Page 50 of Witch Upon a Star
I wasn’t even sure what caused a car to backfire. Could it even happen if the car was already in motion? Home was only ten minutes away, so it wouldn’t be long before I would know for sure that they’d made it safely.
I dragged the large trash bag to the backdoor. True to my word, I did not venture outside to place it in the dumpster.
Turning around, I froze. A man stood in the center of my storage room. A man who was not Starbucks. A man with a gun in his hand.
Fear gripped me.It took a lot to be able to sneak up on me. I knew for a fact that I’d never met this man before.
I didn’t know a lot about guns. Probably knew less about them than I did about cars. But I did know it was not a good sign when the person holding a gun on you had his finger over the trigger. I think the gun was a revolver or maybe a pistol. It had one of those turnstiles like in the oldLooney Tunescartoons, which was probably not good when that was the extent of my gun knowledge.
“Call him back here.”
Thepop!of a car backfiring was so loud in my ears that I nearly missed the man’s order. Call him back here? Who? Starbucks?
As I stared into the man’s cold eyes, I wondered how I’dbeen caught so off guard. If I’d been in danger, if a member of my family or Starbucks, had been in danger, I should know about it. I would have gotten a full vision like I had before my sister and Dosia’s mom, Stella, had died in her car accident. I was no longer a child who didn’t understand what she was seeing. I was an adult, a Third Degree Wiccan, who knew how to interpret my visions.
Ishouldhave seen this coming.
But the man in front of me was, for lack of a better description, a magical dud. A psychic null. Either through a natural shield or maybe a medication he was on, magic couldn’t touch him. Which meant I couldn’t sense him, and I couldn’t have seen him coming. I’d heard of people like him before, but I’d never met one. Skeptics, sure, but not someone who was blocked from my powers.
He took a menacing step towards me, arching his arm up awkwardly to make the gun point more at a downward angle than straight at me. “I said,” he ordered through gritted teeth. “Call. Him. Back. Here.”
I might not be able to read this man using my powers, but Icouldread intent. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that if I called Starbucks back here, this man, this stranger, would kill him.
I was terrified. My breathing was ragged, my thoughts were jumbled, my hands were sweaty… But my spine? My spine was made of steel.
I stared down the barrel of a gun and shook my head. “No.”
Shock crossed his face before he shook it off. “The fuck you say, bitch? I said to call him back here!”
I didn’t think I had it in me to shake my head again. Myneck felt weak, like if I moved too much, my head might just roll off my shoulders. It made my words clipped as I had to force my jaw to work. “No.”
I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I called Starbucks back here and it got him shot. He coulddie. There was little to no sanity in the eyes of the man in front of me. His deadly intentions were clear in the weapon he held.
I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know his connection to Starbucks. I didn’t know if he actually had it in him to pull the trigger. Theonlything I did know was that I was willing to die to save the man I loved.
Maybe this was my penance. Maybe my parents had been right, and what I’d done had left the world in such imbalance that this was the price I had to pay. I’d ignored my visions. I’d gone against the future Fate had intended. I set not only my life, but also Starbucks’, on an entirely different path.
Four days. That’s all I’d gotten before the universe set things to rights. They were the best four days of my life, and if that was all I got, then I was fine with it. I wanted more. I wanted lifetimes.
I didn’t have a death wish. I wanted tolive. I wanted to have my wedding day and experience pregnancy. I wanted to see my parents again. They’d already lost one child, and now my actions might cause them to lose another. I wanted more than anything to see Starbucks again. I wanted to tell him that I loved him, that I regretted nothing. The need to call to him, to have him rescue me and save the day, was strong. He was going to be so pissed at me. I remembered the day he’d come to my store for the auction labor hours and how angry he was that my front door hadn’t been locked.
That had been a deadbolt. This was a man with a gun.
But I’d take his anger with me to the grave if it meant he got to live.
“Crazy whore!” He came at me again, faster this time. “If you won’t yell out to him, then I’ll make you scream!”
I was so terrified, my bones locked into place, that I didn’t see the pistol whip coming. Agony seared my jaw as the metal of the weapon connected with my face.
I flew backwards, hitting the concrete floor hard. But I would not go down without a fight. The moment I felt his weight on top of me, my body thawed. I wantedno manon top of me but Starbucks.
I used my nails like cat claws to dig into his face. He yelled out in pain, and a second later, his hands went around my throat. I gagged and gasped as my air was cut off. It wasn’t just my throat too. He was sitting fully on my chest, pressing on my ribs and lungs. This man wasn’t large with muscle like Starbucks, but he still had a good amount of weight on me. I hit, I punched, I clawed, but it was no use.
My foot collided with something and there was a loudcrash. I felt something on my leg, but I was too concerned with trying to breathe to decipher what it was.
A loud roar echoed through the room and suddenly the pressing weight on my chest and throat was gone. I coughed, but it was no use. I still couldn’t breathe. I tried to suck in air, but it was like it got caught in my mouth, unable to go down my throat.
Blackness filled my vision. The last thing I heard was the sound of the gun going off, and I knew my mistake immediately. It hadn’t been a car backfiring I’d been hearing all week.
