Inheritance

Chapter 1 & 2: Darkness and Jack

Darkness

Two Years Later: Fall 2013

Mara woke. She clawed her way from shadowed, invisible nightmares to the empty bed, to her empty heart, to her lonely soul. She pulled the dark blankets around herself and refused to face the evening. This evening she refused to surface, this evening it could be dark without her help. This evening she would lay in her bed alone and unwanted.

A glimmer of hope, like a pinprick of light, trickled into her bitter soul. He was still inactive and she was not. He was still angry and fighting the magic instead of doing his job. He still refused to use his power. Mara did not.

For the first time in 138 years, Mara, the witch of Darkness, climbed out of her bed filled with hope. She went to work, prepared to bring death. Everyday brought her closer and closer to controlling the magical inheritance. And now! Now the opportunity, with the death of the young men, presented itself. It gave her the chance to bring a new and younger Cairn into existence. Her life of loneliness promised to fade. The names Alone, Unwanted and Unloved, blood would scrub away. Mara vowed to kill Genesis, who used the powers she stole from Cairn like they were her own - the undeserving bitch. Mara promised to bequeath the powers to someone worthy, someone for herself.

Tears, silver and pure, fell from her dark eyes, fell on the black sheets around her, fell for the man she had loved and lost so long ago.

Jack 

Fall 2013 

He followed her from school, but he kept his distance, head down. He hoped he stayed unnoticed. A cold wind whipped the bandana tied around his shaggy hair and he pulled his dirt splattered duster closer. The trees waved naked limbs, thin as a Holocaust victim, in the air. Bits of rain spit at him from the steel sky overhead. Jack maintained visual contact with the pale girl. He did not want to make her nervous and he did not want her catching on to him. She did not. With her enslavement to the vampire complete, her attention became his entirely. If the elite group of Hunters - Trent, Travis, Trevor and Quincy, who Jack hoped to join someday - surrounded her and walked her home as human shields, she would have remained oblivious.  

The girl turned down a quiet street filled with tidy homes, good sized trees and too many cars. Jack watched her walk up a driveway and go inside a two story home. He moved to a different angle on the house and, a few minutes later, saw the girl silhouetted against an upstairs window. Jack glanced around, saw no one in the darkening day, and shimmied up the trunk of the old oak closest to her window. The deep crevasses in the old bark made the assent easy for his nimble fingers. He climbed from branch to branch until he reached her room. Checking again to make sure no one watched him, Jack climbed closer on a thick limb. He peeked in through the sheer curtains and flushed. The girl lay curled up on her bed in only her underwear. He thanked all the witches in the world the oak retained most of its leaves. Jack shuttered at the thought of saving the girl only to finish branded a peeping tom instead of a hero. 

"Can you smell anything?" Jack asked the winged wiznit, Zephyr.  

He made his way back to the trunk and sat down with his back against it to wait out the setting sun. 

"He is not here if that's what you mean," Zephyr said, pom-pom antenna swaying as she peeked out of his pocket, "You better slay him before he starts to feed." 

"I know," Jack said. He took off his leather, crossbody bag and hung it on a branch. From a secret compartment in the bottom he removed a small, black crossbow, made from synthetic polymers, with silver darts. Crow, his adopted father, gave it to him two years ago when Ronan, the SoulDefending witch, showed no signs of accepting his responsibilities. Crow worried about the human and magical creatures liable to come out of the woodwork with no witch to sense the destruction they visited on human souls. Jack decided to complain about not having his Glock 17 or 19 later. High school principals do not look fondly on gun wielding kids, and Jack was in enough trouble just missing the parent-teacher conference to hunt a vampire.