Burning Sage

Chapter 20: Cotton-Mouth

I woke up with something throbbing and passionate. I wish I'd just taken Viagra, but I was actually beating my brains in with a fatal headache. I was in shock. I was somewhere different, a very familiar place. I looked over to my right. Ember was sitting beside me. To my left, Hope. We all sat there, staring at Luke and Maple. Beside Hope, Landon was sitting there. We were all chained against the brewery's wall, on top of the wooden, sacrificial stage I'd once sat freely on.

"What just happened?" I coughed, not to any one-specific person, but to anyone who cared to answer. "Maple." Luke croaked with a little nudge, "Tell him what happened." He stood behind her, stroking her blonde hair like he owned it. "You died, Sage." She drawled, "and now you get to live in hell." Maple gave me a cheeky smile, before screaming "For the REST OF YOUR LIFE!!"

"I don't feel dead." I optimistically told them, shrugging my shoulders up and down, as my hands were tied behind my back. "Like." she sighed, "You're about to be."

"No, how are y'all all alive? How am I alive?" "Just shut the fuck up Sage- I'll kill you right now! Say another fucking word, your a god-damn phscyo. You and that country hick. I was pregnant." Maple boiled over like a tea kettle, "You know Luke could easily put your child back in me. Through his magic and shit."

"Ya mean with his dick." Hope yawned, "That kid was probably his anyway."

"Oh trust me. I always use a condom." Luke cracked, walking down his aisle of tied up victims, "Ain't that right Maple?"

"Can't keep a secret for nothing can't you?" She joked, not getting a laugh out of me.

"Go kill yourselves" I sparred. My spirit was full of hurt. Maple walked up to me after I said that. She pulled out a silver handgun. She cocked and held the magnum between my eyes, and nudged it hard into the pit of my head. "Say another word." She slapped me across the face with a gun, "I will end your life. You will be nothing, so say nothing." I did say nothing. I shook in place, and tried not to let anyone notice.

"Any questions on what's going on?" Luke asked the group. Nobody said anything at first. I'd noticed the cross from where me and Hope had accidently walked into the brewery. My dad's rotting corpse was still hanging on it. He didn't care to clean it up or dispose of it, which disgusted me. The onix's head was on top of the bloody hexagram, lying beside my dad's corpse.

"Why is my dad on the cross?" Everyone turned their attention to my dad's lifeless body hanging from the cross. Luke walked over to the cross and held my dad, while Maple stayed and watched over us.

"Yeah Luke what the fuck?" Landon fused, "You're one psychotic asshole to be hanging people's dads." "I don't want to hear that whiny shit." Luke spat, "Take it out on your brother, he's the one who fucking killed him in the first place."

"I have to go do my hair." Maple told us, "Don't even try anything stupid." I don't know why she said that. As if the metal chains concreted into the walls weren't going to hold us down.

But she walked away from the stage, out of our vicinity. Luke was still fondling my dad's dead body on the other side of the mess hall.

"I'm sorry for letting y'all die." I didn't know what else to say.

"It don't mean nothin anymore. It ain't like ya can go back in the past and do somethin about it Sage. Hell, if ya could do that then ya could do anything ya wanted." I knew there was no escape, no way out, but at least we could enjoy the moment. Every single drop of hope was poured down the shithole. I had failed myself, my family, the girls, and my love. I disappointed them all. The gloomines of a dark, burning future of pain and torment was inching closer and closer every second I sulked. I kept my head down in my chest, crying out my final thoughts while I had the chance. Maple came back. She said nothing and sat on the floor across from us all.