The Survivors: Point of Origin (book 2)

Unraveled, pt. 2

            

 

"You have it all wrong!" Lizzie cried. "Alexander Raven was a good man!" Tears formed in her eyes and fell down her cold, pink cheeks. She may have seemed vulnerable, but waves of anger and resentment rolled off her.

 

            "So it's true," I breathed. "Hannah's father... Raven..."

 

"Alexander," she said, an edge entering her voice, "He told me what I was, mentored me in a time I thought my body, my soul was betraying me. He held my hand and guided me through what I was becoming. Whatever this stupid witch-thing is." She cried, and as she did, she conjured a ball of fire in her hands and threw it to the ground where it sizzled in the remaining fragments of snow. "He protected me. He warned me of the witch-hunt that was to come. He told me we would be exiled."

 

"How did he know?"

 

            "He could see the future, a trait Hannah got from him," she explained. She sounded defeated, as if her secrets had been the source of all of her strength.

 

            "So you knew what you were. And you knew he was too. But how did you all get accused? No accusation like that is on record. The odds of accusing all fourteen of you were astronomical. Someone else had to know what you were," I reasoned. "Or there were more of you."

 

            "No one else knew," she insisted quietly. "And we were the only ones."

 

"Then how..."

 

"Her father is the one who accused us," she said stiffly.

 

"What?" I said.

 

"You heard me."

 

This shocked me. "Why did they even believe him? He was just one man, and he accused 26 of you all at once? Wouldn't it be more likely that he was guilty of something that all 26 of you could attest to?" I asked.

 

"He was an important man. Considered a confidante of the Governor's, even well-respected by Reverend Parris. They considered him a hero. Who else but a hero, a man loyal to their horrendous cause would incriminate his own daughter? Condemn her to a fate worse than death?"

 

            "Still..."

 

            She shook her head. "It was a time of great fear, Sadie. Of great hatred and suspicion. In those days, in that world, it was entirely believable that one would choose his allegiance to God over his own family," she said regretfully. And yet, this family had been set up in a way that didn't align with this belief. "Besides, there was the spectral evidence."

 

            "Evidence against you?"

 

            "Yes. Abigail Williams, that girl who lived with the Parris family, the one they called his niece, was supposedly afflicted by all 26 of us. We haunted her, tortured her, and so on. Or so she said," Lizzie explained stoically. I wanted to ask how that had happened, how she had known to accuse them to fit in with Raven's original plan. And yet in Lizzie's mind, there was a painful misunderstanding. She never understood that part, never understood how and why the poor tortured girl would say she and the other accused were torturing her when they did not. And so I didn't make her admit this aloud.