Reckless

Chapter 11 Part 3

Present Day

Character POV: Ariadne

I fold the black umbrella up upon entering the car with the specially-tinted windows that don't allow sunlight in. With the door shut, I take off my sunglasses and look over at Zebulun. His hands are clenching the steering wheel, a muscle in his jaw twitching from clenching his jaw. He drives away in the opposite direction from where Roxanne drove, heading to a different airport where the private jet awaits us.

The silence is heavy, the tension making the air crackle like it sometimes does before a particularly bad thunderstorm. My fingers rap against the armrest on the door, making a clicking sound echo through the space as my nerves and patience begin to fray. I glance back over at Zebulun, seeing the way he is deliberately not even glancing my way. Finally, I can't take it anymore. Clearing my throat to get his attention before I speak, I drawl, "There's something you obviously want to say to me, so why don't we get this unpleasantness over with and get back to the task at hand."

"The task at hand being the torture and murder of people who are minor inconveniences to you? Who have no real power to pose a threat to you even remotely?" Zebulun blurts out as he looks over his shoulder and turns the turn signal on before merging into the lane that doesn't end and picks up speed.

I shift in the seat towards him, facing him full-on and rising to meet the challenge in his voice directly. Arching a brow at him, I growl lowly, "Is that what you really think about people like her David? That they are just a bunch of hot air but there's nothing really behind it that could pose a threat to anyone?" He stays silent, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead of him. What a good driver. I bet his insurance has given him a bunch of little trophies to display proudly. I roll my eyes as I snap at him, "You clearly have forgotten the European diabolical witch craze, the witch trials. You don't know how that big mess all began; you weren't even born yet. But I was alive then. I saw the ramifications of it firsthand. I had to keep my head down to avoid being killed. I had to mind my manners, can you even imagine?!?" I turn back around in my seat, looking out of the window at the modern United Kingdom, but seeing only the time where this place was deeply unsafe for women who thought for themselves.

He grunts his amusement and agreement, and then we fall into silence for a long moment. After we've driven in silence for about five minutes, Zebulun glances over at me with an apologetic expression and murmurs, "Tell me about it, then. If there's a lesson I should learn, some information I'm missing to justify what you did to that human, tell me."

I stare straight ahead but don't really see the waking world as I say slowly, "The Malleus Maleficarum was written by two supposedly holy men between 1486 and 1487. They were just words, opinions, intangible things. But then they grew into something more by stoking fear and suspicion. Words then turned into emotions, and emotions then prompted actions-- horrific actions that make me look positively moral," I mutter, shaking my head with disgust. "Before I knew it, people who thought differently, primarily women, were being slaughtered by supposedly righteous men for daring to think for themselves and have their own opinions. And it all starts with little blow-hards like David," I finish, looking over at Zebulun. He glances over at me, and I see the sadness in his eyes, but he stays silent to let me finish my explanation. "If men are not put in their place when they step over the line, if they are allowed to get by with those comments with excuses like they were "just joking", then it grows. It builds, it spreads, and then it cannot be controlled or stopped. It has to be torn up from the root, and that's what I did." I look out of the window, seeing the empty fields with spots of trees where there once used to be forests as I mutter, "The idea that you can educate it out of them operates on the false assumption that those people either want or are willing to change. They aren't," I state flatly, stopping the clicking of my nails on the armrest. "They believe that they are doing nothing wrong, that women are in the wrong and trying to "become men" or be "above men." They don't realize that in ancient times, some societies were patriarchal, and some were matriarchal. There wasn't a standardized definition of how society was to operate or believe in until the spread of a warped version of Christianity and the further spread of it during colonization."