“Or maybe you’re darker than you want to accept,” was his response.

No, I wasn’t. If I was dark, if my soul was as cursed as my sisters and mother then I’d be like them. I would be a shallow, gold digging bitch with no real affection for anyone. I felt deeply, I cared, I loved, I had emotions they didn’t understand. I could fight off the darkness of my mother’s blood in my veins. That made me less dark than any of them. Less powerful. They had no reason to fear me.

ELEVEN: THE CIGARETTE

Eleven

The Cigarette

The house was quieter without Geneva commanding attention on a daily basis. I worked double shifts to keep busy. Luckily, Heath hadn’t asked for any more of my shifts, but he had taken on a few of the other servers’. He was almost working as much as I was now. Which only made me more curious as to what it was that had him saving his money. The dollar movie was showing the 1931 Dracula this week, and I went to see it twice to keep from having to go home. Heath had gone to see it with me Wednesday night since the restaurant was slow and closed early. He seemed to understand my need to stay away from my house. He didn’t ask or get nosey like Margo. I appreciated it.

I’d thought Geneva moving out would make things easier at home. I’d been wrong. Leanne wasn’t as awful as Geneva, but she was enjoying dropping Rathe’s name every time I was in earshot. I almost preferred Geneva’s nasty to Leanne’s fake innocent crap. It was hard to forget I’d almost let myself like Rathe when Leanne kept talking about him. Oddly, though, the few times I’d seen him in passing at the apartment, he hadn’t said anything about her, asked about her, or said much to me at all.

The wedding had been almost three weeks ago now, and I didn’t think Rathe had sought Leanne out at all. Not that I knew much about what either of them did on a daily basis. I’d just seen Rathe a handful of times, leaving the apartment with different females when I had been arriving. They weren’t Leanne. That’s all I cared about or at least that is what I told myself. I tried not to dwell too much on any of the females around Rathe. There were other things on my mind that were much more important. Like the vanishing stranger.

This morning I had woken up, stared at the ceiling for an hour, then decided to just ask my mother about the protection spell cast around the house. It was still there. I had stopped every day since the wedding at the spot it began and tested the power there. It remained. Which led me to believe the wedding hadn’t been why it had been put in place. It could have been there for a long time. I just hadn’t noticed it and that was even weirder. Having any kind of discussion with my mother was something I always avoided. Even something as important as this was. The caster had been real. The spell around this house was very real. I was tired of worrying over it and whether the man would return. My mother was the only one who could answer this for me.