In the Forest of Light and Dark (37 page)

    
With it now firmly in my grasp, I gave it everything I had and swung it as hard as I could. The rock connected with Katelyn’s dome just above her left eyebrow, and she tumbled from me not even making the faintest of a sound.
    
I then struggled to take my next couple of breaths and coughed harshly as I did.
    
Pulling myself to my feet I stared at Katelyn’s lifeless corpse wondering if she would be back. I still had the rock clutched in my hand and was ready to strike her again if need be, but she remained still so I then turned my attention to Abellona.
    
As my eyes searched the darkness for her I couldn’t see anything but the white-paper trees until a blinding light hit me square in the face. I quickly threw up a hand to shield myself from the glare until my eyes adjusted.
    
“Come get me you bitch!” I yelled out from the darkness.
    
“Cera!” a voice called out.
    
“Tucker?” I called back.
    
“Yeah, it’s me, and Owen and your—”
    
“CERA!”
    
“Mama!” I shouted towards the light not being able to see her yet.
    
“Cera, are you okay… What’s going on here?” my mama called out—her voice anxious. But, before I could answer her, I’d been distracted when Tucker had moved his flashlight’s beam down to Katelyn’s body which was now no longer acting the way a good dead body should. The beam of light had lit her up like a ghost in the darkness. Katelyn’s voided eyes absorbing the illumination and drawing it in like a couple of black holes.
    
“Sugar tits?” Owen said, his voice breaking at the sight of Katelyn.
    
Katelyn started moving again, quickly picking herself up off the ground as she went for another go at me, but I wasn’t letting her have the jump on me this time. This time I caught
her
by the throat, but she was still more powerful than I’d been prepared for as she pushed me back.
    
Another garbled cry of rage came from deep inside her corpse freeing up a chest full of the Genesee River, which spurted out from her mouth and onto my face, then down my chest.
    
I swung at her, and there was a flash of reddish energy from my hand that caused her head to snap back. But before I could hit her again, she was abruptly torn from me.
    
Tucker and Owen each had a hold of her and they were pulling her away from me.
    
Katelyn turned and violently head butted Owen in the face, causing him to cry out in pain.
    
“What the fuck, Katelyn!” Tucker shouted, as he tried to wrestle her to the ground. “What are you doing?”
    
“She’s dead!” I yelled at him as I wiped my eyes clear of the blood, sweat, dirt, and river water that were stinging them closed. “That’s not Katelyn anymore. Abellona killed her and now has control of her body.”
    
“Oh, the way you carry on-and-on, making me sound so evil.” Abellona then said, having reappeared in between some of the trees before us, that luminescent glow of her lighting up the forest beyond. “And, Janine, it’s nice to see you again. I didn’t think I would after our last encounter. I really thought that by now you would’ve tucked your tail between your legs and had run away like you did all those years ago.”
    
“Screw you, Abellona!” My mama shouted, scolding her with an anger so primal, so intense, that I had never seen anything like it ever come out of her before. It had frightened me and yet made me proud.
    
I looked down at my mama’s feet where Midnight now stood, her back arched, fangs drawn and letting out a seething rear aimed squarely at Abellona. Not far from her was another cat as equally angered and ready for a rumble.
    
Off to my right, Tucker and Owen still struggled with subduing Katelyn who looked as if she might have been even more than what these two Southern boys could handle.
    
“You know, Janine… When I
killed
your mother.” Abellona said with a smile curling up from her lips as she swung playfully like a child around a birch tree with an outstretched arm. “It was too bad you weren’t here to see it. But, the good news is, you
will
be here to see me kill your daughter.”
     “Leave Cera alone, Abellona. If it’s me you want, here I am.” My mama said.
    
“It’s
both
of you
I want!” Abellona snapped spitting her poison at us. “I want the souls of all you Barretts.”
“But, Cera isn’t even a Barrett, she’s a Singer.” My mama contested.
    
“Don’t play dumb with me!” Abellona again fired back at her and then turned her attention to me. “She has Barrett blood coursing through her veins. I can smell it. I can see her aura radiating from her soul. And, soon…” Abellona then let out that wicked little laugh of hers. “Soon I will taste it.”
    
I knew I couldn’t just keep standing there doing nothing. Eventually, Tucker and Owen were going to lose out to Katelyn, and Abellona was going to make her move, but what the hell was I supposed to do? I had no plan. I had no way of getting all of us out of there. I was cold and wet and bloodied, and just about ready to give up.
    
“Alright, fine then, you and me, Abellona.” My mama said stepping towards her with a train of a half-dozen cats in tow. “I challenge you. You hear me? I challenge you, Abellona!” my mama yelled at her. “Unless you’re too chicken shit to die, just like you were all those years ago when you sold your soul?” She then added showing a cockiness that again I had never known existed in her.
    
Abellona stared down my mama looking almost beside herself over my mama’s bravado. Then, I watched as all the emotion drain from her face as she said, “Challenge accepted.”
    
In a flash she was on my mama slamming her hard to the ground.
    
Shit,
I thought,
I got to do something. I got to do something now or I’m going to watch my mama get killed
. But my attention was quickly pulled away by Tucker and Owen, who still weren’t fairing too well in their tussle with Katelyn. She had Tucker straddled to the ground like she’d done to me and was pummeling and slashing at him. Owen was behind her trying to pry her off with a choke hold.
    
