Bereft: Foretold

31 | A Sin's Mercy

The huntress woke with a start, her hand flying to the pistol rattling on the Jeep's center console. 

I grabbed her wrist before she could take the weapon, my tone sharp with disdain. "If you shoot me," I said as my gaze flickered between her and the dirt road. "We're going to have a problem."

Halefield, as its name would suggest, was little more than a region of fields left fallow by the winter and skeletal trees half-buried in autumn's dead leaves. The land was flat and dark in the small hours of the night, difficult to navigate and all but impossible to find a black mage in. 

A cursory glance through a gray phone book stashed in an abandoned phone booth had revealed a number for one Marian Harris living somewhere in Halefield. Harris wasn't an uncommon name in the entirety of Itheria's county, but there weren't many people to be found in the wide, sweeping agricultural plains of Halefield, and a single Harris was listed as a resident.

It was possible this Marian Harris was a relation of Lucian Harris, possibly his wife, given that mages didn't have sisters and wouldn't take the surname of their mother. Unlike witches, who often begot their children with anonymous human males who never saw their offspring or the witch again, mages frequently married or formed lasting relationships with the human women who carried their sons. It was yet another reason for the syndicates' fierce subjugation of Terrestria: witches, bearing their own children, could survive a societal collapse. Mage mothers were inherently powerless and needed the protection of their fathers to survive a magical incursion like the one being created by my brother, Aurelius. 

While having an address for a possible connection to our black mage was all well and good, finding that location in a rural setting without a map, GPS, or the existence of street signs was more of a daunting task than I would have thought it to be. 

Connie had fallen asleep around midnight, too exhausted to keep her eyes open any longer—which didn't bode well for her future in vampire hunting, if I were to be frank. I'd driven for most of the evening past quiet farm houses with dark windows and the wrong surnames written on the mailboxes. In truth, the mage could be at any of the houses I'd seen tonight. He might not even be in Halefield—the man might not even exist, in which case I'd have to find Everett Robinson again and quite literally pummel him to death.

The huntress muttered a half-insentient apology and slumped against her seat, ponytail drooping down past her ears as she shrugged her shoulders and stretched her legs. "We should go back to the motel. We ain't going to find him tonight," she said, not for the first time. Did she remember repeating herself earlier? If she did, she should also recall my response: no. 

The tires hit another pothole on the dirt road and Connie grunted, the gun banging on the console where she'd left it.

As I drove, the headlights flashed across another low, crooked street sign, and the reflective quality of the sign caught the light, the name Hobby Street clearly visible against the stark green background. I hit the brakes on instinct and felt the seatbelt cut into my shoulder as the Jeep lurched to a stop. 

"What?" the huntress asked, sitting up. I nodded at the sign and we both stared at it—or, more specifically, at the bloody hand-print streaked across its side. "Dang. That's the road we want, ain't it?" 

"Indeed." Gritting my teeth, I took the gun for my own before Connie could claim it and directed the car onto the open lane. "Find yourself another weapon from your cache. Our quest may have just taken a decidedly unpleasant turn." 

The speedometer never eased past ten miles per hour as I drove, headlights flared, bathing the barren road in yellow light. I opened the window and listened to the sound of the tires dragging along the earth, feeling the toothless bite of the cold wind seep through my skin as my breath coalesced into white steam. The long grass and mounded earth was crusted with dirty ice, the drainage ditch on either side of the road filled with debris and more clouded snow. There were few houses, and those that could be found waited like marooned vessels in the dark plains, shining with gentle light.