around me and went off down the hall towards the gym.

  I stood there for a moment, watching him walk away. Then I tried to pull myself together.