CHAPTER 2
THE DEVIL'S HOUR
EARTH-616's MIGUEL O'HARA was having a great morning.
He knew he was getting that promotion today at work. He'd already been briefed about it yesterday; today they'd ask him formerly. His hair was styled in perfect waves – not even the humid air could mess it up – and he was wearing his best suit. The same suit that had been passed down to him from his father. His coffee order this morning had been free because they messed up the previous cup. He was perfectly on time to get to the office. Everything felt right and at peace.
However ... Miguel couldn't help but feel something was off. How could everything be so perfect, but there was still a nagging feeling deep in his chest? He was walking to work, looking around at the hoards of people also on their way to work or the subway, and wondering if he wasn't clued in on something. He glanced up. Was that Spider-freak around or something? The skies were clear. The air was warm and a little sticky. But Miguel knew something had shifted within him. He just wasn't clear on what.
But then, Miguel noticed an attractive woman with pretty braids and dark skin walk by him in a matching pantsuit, completely distracting him. She smiled when he looked at her, and he couldn't help but have his eyes follow her as she moved past him. He smirked, turning around to see if he could get her number.
This was a typical day for Miguel O'Hara in Earth-616.
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"I don't understand why you're being so difficult, Mel," Jude said, holding out the small tank to the woman across the bar. "You said you always wanted my Betta Fish."
Melanie was the head bartender at Joe's on 48th Ave, a local joint Jude would go to with coworkers or alone on a bad night. She'd become fast friends with Melanie – they were into similar books and music, and sometimes even had Bachelorette nights together if their schedules aligned. Melanie had told her a few times that she'd love to have a Betta Fish just like Jude's, but didn't know where to find one with such pretty coloring. Jude had gotten hers at a local pet store, but since she was going away for a pretty long time, she thought this was the perfect time to finally hand her little fish over to Melanie.
"No, I don't understand," her friend clarified, drying a glass off with a rag. "You're just gonna drop your fish off with me and drive to some bum-fuck town in Louisiana? You realize how crazy that sounds, right?"
"Mel, I'm being evicted from my apartment. I was rejected from the writers' program at the Times. My godfather just died. And I ..." She sighed and pushed the tank more across the bar top. "Listen, I already sent in my letter of resignation this morning and I gotta go soon to make it in good time. Can I sell you the fish or what?"
Melanie shook her head, clearly thinking this was a bad idea, but no one could argue with Jude when she was onto something. They had to let her see it through. She was as stubborn as a horse. "Fine, I'll give you one hundred fifty for him because he looks rare."
Jude raised a brow and gave her a big smile. "Two hundred, maybe? You know how my Camino is with gas."
Melanie exhaled heavily again and pilfered through her wallet. She smacked the pile of twenty-dollar bills in front of Jude. "Only for you," she replied, sliding them closer to her.
Jude gave her friend one last hug goodbye before going out to her car that she parked on the street. She checked her trunk, wondering if she missed anything. She had packed up the essentials this morning, making sure to put any family belongings like photo albums or frames in a separate box. Jude didn't have much in the apartment to begin with, besides a few favorite furniture items that she had to leave behind. She didn't even tell her landlord she was leaving; just got her things together and packed them in her old Chevrolet El Camino.
It was times like these that she thanked her lucky stars for keeping a steady stream of money flowing into her savings account every week. There was no way she could make a snap decision like this without it.
It looked like everything was in order. Hopping into the driver's seat, she got her GPS on her phone ready and noticed a few texts from her Creative Director, Adam – more like her old Creative Director, now that she resigned. She ignored the texts, propped her phone into one of her cup holders, and pulled out of her spot. She prayed for the first time in a long while that she was making the right decision. There was no place like home to write a memoir with heart, right?
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The drive to Barton Hollow would take about 3 days. Jude wasn't exactly excited about going back and having to face her family again, but she supposed there came a time in every 20-something-year-old's life when their past came back to bite them. What was she to do – wait for this reunion until she turned 30 in a year's time? Perhaps this was Fate telling her to rip the bandaid off now, so to speak.
