Treycore kept up with Mika’s daggers. A sword rushed him from the side. He caught a glimpse of Vera.
Another sword came crashing down on hers, effectively deflecting it from its course.
Fuck, that was close, Treycore thought.
“Dedrus,” Vera said. “So good to see you again.”
***
Dedrus eyed Vera with contempt. “Not a very fair fight, is it?”
He’d snuck through the front door, having instructed Maggie to slip through the woods behind the house and hide out at the nearby gas station until they were finished handling their current predicament. He had no intention of letting Treycore and Kinzer fight this battle on their own.
“Now it is,” Vera said.
She disappeared.
Oh, here we go, Dedrus thought, acknowledging how fast his attacks were going to have to be to keep up with Vera’s advantageous gift.
As Vera appeared on the opposite side of him, Dedrus whirled around and struck at her.
“So predictable,” he mocked. Their swords clashed again.
***
Maggie crept through the woods. A chill bit at her exposed arms and cheeks. The dim moonlight sparkled off branches and trunks as she navigated her way through the foliage.
What am I doing?
Everything that Kinzer had told her had been insane—the ravings of lunatics.
They had to be. There was no other reasonable explanation. She didn't believe in God. Even if she did, she wouldn’t have believed that He was evil.
That was not the God her mom had told her about.
“God doesn’t like a girl that throws her legs up,” her mom used to say. When Maggie was little, she believed that her mom was talking about cartwheels.
A hallucination, Maggie thought. That must've been how she'd seen the wings. She'd hallucinated plenty of times, writhing in the intoxicating sensations of pleasure and dissatisfaction of her most familiar drug of choice. They must've given her some earlier. It was just a big, long, terrible haze that she was going to wake up from. Although, she felt more lucid than ever before. This wasn't like the days where she met Kirk so he could slip her some dick and G. Then things were blurry. Days and nights would pass like moments, like days when, as a child, she'd woken and fallen asleep repeatedly in a night, surprised by the rapid intervals in which time seemed to pass. Despite their brevity, the most vivid of the moments she experienced were those of enchantment, of delight, of magic—those moments that she so desperately reached for. A night in the back of Kirk's car, her body trembling in the cold, could be better than any night she imagined that she could have had anywhere else in the world.
Maggie was very familiar with the hallucinations associated with usage. Sometimes, they contained meaning that linked to her past. Giant snakes, like the ones her mom used to cradle to demonstrate faith, would slither through nearby halls. They’d watch her through mirrors and windows. Sometimes, she could hear the chanting of her mom’s tongues in the background. She expected her mom to fall out of a closet, trembling and rambling as she collapsed to the floor.
“Don’t give in to the serpent,” her mom had said.
Maggie hadn’t understood that statement until she let Tommy Rager drive her home from school. He’d shown her the serpent on the side of the road, a few miles from her house. The moment was brief and filled with tears, but she wanted Tommy, so she let him give her rides every day from then on. She knew something was wrong when the bleeding didn’t come, and when her mom discovered the reason, she took her to the city to get the abomination removed. Maggie didn’t want to get rid of it, though. That wasn’t right. She ran off and decided to care for it on her own, but life wasn’t so kind to the unwed mother, and she quickly stumbled into obstacles, having to barter with her body in exchange for shelter. A pool of blood among white sheets announced the failure of the pregnancy and birthed a darkness within Maggie that led her down a painful, unrelenting path—desperate to find ease from the sadness she felt about the loss of the baby, her mother, and Tommy.
Some days, when she was being fucked, she'd wished that her mom could see her legs high in the air. Sometimes, she’d work to force them higher. She’d look into her john's eyes, hating him, hating herself. She wondered about their lives, about their families. She wondered what diseases they had, just waiting to spew through a broken condom. Wasn’t that what she deserved? That was what mom always said happened to girls who threw their legs up in the air.
When she’d discovered her new pregnancy, she’d wanted to kick the shit. She'd wanted to do the morally responsible thing, as society would have preferred. She just couldn't bring herself to release the habit, and her life was hardly appropriate for nurturing a child. Based on her calculations, which could have been flawed considering her stunted stint with public education, it could have been one of any number of the boys Kirk had lined up for her. And if it was going to grow up as disgusting as any of its potential fathers, what was the point of existing? Rather than quitting the habit, she had hoped that it would expedite her ultimate goal. Her belly continued to grow, bloating to the point where Maggie was of little use to Kirk, who by way of fist, had tried to assist her in releasing the parasite on several occasions. To their disappointment, it hadn't helped. With her first pregnancy, she had seen murder as a disgusting cruelty. Now, she saw that in life.
Who the fuck are these guys?she thought as she stumbled through the darkness.
She remembered Kirk introducing her to the two men who'd gone by different names than they called themselves after they'd abducted her. They gave her something they said would elicit an incredible experience—a new drug that would send her into a rapture beyond anything she'd ever experienced before. After attempting this allegedly mystical drug, she'd woken tied to that bed. It wouldn't have been the first time. She'd had a similar experience with two of Kirk's clients who'd gagged her and killed cigarette butts on her breasts for three days before abandoning her in a motel near Taco Cabana. Unlike those clients, these men hadn't fucked her, which led her to assume that their motives were far more sinister. Surely, they got their thrills from watching the eyes of their prey deaden, not from rushes from their own cocks (unless the former resulted in the latter).
The men tied her to that bed and gave her such miniscule doses of her luxury that she thought even with it rushing through her veins, she was going to die. She needed more. She always needed more. But Kirk never came. Just these two surely sadistic men. What kind of bastards would abduct a pregnant woman and force her to get clean? Regardless of her attempts at understanding their motives, she couldn't. They didn’t hurt her, and they supplied her with plenty of food. Had it not been for depriving her of something she felt she needed as much as water, the stay in that dirty little room would have been like cruising through exotic locations. However, considering the torment of her deprivation, it felt far from something so delightful.
Where the fuck am I supposed to go?
Cracks harmonized with the crickets and frogs as Maggie stepped on branches and twigs.
