Page 41 of Kat Bethel

I sat at a table with books stacked everywhere. Luckily, it was pretty empty except for one college-aged young man across the way, and he didn’t seem to care that I'd taken a call.

“Let’s see here.” I grabbed a book to my left. I’d noticed Abiel being mentioned. “They say he was a magnificent builder and single-handedly built most of the houses in Dudleytown after he founded the settlement. Says he even partnered with a local witch to make his house impenetrable.”

“Margaret Rinah. She is why I don’t think this is our doing.” The sound of pages flipped in my ear, before she settled on what she was looking for. “Ah yes, my good friend, Abiel and I have put in fortifications to defend the city from evil… She married him.”

It was a gut punch that took my breath away at the confirmation that there was indeed a wife. “Marriage gone wrong?”

“No. She describes it as being similar to a lavender marriage. Except instead of hiding that she was gay, she was hiding that she was a witch. It was meant to take scrutiny off of her, and he protected her from prosecution. They each had outside affairs, and she stayed by his side, even when he lost everything to some unsavory accusations.”

That made it easier to breathe. It shouldn’t have bothered me. Why did I care who he fucked a few hundred years ago?

I was becoming unhinged.

“They were best friends. Loyal until the bitter end.”

The darkness in the room grew thicker. Now we were to the meat and potatoes.

“What accusations?”

“That he killed his brother.”

The lights above me cut off completely, and like an outward wave, took out the rest of the lights on the floor. The man across the room gasped in surprise. Slivers of the sun setting outside gave enough dim lighting through the tinted windows to keep it from being completely black.

He was still pissed about that accusation.

“Margaret testified in court that Abiel had nothing to do with it, that Abiel had simply found him in the woods and tried to get him help. But it didn’t matter, the village vilified him for it.” She hummed with curiosity.“Her handwriting is stressed here as she mentions it, and I think these are tear stains.”

“Is that a journal you’ve got?”

“Yes. She mailed her journal to us shortly before she died.”

“How did she die?”

The air pressure grew so thick I couldn’t breathe. The wild thought that I was in the eye of a storm hit me sideways.

My table shook. The table legs loudly clattered against the hardwood, echoing in the eerie silence. The table decayed until there were clear black handprints on each side of me.

I hung up my phone and stood up just in time for all the books on my table to fly away from me. A roar that sounded like nothing else in this world pierced my ears, making me flinch away.

“Okay! I’m sorry I asked,” I apologized to him.

The other tables flew away from me as if someone pushed them. As they came back down they slowly disintegrated to ash. It was like time slowed enough to show me every stage of the decay.

Highlighting exactly what he was capable of.

A song of glass cracking sliced through everything and made my heart pound against my breastbone. What did I do?

My eyes went up to find that the glass above me had cracks running through it. The cracks were spiderwebs that were growing exponentially by the second. It was beautiful.

It was deadly.

“Kid! Take cover.” I turned around, yanked books off the giant shelf, and tucked myself into the giant bottom shelf. Kneeling and bending down like every horrible hallway tornado drill on the planet.

The shattering made my ears ring, but I opted to use my hands to protect my head instead. It rained down over the shelf, and I could hear the glass lodging into the top.

Please hold up.

Raining glass wasn’t a proper way for a witch to go out.