Time - Chapter 4
Every turn of the tires crashed like a wave of guilt on my heart, but I knew I was making the right decision…
This is a portal fantasy series with mythological roots and action-adventure tendencies. You can search through all my work on my website.
In the ashes of her past, she will rise up, and her death will save us all.
Lizzie ran from her past for ten years, zigzagging across the United States every few months, trying to outlast the prophesy that an oracle gave to her when she was just sixteen years old.
But nobody can run from their destiny forever.
After watching her friend brutally gunned down by a group of ruthless demons, she had no choice but to protect the woman’s child, and there was only one place where Lizzie knew the girl would be safe.
Bronard, Missouri.
Home.
She stayed away to protect her parents, but the girl needed mystical protection.
Her parents had taken in magical strays their whole lives, including Lizzie. If anyone could save the poor child’s life, it would be her mother and father.
But will returning to her home doom Lizzie even as she works to save the child she has vowed to defend?
Every turn of the tires crashed like a wave of guilt on my heart, but I knew I was making the right decision…didn’t I? If I went to see my mother, I would be putting her in danger, both from the prophecy and from her own will to live. If I wanted her to live, I had to stay away and live with the guilt.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t come to terms with guilt. Hell, I’d worn it like an old shawl since I ran away. That first night I left home, I could barely close the door on Dad’s pickup truck, and I had to fight against my own body to put the key to the ignition. It was like I got punched in the gut when the engine turned over, but I was determined to leave, to protect those that I loved, and never to love anything or anyone ever again. Once I found a new car, I called and told Carl where to find the truck. I couldn’t have that on my conscience, too.
It was a lonely, solitary life, and through the last decade, the one thing I could count on was the guilt. It sat with me every day. Sometimes, it squeezed my stomach so tight I could barely move, but usually, it was a light din, like something ringing in my ear. It just needed somebody like Kimberly to turn the volume up.
She wasn’t wrong, either. She was just a dick about it. She saw things from her side and from Mom and Dad’s side, but she never tried to see things my way. Imagine being sixteen years old and told that you must die to save the world, and that your past must burn along with you. Yes, Kimberly had had a tough row, too. As a baby, she’d been kidnapped and brought to Hell as a sacrifice to the Devil. Later, she had to watch as the mentor who saved her from that terrible fate was slaughtered in front of her eyes. But Kimberly had agency to fight against that fate. She became a monster hunter, a savior of fairy folk. She didn’t have to die to fulfill her destiny. She didn’t have to burn her past to live her life.
I did.
I wished I’d never known my fate. I could have gone on in ignorant bliss. But now, a nagging thought pushed its way to the surface—could anyone really outrun their fate? I had built my life on the idea that you could. Deep in the back of my brain, the part of my brain that only spoke in the deepest silence, I knew I was on a fool’s errand; if the fickle finger of fate wanted me to die, it would find a way to make it so.
Hell, it was nudging me right now, pushing me back to my past, the past that I’d done everything in my power to avoid. If my past died before I showed up, then it couldn’t burn, could it?
Ah, there you have it, Lizzie, the crux of the matter. You can’t kill the past if it dies without you, and if you can fight against that part of the prophecy, then perhaps you didn’t have to die at all, at least not for a very long time—as an old woman, maybe. Peacefully, in your sleep. That’s what you want, after all, in the end, right? You don’t care that your mother will die without seeing you for a decade—that your father will die alone, without his wife to help him pass into the darkness. What matters is that you’ll be alive.
I clutched the steering wheel and turned off the road at the next town I saw. Any town would do. I wasn’t picky. I often fought against my guilt by swerving into whatever truck stop town came up on the map. I couldn’t take the voices pounding in the back of my head. One of the best tactics against guilt was to fill it with work, and lots of it.
I had no idea how long I had been driving or where I was exactly, just that the name on the exit said Edgemont Rd, and it was somewhere along the 80 past Reno. Everywhere in Nevada looked kinda the same: Large swaths of desert speckled with lush forests and small towns nestled by the bits of water that popped up along the way.
It was the middle of the night, but I passed a couple of motels with vacancy signs. There was no point in going to bed. My brain wouldn’t shut up until morning. Better to find an open diner, get some food, and check out the classifieds for a job. I had acquired enough skills over the last decade that I could do most entry-level jobs well enough. I had experience working at call centers, logging companies, answering phones, telemarketing for vitamin companies, selling cars, and, of course, waitressing. That was the one I kept coming back to, even though it was the one I liked least—except for telemarketing. There was nothing worse than calling people, interrupting their dinner, and getting them to scream at you for five minutes, or hanging up on you in the middle of a sentence.