Fate usually had a habit of fucking her over.
She was driving through West Virginia as the sun was setting on her first day of driving. Johnny Cash was blaring through her car's speakers – God's Gonna Cut You Down. How fitting. She had her window open as a Lucky Strike cigarette dangled in between her lips, the warm air blowing her hair off her shoulders. It wasn't a hot day by any means; the air was warm, but not humid anymore. Jude was grateful for it, knowing the kind of heat she was going back to in Louisiana. This dry warmth reminded her of every Spring during her childhood, when her godfather would pick her up from school and take her to Dolly's Creamery for ice cream. She would get mint chocolate chip; he got old-fashioned vanilla. His wife, her Aunt Peggy, would join sometimes, or decide to take them out to a movie instead. Back then, movie tickets were at least half the price they are now, but Peggy still complained about it. Once it hit summertime, he would mix it up, taking her to the local watering hole one day and then the park the next. The days when she had to walk home were treacherous. Uncle Abel really had been her best friend, a source of happiness in such a dreary, hot town.
There were good times with her parents, she remembered, but still few. Even some moments in church were good. On Sunday mornings, her mother let her sit with the other kids in front, and she watched her father up at his podium with bright eyes. Sometimes, her dad let her sing with the choir. One of the soprano vocalists, Bridgette Turner, liked to pick Jude up as a toddler and place her on her shoulders as Jude sang with them. After school, she was either with her godfather and aunt, or at the church's after-school program, run by her father. She didn't know it at the time, but these moments when Bonnie-Mae was alone at the house, she used them to get high. And somehow, they all just ignored it by the time they got home and found her asleep in the bathtub.
Those happy memories, the times when she actually remembered herself smiling as a kid, were shrouded when she remembered all the bad. Her parents had loved her for a long time, but not as much as a god-loving family should. They loved her until they simply couldn't. It started when she got her first period, the day she became a "woman" and therefore she couldn't trust any man that wasn't part of her family. (Could she even trust those men too?) As an adult, Jude wondered if there was actual care in her mother's words to protect her from harmful older men, or if she was simply viewing her daughter as a woman upon the first drops of blood.
When she turned 14 and started high school, she stopped attending the church's after-school program. Her godfather didn't pick her up anymore. She still saw him and Aunt Peggy on the weekends, but never as frequently as when she was a kid. Jude had been a teenager – not a stupid one, because her father made sure nothing ruined his reputation – but a teenager nonetheless. She had friends, wanted boys and first kisses, watched parties from afar. She tried to do most normal teenage activities without hurting her dad's character amongst the community.
The straw hit the camel's back a few days after her 17th birthday. By this point, Jude knew her mother was addicted to opioids, but you never know how bad it truly is until you see it firsthand. And then, she saw her mother start to deal one late Friday night. Jude remembered she and a friend were walking back from the creek down by Wayne Road, and they had to hide behind a bush when they spotted her mother. Bonnie-Mae was with two boys from Jude's grade, handing them something in a plastic sandwich bag. She made them promise not to tell anyone before they took the bag. The next Monday, Jude threatened the boys to tell her what happened behind the school with a rock in one hand, and they confessed that they thought the drugs her mother sold them were laced.
She had made the 911 call a day later. Jude had found her mom high and asleep in the bathtub again after school, and then ran to her room to make the call on the house phone. Her voice had been frantic as she talked to the operator, not knowing how much to reveal. The police were at her house at the same time her father arrived, and she remembered watching him argue with them on the front lawn. Bonnie-Mae had woken up when she heard the shouting, and managed to make herself decent before walking outside. She was cuffed and taken to the police station only minutes later.
That was the day her mother stopped speaking to her.
