me and the devil - kai parker

21

Portland, Oregon

 May 10th, 1994 - day 6575

Life felt strange after that day, Madelene woke up in the forest alone, in a bloody t-shirt and with no signs of Kai. 

Kai Parker seemed to disappear from the face of the earth for almost nine years. His ego had been bruised too bad to do anything else, Madelene assumed. But he was never really, truly gone, she felt him close. 

Sometimes she did a proactive locator spell, he seemed to be everywhere, all over the map, traveling with the speed of light, almost as if he was flying a plane, and maybe he was.

Sometimes she felt his presence in the deep of the night and she knew that he came for magic. Maybe it was the tiredness of it all or how exhausting it was to fight this man for eternity. Still, she just always pretended to sleep, not to feel it, her back turned in the other direction as his cold fingers traced her forearm and made her shiver as magic was pulled from her body.

He always whispered a quiet thank you, sweetheart, maybe knowing damn well that she was pretending to sleep, and he always kissed her forehead before he left. Sometimes he hung around the quiet, empty house for what seemed like hours, and those times she would wake up to a steaming breakfast and a fresh pot of coffee laid out in the kitchen and flowers in a vase, and she liked how he did not stick around long enough to speak with her, she liked him gone out of her life.

She always threw the breakfast into the trash and poured the coffee down the drain in hopes that Kai was watching her from afar.

Madelene has settled in her father's house, one hour away from Portland, it only seemed right, that was the place she wanted, and probably would be in right now if she never met Kai. It was a small, beautiful cottage on the outskirts with a pond and thick woods growing around it, and she loved to call it home after running for a decade.

 She knew the games he played, it wasn't the smartest decision to stay put in the same spot. She learned to not care anymore, matter of fact, she was not capable of feeling many emotions nowadays anyway.

She also anticipated his unregular visits a bit more than she'd like to admit. She could have transferred her magic into an object and hide it, freeing herself of the burden. But she did not want to, she knew Kai kept coming back because of her magic, he did not care for her at all, and she knew that she stopped caring about that long ago, as long as she felt his hot touch against her lonely, cold skin, just for a few seconds.

She grew to realize how right her father was for leaving the coven and magic behind, he probably lived a very good peaceful life right now, maybe he thought of her sometimes, or maybe he had more children and he didn't think of her at all.

Maybe everyone spoke of the mysterious murders and disappearances of two teenagers or maybe no one cared and her name had not left anyone's lips in almost twenty years, maybe no one cared what happened to Madelene Brooks or maybe they made national news. There was no way to tell. 

It was in the late evening, Madelene sat on the front porch, legs lifted up to her chin as she slowly rocked back and forth on an old, wooden rocking chair, her body covered up to her chin in a crocheted blanket she just finished earlier that day, a soft hum of the woods and gentle rock ballad filling the silence of the world.

And then it happened, something that never happened before. It seemed like the whole world started to shake, she could hear the glasses in the kitchen fall from the shelves with a loud bang, the walkman stopped playing music now screaming a sound of static that made her ears hurt, and then a blinding light covered her entire vision, it couldn't have lasted more than a minute, but it was enough to make her jump to her feet in search for her maps.