It didn’t take me long to find the little diner with the lights on. Several semis were parked outside, which was how I judged a good diner. Truckers talked, and you could always rely on them for recommendations on good, fast, cheap eats along the interstates. I often peppered them with questions about their favorite towns along their routes, and more than once used their recommendations when I moved further down the line.
Sometimes, I would get a trucker who became a regular at more than one place I had worked, even if they were hundreds of miles apart. Maybe that should have been a cue to move on, but there was never any fear of developing more than a passing connection with them. They never stayed around one place for more than a meal, anyway. However, now that I thought about it, maybe that’s how Kimberly tracked me across the country, by using the same truckers I did to rebuild my path.
Very sneaky. I would be sure to take side streets and country roads next time. Although if Junebug died, I doubt she’d be looking for me anymore. Kimberly liked my father enough, but she would kill for my mother. Watching Junebug suffer couldn’t have been easy, and it likely drove the pixie to check up on me more often than she otherwise would have—to beg me to come home. Once Junebug was gone and the constant pain was off her heart, Kimberly would forget about me, and that would be for the best.
The bell over the glass door dinged when I opened it, and a smiling waitress, way too perky for the middle of the night, walked over to me wearing a pink apron and red shoes, accented with a red headband to pull back her brown hair. Her nametag read Becky in glittering letters.
“What can I do ya for, hon?” she said.
“Table for one, please.”
“Follow me,” she replied, snaking through the empty tables to a red vinyl booth by a window looking out at the main road. “Here you go.”
She handed me the menu, and I smiled at her. “You don’t have to do that, Becky.”
She cocked her head. “Do what?”
“I’m a waitress, too,” I said. “I know that customer voice anywhere, and it’s exhausting, so you don’t have to, but if you want to drop the act around me, it’s okay.”
Becky took a deep breath, and the smile dropped from her face. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped half an octave. “Thank Christ. I’m at the second half of a double, and I don’t think I could pretend to give a care about one more person. No offense.”
“Girl, I have been there.” I looked at the menu. “What’s good here?”
“People like the burger, but what greasy spoon doesn’t have a good burger, right?”
“What kind of fries?”
“Real crispy ones,” she said.
I pointed at her. “That’s what I want. And do you have a vanilla milkshake?”
“We do, but the strawberry is better, in my opinion.”
“I’ll have that, then. I know better than to go against a waitress’s recommendation.”
The thing I liked most about greasy spoons was that they didn’t care about presentation. They were much more worried about taste, the good ones at least, which was where I tried to end up. Becky wasn’t wrong; the burger was dynamite. Though, if you couldn’t get a burger right, you had no business being in the diner business.
As I savored my meal, the few truckers in the diner funneled out until it was just Becky and me. She smiled at me as she cleaned the tables around me, and when that was done, hopped from one foot to another, trying to maintain the energy to stand on her aching feet.
“How much time do you have left on the clock?” I asked her.
She looked up to the glittering wall clock above the counter. “Two hours.”
“Busy this time of night?”
She shook her head. “Not too bad. Could be a couple more people or a couple dozen before I get to go home. All of ‘em will be crap tippers, though. That’s for sure.”
I swirled a fry into my milkshake and popped it into my mouth. “Want some help? I’m a pretty good waitress if I do say so.”
“Uhm…I don’t know how to answer that.”
I pushed the basket of fries over to her. “If you’re anything like me, you haven’t eaten since you started shift. So, how about you eat some fries, take a load off, and I’ll handle the next customer.” She looked at me funny, trying to size me up. “You keep the tips, too.”
“What’s in it for you?”
I popped another fry. “I’m new in town, and I need a job, so you might consider it a tryout, and well…I really don’t want to be alone right now. Doing work will stop the voices in my head from driving me crazy.”
She stepped over to my table, and I handed her a fry. “I am real hungry.”
I slipped out of the chair. “What can I get you? My treat.”
She lost the last of her resolve and slid into the booth across from where I had just been sitting. “You wouldn’t believe it, but Bryan back there makes a real mean Cajun chicken pasta.”
“Weird, but I like it.”
This is a portal fantasy series with mythological roots and action-adventure tendencies. You can search through all my work on my website.