Jude couldn't help but let her mind wander as she drove, and each day, no matter what the time, she kept going back to her dread of seeing Bonnie-Mae again. She remembered the day her mother was sentenced in court, the look of wrath and pure hatred she'd given her daughter, as if she were trying to curse her on the spot. She remembered writing her mother letters, expressing her pain and disgust within herself, wishing she would forgive her for what she did and that she didn't think it would all turn out this way. Her mother didn't answer a single letter. And the times she was able to visit her in jail with her dad, Bonnie-Mae just about ignored her existence.
What was her mother going to do now with an almost-30-year-old Jude? Treat her the same way she did when Jude was 17? She had an inkling that she already knew the answers. Jude had gotten her stubbornness from Bonnie-Mae after all.
It was the second day of driving and Jude just hit the edge of Tennessee. The sweltering weather of the South was already hitting her, and she didn't miss it quite that much. She was about an hour from her destination for the night – a tiny motel just off the highway – but she was running on almost no gas. There were probably only about 10 miles left in her tank. And it was 3 AM.
"The devil's hour," her father used to call it.
Jude didn't believe in that anymore, or most of her father's teachings. But she couldn't stop the sudden fear instilling her body. It was late, and her dad's old words became so much louder in the dead of night. It was hard to ignore something that was so deeply ingrained in her psyche.
"The Devil and his allies are at their most powerful at the hour between 3 AM and 4 AM," her father said once, when she had come home late from a friend's house. "We have known this since the Bible was first written. Jesus died at 3 PM on a Friday, Willodean, and 3 AM is the inversion of that. Trust in me. You are never to be out that late."
Despite her hands starting to shake, Jude knew she had no choice but to stop for gas. She reluctantly pulled over to the first gas station on the side of the highway. The station was completely empty, not a soul remained at this hour. The light above her car flickered every minute with flies swarming around it.
Jude swallowed hard and gripped her steering wheel tight. She blew out a sigh, attempting to expel all the fear from her body, and exited the vehicle. Popping the gas cap off, she stuck her card in until the machine asked her to pull it out. She tapped the regular fuel button and unhooked the nozzle before sticking it inside the tank and pulling on the lever.
She hummed a nonsensical tune to herself as she filled up the car. The light above her head began to flicker more, as if her mere presence was making it burn out. Her hands were still trembling slightly, but she could feel her body relaxing. The air was particularly quiet this late at night. So quiet that she was sure she could hear a rustle just a few feet from her. She lifted her eyes and saw nothing. Just a few bushes full of dead leaves. No one in sight.
And then, she heard the rustle again. She wouldn't fall for it this time. It was probably just a bunny or skunk. But she noticed the flies above her head start to swarm around her, and she had to let go of the gas lever for a moment to swat them away. The lights flickered more rapidly. She gripped the lever again, her tank almost halfway full, and looked back at the bushes again.
Two red eyes stared back.
"Fuck," she muttered. Jude didn't even give herself time to think as she took in the unwavering crimson eyes watching her in the darkness. Her tank was only halfway full, but that would get her to her destination for the night. She ripped the nozzle from her tank and quickly screwed the cap back on. Her hands swatted more flies away and the flickering lights made her breathing intensify. She was sure she wasn't getting enough oxygen in her lung, but she didn't care. The red eyes were still staring, taking her in, not making a move. She jumped into her car from the passenger side, swiftly pushing herself into the driver's seat.
Jude took one last look at the eyes, at the swarm of flies, at the lights that just wouldn't quit flickering above her car. There was something about the color of those irises that was haunting, almost pulling her in. But she knew better than to get close. That was one thing he parents taught her well.
She put the car in drive and stomped on the gas, not looking back.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: oop 🤭🤭 he could've that been at the gas station??? I WONDERRRRRRRR hehe 🤭
also, if you check out the summary, you'll see we FINALLY have an fc for miguel!! I still don't think it's perfect, but hey, miguel is a cartoon so nothing is gonna look exactly like him irl lol. I chose SEAN TEALE as miguel's fc because he's the perfect age and looks almost like a younger version of oscar isaac. and both him and suki waterhouse look SOOOOOOOOOOO good together omg