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Marcella ran in a university sweatshirt to get her blood pumping, her headphones glitchy again. The wind growled against her veins, hissing in retaliation as sweat streamed from her forehead, and in desperation, she searched for the drop. Her heart jackhammered against her chest as she moved through the Wraithʼs Circle by the Chicago River, where necromancers and sorcerers performed exotic rites, concocted various potions, bathed in damnation like it were a Catahoulan boudoir and hid it from humans through the Vale – a wall of white magic used to cloak the innocent from prying eyes like a wedding veil would a bride.
As she swiveled her hips, the soles of her feet kicking up dirt into the polluted air, she searched again. Her lungs on fire, her ears burning with the snide, snarky remarks of sketchy reporters and wayfaring homelessness. Day barely broke bread with the night, the cold overwhelming.
A man hit her.
He hit her like a surge of adrenaline, his shoulder driving into hers as he ran and his package of wildfyre hitting her sweatshirtʼs pockets. In the Wraith's Circle farmers markets, the devil's tongue pounding against the shell of her ears, Marcella took the courtesy of measuring her own carton of discolored, forbidden fruit ripe with blushing Yggdrasil leaves of vitality and jumjum apples of poisonous youth from Serbia. The remains of Chicago River skipped underneath the soles of her feet.
Its back-water backwash coated her heels as she walked through the macabre warlocks and witches, and without warning, she stabbed the witchfyre again; the dust spilled into the air.
The fire came.
The fire saw.
The fire conquered.
And Chicago burned in an explosion of searing white light.
YOU ARE READING
Our Dark Prince (The Scottish Play)
FantasyTHE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO LOUISIANA - And there will be killing until the score is settled. Tortured and exiled, Robin DeMarcus came back to the United States unscathed: a ruthless heiress to an antebellum empire with a hunger for revenge to carry on...
