Authors: G. P. Ching

WeavingDestinyebook (27 page)

“Be strong Ivy, but don’t be ashamed to cry.” I cupped my hands around my mouth, yelling to Ivy as the guards dragged her out of the room.

“I’ll never give him or any of his stupid guests the satisfaction!” Ivy shook her arms free from the guards. Shoulders thrown back, arms straight, and fists at her side, Ivy marched out ahead of them.

I imagined the scene taking place and the murmurs of the lords and ladies as they would watch Ivy get strapped into the chair. Forced to bend at the waist with her arms still tied behind her back, Ivy’s face would rest in a hole on the table. One guard would hold her head down as the other would sear the brand into the back of her neck. It was always the same story, but only from those who were brave enough to tell the tale.

Kandek did allow each slave one person to wait for them after the branding. Ivy naturally chose me, so I waited alone in our sleeping chambers for her return. Not long after taking Ivy away, the guards returned with her propped up on their arms.

Her head hung down; the branded fox red and swollen on the back of her neck. In the background I had heard the raucous laughter of the partygoers. My stomach flipped as I realized this would be me in a short time. I had never seen the immediate after-effects of branding before and I would never forget.

Throwing her into my waiting arms, the guards left as quickly as they had come.

“Are you okay?” I whispered into her ear. Her head lay on my shoulder, my arms around her back.

“When it’s your birthday I promise to hold your hand until the moment they force me away from you.” Ivy held her head up to gaze into my eyes. A lone tear escape from a blue eye. After that, she didn’t speak to me, or anyone else, for three days.

I helped Ivy hobble to our bunk. Once she settled into bed with a medicinal poultice made for her by the herbalist, my duties as her aide were over and I was forced back to work. The day’s party would dirty many more dishes than normal and I was needed in the kitchen. But that night we held hands as we fell asleep.

As I pulled the last of the dishes off the shelf, tears fell as it hit me how alone I was.

I wondered what anathema meant as I slipped the coin out of my pocket. I flipped it over and looked at the baby again. Its head turned and looked straight at me. But it didn’t wink. Oh no, this time it smacked its hand to its mouth and blew me a kiss.

Loramendi’s Story (Excerpt)

A Lords of Shifters Novel

By Angela Carlie

Some think that space is the final frontier or something like that. Believe me, space has got nothing on what lives here on Earth. If people, the human type, could see what I’ve seen, they wouldn’t be so afraid of aliens or the unknown of space anymore. Aliens are a walk in the park compared to the creatures biding their time to destroy—

Oh, wait. I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? Silly me. Let’s start from the beginning, shall we?

Things started getting weird a few months ago when my best friend, Jess, arrived home from her trip to San Francisco. We lived in the same small town where I’ve always lived in the Columbia River Gorge—White Salmon, Washington. Windsurfing territory.

We hadn’t been friends for very long. She had just moved to White Salmon about two years prior, but we immediately clicked like soul friends.

It was a late summer mid-afternoon when Jess’ car squeaked into the driveway. The sound ran over the bird songs and wind chime music. Two dragonflies buzzed over my head before I darted from the brown grass and skipped over to the little red Honda, anticipating a big hug to leap from the vehicle.

The driver didn’t look like my best friend, but on further examination, Jess sat behind the wheel with stranger hair.

“Oh my stars!” My jaw dropped. “What did you do?” I stepped closer and a smile crept onto my lips.

Resentment scribbled all over Jess’ face. She opened the door and took her time crawling out of the car. “What?” Malice dissolved into a smirk with attitude. “You don’t like my new look?”

“I don’t know. Turn around. Let me see the whole thing.”

She strutted, as if on a catwalk, and pivoted a quarter turn for my approval. She pushed one hip out with her hand on the other, puckering her lips in a serious pout. Her once long golden brown hair was now a short, pixie cut, dyed purplish red.

“You pierced your eyebrow!” Pink skin puckered around a silver barbell penetrating the outer edge of her right brow.

Jess poked her tongue out to reveal a stud straight through it as well. I gasped.

“You better close your mouth, Lora. Lots of bugs out.” Jess pointed to the invisible bugs flying in the air.

I snapped my jaw shut.

Jess grabbed the bottom of her t-shirt and then laughed quietly to herself. “You like
that
? Well then, you will
love
these!” She winked and lifted her t-shirt for the world to see her creamy white boobs. Well, not the whole world, just me and possibly Old Man Franklin, the neighborhood snoop across the street.

I leaped two steps, yanked her shirt down, and made sure the old man wasn’t having a heart attack in his front window. For once, he must have had better things to do.

“Your nipples too?” I whispered. This was not my best friend who left in June. The girl standing before me was a stranger who only resembled my best friend. “Why’d you do that?”