I turned back to see Abellona on top of my mama in a similar position to which Katelyn had Tucker in, only Abellona wasn’t all flailing with her arms, she had her hands firmly wrapped around my mama’s throat. As she squeezed down on my mama’s windpipe harder-and-harder I could see my mama’s face beginning to transform, and I could hear her struggling to breathe. It was surreal what I was watching. My mama’s face wasn’t turning different shades of red, blue, and purple like you would have expected someone’s would have after being cut off from oxygen. But she was becoming gaunt—hollow—as if Abellona was now somehow squeezing her energy from her, pulling her soul from her body like a pump.
    
I ran over to my mama as fast as my legs would carry me and without even thinking I slammed the rock that I was still holding against the side of Abellona’s head. The sound of the impact was like that of two billiard balls coming together and Abellona tumbled off my mama just like Katelyn had tumbled from me when I clocked her. The blue light which radiated from her then wavered and flickered in and out intermittently.
    
I looked down at my mama and she appeared unconscious. So I quickly bend down and began cradling her head in my arms.
    
“Mama… Mama!” I cried out touching her face, but got no response. I could feel that she was still breathing as she lay in my arms, but it was shallow at best.
    
Panicking, I looked for anything that I could use to help her regain consciousness but found nothing around.
    
I then glanced over towards Tucker and Owen for help. Owen was still standing behind Katelyn who was still on top of Tucker as they both tried desperately to fend her off. Owen now had in his hands the large rock. The very same one I was going to use to destroy the symbol etched into Abellona’s grave. He brought it down hard onto the back of Katelyn’s skull, the impact making a sound like an egg cracking as her skull fractured. Katelyn’s head slumped forward, her hair covering her face, and then she fell away from Tucker. Her eyes remaining open and negated when she hit the ground as if staring endlessly into the dark emptiness of the forest.
    
“Oh, so sad, they break so easily, don’t they?” Abellona asked having gotten back up from the knock on the head, I’d given her. “And, it looks like your mother won’t be around to watch you die after all either.”
    
Furious and finding a renewed sense of strength growing inside of me. I rested my mama’s head down on the forest floor and almost immediately my mama’s body became blanketed by all the strays that’d been coming in from all around the surrounding forest. They piled on covering her with a layer of fur. It freaked me out a little, but I knew they weren’t going to hurt her. They were only trying to protect her.
    
I stood up cautiously and faced Abellona. Then, before giving myself a chance at a second thought, I went for her like she was the bitch who’d just stolen my boyfriend. I can’t really recall what happened in that fury but… I was on her in less than a blink of an eye, having teleported across the forest floor just like she could.
    
Slamming into her with a tremendous force I sent both of us careening into and then off of a birch before tumbling to the ground. I then pushed my fingers into Abellona’s eyes screaming, “Die!” as I clawed my nails ever deeper into her eye sockets.
    Then, as I worked my way further into her skull that strange sort of red light poured from my fingertips boring its way in Abellona’s flesh and mixing with the pale blue light she emitted.
    
Abellona screamed out in pain as I dug deeper into her. But she wasn’t going to just sit there and take that, and before I could do anything to stop her, she shot up an arm catching me on the bottom of my jaw, pushing me back and breaking my grip on her.
    It hurt… It hurt badly, like getting hit in the face with a hammer, and I winced in pain almost to the point of blacking out as I fell back away from her.
    
I shook it off the best I could and countered her punch with one of my own that caught her in one of her eyes that I had just assaulted. The blow snapping her head back violently in a wave of red light that was full of energy.
    
I had no idea as to what the ever-increasing reddish light pouring from me was and didn’t have time to figure it out. But just like my sudden ability to teleport, I reckoned it was my powers growing.
    
Abellona lunged for me and had grabbed a handful of my hair in one hand and with her other she dug her fingernails into the flesh along the side of my face. I tried my best to block out the pain as I felt her nails puncture my skin but that wasn’t easy.
    
As we tussled thunder cracked off from above and lightning began irradiating the surrounding forest exposing an innumerable amount of strays that were now weaving in and out of the tree branches and endlessly meowing and hissing giving the forest a haunted sound.
     I had gripped Abellona by her wrist and had tried to yank free her grip on the side of my face. Then with everything I could put into it, I swung a left catching her in her ear, a red glow flashing brightly in the darkness and then trailing my fist as I swung.
    Abellona fell away from me crying out in pain and I used the moment to breathe again.
    
Thunder sounded off again and the trailing flashes of sudden lightning lit up the area with its brilliance. I looked over my shoulder between the flashes and saw that my mama was now being attended to by Tucker, Owen, Terra, and the other witches who must have finally found where we were.
    
“Fucking Die!” Abellona screamed as she pounced back on top of me, pinning me to the forest floor. She then hit me across my face and it felt like being in a car accident, my mind blinking out momentarily. She then hit me again and then a third time and I wasn’t sure just how many more I could take. Each powerful blow making me weaker-and-weaker, taking more-and-more out of me until I thought I was about to go unconscious.
    
Straddled on top of me, Abellona grabbed a fist full of my hair again and pulled me up bring my face close to hers. “Fucking die, Barrett scum!” she screamed directly into my face, and the thin blue light that radiated from her mouth and eyes stung my face with the heat of her hatred.
     Exhausted, and not knowing if I could keep going on. I turned my head, looking away from her, down towards her chest. And then… There it was dangling from her neck, hidden under her tunic the entire time.
    
We had been all wrong. The source of power that had kept her here wasn’t the weird symbol etched into her gravestone at all. That hadn’t been created by her. That had been made by the villagers to mark her grave, of being that of a witch. It wasn’t the source of her power, allowing her to stay in this realm, but the gold medallion she wore around her neck
was
.