Shift | Complete ✔️

1 | Liquid Courage

Glistening in the moonlight, wisps of snow danced past the pine trees, before gracefully landing upon my windshield.

I cursed at my luck. "Shit."

Turning the volume down, a mash up of increasing static and Stevie Nicks singing 'and the landslide brought me down...' was not exactly the reassurance I was after as I drove blindly into a suspected snow storm up a mountain side.

Granted, I was prone to exaggeration at the best of times, but this was, quite frankly, precisely why packing my bags based on the rantings of a mad woman was proving to be one of my more questionable life choices.

But the note was clear. You will find the answers when you get to Haven.

I had no reason to believe it of course. But what did I have to lose? The death of the woman who raised me brought far more questions than it did closure.

Up until the point of her passing, I had no idea that she was not my mother. In fact, calling her the woman who raised me was unnecessarily heartless. She was an angel, and despite always feeling that I didn't quite belong, she herself was never cause of those feelings.

There wasn't a memory that I had that didn't include her in it. And why would a child ask questions when the life they were gifted was idyllic? But like most things, when they are too good to be true, they often are. For what broke my heart wasn't her posthumous disclosure that she was in fact my paternal aunt, and thus not my mother, but the fact that she couldn't bring herself to tell me before she left me here alone.

And now I was quite literally alone. And in the middle of nowhere no less.

I tasted the sound of it as it rolled from my tongue.

Haven.

I couldn't think of a more ironic name for a mountain town that threatened me with imminent death on a one way road up a winding cliff face, but alas, I was at the point of realization that nothing worse could possibly go wrong in this disaster of a year.

I mean, finding out your mother is not your mother, but in fact your aunt tops the list. But to further test my mental resolve, my partner of almost two years turned out to be a cheating bastard leading me to wish that I could dive between the legs of a woman. But, as much as I tried to picture doing that very thing, I just couldn't convince myself that I could in fact go through with it.

Goddammit.

So, not only was I more or a less a grown ass orphan, I was destined to be spinster who had a craving for all things unholy and not one hope of experiencing it because, frankly men.

I was doomed. Doomed.

And as my slow, clunky car hauled ass up the bumpy road, I was convinced right then and there that I would die. A 24 year old full with regrets that I didn't live life on the edge like all my college friends back home and go to hell with it all.