Exquisite Poison (Original Draft)

Chapter 16 - The Thorn in the Lion's Paw

It was after it had finished raining - a rarity in the desert - that Netta had wandered from her younger sister, Beryl.

Netta, who had nothing in particular against dolls and the playing with them, nevertheless found that Beryl's brand of playing was somehow discomforting.

Undoubtedly with the coming of the rain would bring a profound softness to the Earth. allowing the bounty of the local clay to be removed easily from the Earth.

Trudging through the muddy ground, Netta might have passed by the tree, if not for the fact that she got the sudden urge - a need - to look towards it on her left.

As she did, she was surprised to see the boy who seemed to almost be trying to blend in with the shadow of the tree in the gloom.

He stared at Netta, making her fidget. She suddenly felt herself say, "Hi."

"Hello." His face seemed to hardly move when he spoke, but Netta thought that it could be possible that she was unable to see him well from where he was standing in the gloom. "Is your mother a Witch?"

Netta's stomach gave a violent turn and she took a staggering step backwards. "H-how did you know that?"

"Are you a Witch, too?" The way that he asked was odd, almost emotionless.

Netta's mind spun wildly as she tried to imagine how to explain to the boy as best she could what her family was about.

"We're - we're Witches, yes, but we're not - we're not Monsters. We - we don't eat children and we want to be left alone." Even to her own ears, what she said sounded like a plea.

In her mind, after all, were the stories she had been told, why the Coven had had to flee Ireland when she was a baby. Always there was the threat of being found out to not be full human women.

He was silently stared at her for what felt like an eternity before he said, "Do you think that you could eat me?"

"E-excuse me?"

The boy walked out of the shadow of the tree and walked towards her in stiff movements. As the bare light, what had not been chewed away by the earlier rain, hit him, Netta saw the mass of thick, dark brown hair that poked out all around the lining of his simple brown cap, the heavy gold of his skin, the resolute line of his mouth. He wore suspenders over an oddly perfectly clean dress shirt, attached to trousers.

On his feet were dress shoes that had not touched any of the mud covering the ground, the very same that had already splattered up Netta's own black trudgers and had filthied up her floral-patterned dress a good deal already.

"Do - you - think - that - you - could - eat - me?" He enunciated each word carefully and stared deeply into her eyes. His eyes, a rather unhuman, bright shade of brown, made her feel uneasy with the intensity that they played against his mostly still face.

Netta gulped. "Why would I do something horrid like that?"

"What if I wanted you to consume me, to eat me whole?" The smile that began to spread on his lips was horrible.

"Please," Netta said before she even knew what to ask. "I just - I wanted to play with the mud on the bank. I was - I'm going to dig for clay, too, I like pottery a good deal." She did not know why she was telling him this, but it was only the thought of her earlier plans that came to mind then.

She stared at the hollow-looking boy who was, so obviously to Netta as she looked at him in the light, not a boy at all.

His eyes, after all, were not, an unusually intense and bright brown, but were rather red.