Page 8 of 3 Shifters to Break a Curse

All of that didn’t matter anymore. Because despite everything I had tried, he found me.

He grunted and growled as he pulled on me. I struggled against him, clawing at his hands which had a tight grip around my hair. Once my feet were out of the car, he let go of me. I fell the short distance I was from the ground and landed hard on the asphalt. Bits and pieces of gravel became embedded in my upper back.

“I told you, you couldn’t leave,” he snarled as he slammed a foot into my stomach.

The force of the kick expelled the breath from my lungs. My solar plexus froze, making it difficult to breathe. I writhed on the ground, coughing weakly, trying to force air back into my system.

“Now I have to punish you,” he said.

I tried so hard to get away from him. I tried to roll over to my hands and knees and climb to my feet. I struggled to get up and put as much distance between us so that I could heal and come up with a way to let him know we were over. But he was a lot more persistent than I had given him credit for and a lot more skilled at following me than I would have liked to admit. It was going to take so much more to get away from him than I had in me.

Another kick to the stomach and a punch to my face sent me back to the ground. I tried to get up again, but every time I would get up on my hands, he would kick them out from underneath me.

I refused to lay down and take his brutal punishment. I wasn’t his child. I didn’t belong to him. He didn’t own me. I wasn’t his to command and control.

And a small burst of rage ignited within me. Starting from somewhere deep, deep down inside me. It grew with each hit until I managed to block his attack. He stared at me, shocked that I was able to do that. To be honest, so was I. Because I had never done anything like that before. But I wasn’t about to squander the time I was given. So, I summoned the elements around me. I didn’t do battle magic or even defensive magic. That wasn’t my forte… my talents were in the more passive aspects of magic. But I had to do something to get him off of me long enough to allow me to get up from the ground and get away from him.

I took in a few deep breaths as the energy from nature swirled around me, prickling my skin and filling my body with strength.

Jared had recovered from his shock.

“You can’t fight back,” he seethed. “You can’t overpower me!”

“Watch me!” I shoved my hand out, sending raw, unchecked power from my hands. He flew back, over the concrete blockade and into the darkness over the river.

I didn’t wait for the sound of his landing before I was up and running. There was a small side street that ran next to the highway. It likely led to a small town or somewhere I could at least hide for the night. But I hoped I could get help from someone there.

The cold mountain air burned my lugs as I exerted myself. The muscles in my legs burned, my hands scraped against the bark of the trees and anything else I could use to propel me farther.

Minutes later, Jared’s angry footsteps pounded the ground behind me. Too close for comfort. I had to figure out some way of losing him if I had an iota of a chance of making it through the night with my life.

In my desperate attempt to escape him, I ran up the mountain that towered over the highway, and through the thick forest of trees.

It was sort of funny how running for my life made me think of where I went wrong with Jared. How grossly incorrect my initial assumptions were about him. I thought about what I could have missed that would have warned me Jared was wrong for me. He was broken, cruel, and a monster. Not at all the man he had initially shown me to be.

In the beginning, I thought he might have been my soulmate. Especially with how charming he was.

I was dead wrong.

But then, things were never truly right between us, to begin with. Now that I was digging deep into our history while running for my life, searching for a reason on how I got myself into this mess, I recalled noticing small things. Things that were easily dismissible when compared to his initially charming demeanor. But when collected together formed a huge red flag I no longer could afford to ignore.

He never had any pictures of himself. No social media accounts. No real proof of his identity. At least, none he was willing to share with me. I had never seen him in a mirror. He always managed to avoid them at all costs. He didn’t have any bank accounts. He had always paid cash for our dates.

When I first learned of this, I figured he just liked living off the grid and had a poor self-image. But as I thought about the odd things that never added up, I realized the numerous red flags I should have never ignored. I guess it was better late than never to discover these things or really pay attention to them.

Too bad it did little to help me escape his nightmarish hold on me.

But the biggest red flag yet was one I should never have tolerated in the first place. And that was he never went around my friends or my coven. Despite trying to introduce them to each other. Other than the first time I met him with Savannah, and even then, I realized he avoided or ignored her the entire time. He would always make excuses to not go around them.

“You can’t run from me, Toni,” Jared screamed after me, uncomfortably closer than I would have liked.

“Shit,” I muttered under my breath and forced my legs to go even faster, but the terrain was rough and difficult to maneuver through in the dark. I slipped on a rock and accidentally launched myself into a tree. My breath expelled from my lungs and in the few short seconds following after, Jared stomped closer to me.

In my desperate and somewhat futile attempt to get away, I pushed off from the tree and continued running. Despite being exhausted. Stopping wasn’t an option. I wouldn’t allow myself to get caught by him. Not again. Because if he did catch me, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, he would kill me.

I had to keep going.

The Goddess willing.

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