Bad Influence (Seven Deadly Sins #2) ✅ Completed

Chapter Seventeen: Cornfields After Dark

Cornfields After Dark

Three days after retrieving the sword of Perseus I was standing in the middle of a dark cornfield with nothing but a small flashlight to comfort me. It was the same field I'd noticed across the rundown gas station on my first day in town. It was strange how taking that one step off the Greyhound bus had changed the entire course of my life. If I had known then what I knew now, maybe I would’ve walked to my corner deli in Brooklyn and ordered a sandwich instead of taking my mom’s car out for a spin, getting into a high speed chase with the police, and landing in this mess.

I dismissed the thought as quickly as it came. It was too late to dwell on the ‘maybes’ of my life. All I could do was deal with the here and now – even if my here and now was freaking me out a little more each day.

The cornfield wasn’t very far from my aunt’s shop, but it was as far away from the citizens of Blackwater as we could get while still staying inside the town line. We had exactly fifteen days left to get Andy to commit a virtuous act for Caroline. According to Dante, it was time for us to get the last piece of Andy’s soul out of the Medusa and back into her body. Cassandra said we had to wait until the very last minute to unfreeze Pete and Caroline, but if we got Andy her soul back now, we’d be able to work on convincing her to do something to erase the taint of her sin by that time.

Hopefully.

Andy first, Caroline and Pete next – that was the plan.   

“Tell me again what the plan is?” I asked, attempting to find my spine since I was pretty sure I was stepping on it right at the moment. To say I was a little scared would be the understatement of the millennium.

We’d walked deep into the cornfield, though by most residents’ standards it wouldn’t have seemed very deep at all. Considering I had never been in a cornfield in my whole life, I wasn’t of the same opinion. Stomping through the tall stalks in the dark with only a flashlight to guide me was like every scary movie I’d ever watched all rolled into one surreal moment. Dante didn’t need a light to see in the dark apparently. He’d walked just ahead of me, hauling a cheap card table as he'd made a trail through the ripening crop. Tonight he was dressed all in black and had it not been for the small white table he was lugging around, I might have lost him in the dark entirely. At least he was the one in charge of making a path for us. If it had been up to me, I wasn’t so sure I wouldn’t have led us right back into town.  

When Dante had finally stopped, he’d stamped out a small square area then set up the old table, unfolding its legs and kicking away most of the corn lying on the ground underneath to keep it steady. He’d placed the Medusa figurine in the center the table, her face turned away from us, before pulling out a small lantern and setting it right next to her. He’d turned the light on, surprising me with how bright it was. The light from the lantern hit the side of the Medusa’s face, throwing her horrible shadow against the wall of corn in front of her. Her shadow made the statue appear a lot bigger than it actually was and did nothing to dispel the growing uneasiness in my belly. There was another warm breeze tonight which made the corn stalks rustle in the light breeze, the snakes in her hair appearing to move in the night.

“Something tells me I’m really going to hate this part,” I’d whispered, watching the shadow snakes jump and imagining the real thing coming to life.

It was not a happy thought.    

In the light of day, in the middle of the emporium surrounded by Dante and Chase, it was easy to talk about facing down Wrath and saving Andy’s soul. It was a whole different ball of wax to actually be out in the middle of the night, inside an abandoned cornfield, with the very real possibility of being turned into stone for the rest of my life.