Jess didn’t answer me with words, but only shrugged her shoulders as if to say she didn’t know. She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her worn cut-off jeans. I twisted a long blade of grass between my toes. Words stuttered through my mind but they wouldn’t form a sentence in my mouth.
Why isn’t she talking? What happened to my best friend?

“Do you want to sit down or what?” The way the question sliced through my mouth shocked me.

Jess shrugged again, her eyes never leaving the ground. “Sure.”

I stomped toward the house and leaned against the handrail attached to the worn front porch. “So, are you going to tell me how your summer went or am I going to have to read your mind?”

Jess plopped onto the peeling white painted stairs. “I just hung out with my cousins a lot. We went to clubs on the weekends.” She grinned. “No one ever asked for my ID. It was pretty cool and I met a lot of people. It’s kinda weird coming back to this boring, lame town.”

“I bet.” My turn to roll eyes, but Jess wasn’t even looking at me. She gazed up at the tree instead.

“I think I want to move there next year after we graduate,” Jess said matter-of-fact like. “Maybe go to art school and live with my cousins.”

“That sounds cool. There’s one problem with that, though.” I crossed my arms. “What about our plans to go to Seattle? I’m sure Seattle has just as many clubs if that’s what you’re concerned about.” I turned away so she wouldn’t see the sting in my eyes betray me, because Jess didn’t seem to care or remember the plans we had made before she left.

Jess snorted. “I always thought you only agreed to go with me to make me happy.”

“No, stupid!” I forced a laugh and sighed with relief. “I wouldn’t do
anything
just to make
you
happy. Who else would I want to escape this town with? There are absolutely zero cool people here other than us—oh and maybe Johnnie too.”

Jess scrunched up her nose. “Did Johnnie find himself a girlfriend over the summer or am I gonna have to keep breaking his heart?”

“What do you think? He’s still madly in love with the one and the only Jess!” My hands flew up in the air with dramatic sarcasm.

The wall between us crumbled a bit.

“Great.” Her face vomited disgust.

“He’s a fun guy. I don’t see why you don’t give him a chance.”

She picked a brown and red leaf off the ground that had just fallen from the maple tree and ripped the flesh away from the spine, pretty much telling me that she was done talking about Johnnie.

I leaned closer to her, near her face, but she wouldn’t look at me, flinch, or anything. “There were a ton of tourists and surfers in town this summer, more than usual anyway.”

“Uggh…surfers.” Jess never liked surfers. She claimed they were dirty and didn’t have homes.

Dirty and homeless appealed to me, along with riling Jess up whenever she fell into these moods, which wasn’t often.

“Quite a few hot ones too, I might add,” I said.

A windsurfer didn’t actually have to
be
hot to be dubbed as hot. All windsurfers were hot in my book. I didn’t know why, but it had to do with the fact that they mastered a skill that scared the crap out of me. If only I could swim, then maybe I’d learn to windsurf.

Jess stared at a squirrel scurrying up the tree. It stopped at the lowest branch and twitched its tail several times before climbing higher. It disappeared into the abundance of leaves.

Behind Jess, a hairy spider strung webbing between two rose bushes in the garden to catch his dinner.

I tossed a small twig to get her attention. “We still going to the Bloody Pulp concert next week?”

“Why wouldn’t we be?” she asked with heat in her voice.

I exhaled and figured she must be tired from the long trip home or something. She needed to chill with the attitude, though. “You want to go shopping before? I don’t have anything to wear.”

“I guess,” she said.

“Sweet. I’ll drive. We can go tomorrow if you’re free…” I sprang to my feet. “Oh! I almost forgot something. Stay there a sec.” The screen door snapped shut on rusty hinges behind me as I ran into the house and then thumped down the hall.

Jess loved photography. So much that I talked her into entering one of her photos at the state fair while she was away. It won second place.

I grabbed the red silk ribbon from my dresser. It flapped in my hand while I ran back down the hall. A car door slammed shut and an engine roared to life.

The little red Honda squeaked backwards, out of the driveway, and then sputtered down the road.

I stood at the door. Jess no longer sat on the stairs.

The maple tree continued to sway, shedding leaves onto the dry grass below it. Wind chimes sang once again in the distance. Across the street, in the large bay window of a small house, Old Man Franklin’s face appeared—pale and shriveled, as always. He nodded toward me. I waved.

I began to turn away and then stopped, as did my heart. A shiver skipped across my arms. Jess’ second place ribbon fell from my hand.

The light must have hit the glass pane in the door just right because at that moment a reflection of a face peered back at me, and it wasn’t Old Man Franklin’s.

And it wasn’t mine.

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