Sweet Like Candy (The Series)

Volume II, Chapter One: Homecoming

I was happy. After a year of brutal mental and physical torture at the hands of my ancestral lunatics - The Maguires - I deserved some peace. And, that's exactly what I got. Carter and I got married three months after leaving Oak Hills behind. We wanted to get the damn thing over with. We knew life was way too short. I loved him more than life itself and I couldn't wait another second to call him my husband. Carter and I were soulmates.

We did everything together. We baked. We watched reality TV. We laughed. We cried. And most of all, we raised our children to be strong, beautiful young girls - Addison and Avery. Addison was so pretty. Her eyes were as blue as the sky and her hair was identical to mine - straight, jet black. She was Carter's biological daughter. Avery, on the other hand, is the pure Maguire child; the product of rape and insecst. I felt a darkness in Avery from the moment she entered this earth. She was evil. There's no denying that.

Before I let you all know about that, I need to tell you about an interaction I had when I was seven months pregnant with my girls.

SEVEN YEARS AGO, 2019:

It was Carter's birthday on April 13, 2019. The sky was pouring rain, pelting upon each and every surface that it could. My favorite kind of weather. Carter felt like he didn't want a big, lavish birthday celebration especially since we were living under the assumed names of Winona and Chase, even though all the Maguires were dead, we still felt a huge sense of paranoia and fear lodged between our hearts and our bones. We felt uneasy. Nevertheless, Carter was feeling like he needed to cut loose that day, so he decided to go to a fortune teller - to see if she knew our children's genders. The fortune teller that we visited lived in a run down, immobile RV, parked on the outskirts of a muggy, damp forest, south of downtown Tulsa. I had a dooming feeling in my gut when I saw the name of the fortune teller: Misty Lowe; the real Misty Lowe. Her name, that sinister, insidious name was blinking and beeping in neon lights, stapled onto the door of her 'business'.

"I can't go in there, Carter. It's creepy", I feared, feeling like the coincidence was far too weird. Carter placed his reassuring hand on my left shoulder, as I could feel his comfort pass through his body into mine, as he calmed:

"I looked into her before we came. She's harmless. She doesn't even know Minnie took her name". That made me feel better, a little bit better... at least.

We walked into the RV, hesitantly, and the bohemian-chic dressed, green highlighted haired Misty Lowe appeared from the shadows, with a calming acoustic sound playing in the background, for the sake of ambience. Misty Lowe was nothing like Minnie Maguire. She seemed caring... a little wacky... but caring. Misty Lowe didn't even utter a "welcome" to me before her eyes fleeted to the back of her head and her mouth opened, allowing a vicious screech to erupt from it. I thought the woman was having some kind of epileptic seizure of some sort. As Misty Lowe collapsed to the ground, blood oozing from her nostrils, the right side of my stomach felt as if it had torn open - the pain was indescribable. Sheer agony. I collapsed in unison with Misty, as Carter caught me before I could fully crash against the hardwood floor. I was screaming with severe pain. Carter called an ambulance, fearing something had gone heinously wrong with Avery's placenta, which my doctor had said was a risk in my pregnancy because of her father being directly related to me.

Suddenly, everything was calm in the previously chaotic room. Misty Lowe rose from her fit with such an elegant poise, and my pain faded away completely. It was like we were linked somehow. Misty looked at me with great concern, as her deep blue eyes pierced into my soul, she muttered with worry:

"She'll bring you to absolute hell".

As soon as Misty Lowe spoke those words, she went into cardiac arrest and died. I was haunted by those words, in retrospect, but I had no time to be in that moment because as soon as Misty passed, my waters broke and I agonizingly birthed my two girls - Avery and Addison in the fortune teller's RV. When I saw Avery for the very first time, I only saw a cooing, innocent baby, identical to her angelic half-sister but, as seven years passed... my angel became the devil.

PRESENT DAY:
Carter, Addison, Avery and I returned from Tulsa, Oklahoma back to Oak Hills, Oklahoma in the summer before Avery and Addison started school. We wanted our children to attend prestigious schools, ones where they would feel safe and heard. The only one I could ever think of was Oak Hills Elementary. It's where I went to school, as well as Carter. It was very hard for the both of us to decide to return to Oak Hills, after the nightmare that was our lives here. We had to make a choice: our happiness or our daughter's futures. We, obviously chose the latter. As soon as we bought our home on the very, very, very edge of the county and town limits, we felt worried. Avery's behavior had also changed.

She was no longer the angelic child I thought I was blessed with. She bullied Addison to no end, she would behead rats and mice, she was interested in the macabre and she made no friends. I feared she couldn't escape the fate of having Silas as her father and I think, during that time, I was right.

The second night of us being back in Oak Hills, Carter threw a surprise homecoming party for the family. He invited Mallory, who had returned to Oak Hills from New York after marrying and subsequently divorcing her husband, Charles.

I was dressed in dark skinny jeans, heeled boots and a checkered shirt, as Carter kissed me lovingly on the lips and whispered, "I'll make you feel something tonight". He followed through with that promise alright... but not in the way I think he meant. I smiled, as Carter rushed Avery and Addison to their bedroom to go to sleep. Mallory, who had seen my interaction with my husband, grabbed by arm with her perfectly manicured nails and worried:

"What is with Avery? She said something to me, Phoebe. Something terrible".

I had grown used to Avery's darkness but seeing Mallory so concerned made my stomach drop. I quivered, "What did she say?". Mallory's eyebrows burrowed and her voice lowered as she sighed:

"Daddy's gonna die".

My heart stopped. It stopped dead in its tracks. I didn't even respond to Mallory, as I darted towards Addison and Avery's bedroom. I latched onto the door handle and pushed the door and to my horror, noticed the door was locked. Mallory and I started banging relentlessly on the damn door, as I heard Addison's high pitched scream and cry. My maternal instinct kicked in and I knocked the door down with one, very forceful shoulder.

Mallory entered the room first and comforted a distraught Addison. I slowly set foot in my children's bedroom, as I saw my husband, the absolute love of my life, hanging from the ceiling fan, lifeless. Carter was dead. Those words are incredibly hard to type. Even to this day. Carter was dead.

Behind Carter's dangling corpse was Avery, giggling and humming an eerie song to herself as she wrote, with what I concluded to be blood on the pink wall of the bedroom:

"Homecoming"

Everything in me collapsed. I couldn't comprehend who that message was about but I had a horrible, apocalyptic feeling. Somehow, someway... I knew I wasn't finished with the Maguires and that Carter's body was only the foundation of what will be a mountain of corpses, a mountain of loved ones, family and friends lost.

Welcome to the worst year of my life.

Thank you for reading the first chapter of Volume II. Chapter 2 will be released on April 20.