Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 116220 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 581(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 387(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 116220 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 581(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 387(@300wpm)
Are you sure that’s all you want to know?
Kyle didn’t know how to respond.
Tristan stopped stroking Brock’s hair and looked up. I can tell you a whole lot more than how I put him to sleep. But first, I have a request.
“What?”
Would you eat lunch with me tomorrow? I don’t enjoy sitting alone, and as it turns out, your friend here was right. I have no one at this school. Not even a … what’s it called? … “study buddy”.
Kyle frowned at Brock. “He’s not my friend.”
Tristan lifted an eyebrow. Is that a yes?
3.
Creating Monsters.
—∙—
It was a restless night of sleep for Kyle.
Not just because of the inconvenient erection he wrestled with under the sheets.
He found himself thinking about Halloween five years ago for some reason. He was thirteen. Kaleb, eight. Brock was with them, too. Instead of trick-or-treating like they were supposed to, the boys went to a psychic, her shop sandwiched between a drug store and a RadioShack. Kyle still remembered the smell. Musk, old books, a cloying fragrance from somewhere unseen. He had wanted to do something special for his brother who was never allowed to experience such things. He had saved up lunch money and allowance just for that night.
But the old psychic, her long silver hair, her brown papery skin, her odd mismatched eyes, she didn’t take a cent from him. Children, she called them all. Foolish, reckless little children. She told them to take a seat. Only Kyle did, Kaleb being too distracted wandering around the place looking at this, at that, gawking at the strange trinkets on the shelves, a rack of tiny vials along the wall, potions, tinctures, tonics, likely filled with nothing but colored water and nonsense, Kyle presumed. But in front of the strange lady, he didn’t dare mock any of it. Brock was in the back of the room playing it cool, arms crossed, smirk on his face. The woman didn’t sit. She stood over Kyle, peering down at him for a long while, her eyes growing harsh, soft, then harsh again, as if watching a troubling movie only she could see, her long silver hair like a curtain.
“You will live a long life,” she then told him, words spindly and drawn out like piano wire. “A very, very long life. You will make friends. You will make foes. You will make friends who slay your foes … and foes who slay your friends.”
Kyle never believed in psychics or magic, but when the lady looked at him, he felt as if she could see his darkest desires.
“If you ever find yourself lost,” she had said, “a lone lion in the middle of nowhere without your pride, where even sunlight cannot hope to penetrate the darkness of your life … you will find comfort in an old enemy … whose hatred will save you.”
“Lion! Rawr!” Kaleb had shouted as he swung his arms around like a little monster on the savannah, bearing teeth.
“Shut up, Kaleb,” Kyle hissed at him, embarrassed.
The old woman wasn’t annoyed by the boy. She seemed to find him adorable. “You, too, shall live a long life,” she said to Kaleb, a twinkle of joy in her eyes. “Music,” she then stated, as if the word came to her as a surprise. “You will cherish it. It will be your greatest and only love … but you will hate it first.”
It was then that Brock pushed away from the wall. “What about me? What’s my fortune or whatever?”
The look the woman gave Brock right then could wither a garden of roses to ruin. Kyle remembered her face reflecting sadness when she answered. “You, handsome little devil … you will have a wife you love, a child you love, and a best friend you love … and you will abandon them all.”
Brock fumed in an instant. “That’s stupid.”
Kaleb let out a burp right then, rushed to the side of his brother who was still seated, and asked, “Do you have candy?”
Her mouth wrinkled up. “Will Snickers do?”
That year, it felt as if the Fates themselves wove a path to guide the three of them to that old psychic lady, even if it was just entertainment, just bullshit. The boys all left with Snickers bars and a whole lot of nothing in their buckets. And as Brock went on cursing about how “old and dumb” that psychic was, Kyle peered back at the parlor several times, feeling like the building itself was watching them walk away.
Kyle turned over and over in bed, thinking about that night five years ago, thinking about psychics and strange eyes, about Tristan and what he did to Brock in the hallway, about magic and impossible things, about fate.
Something was coming for Kyle, he just knew it. He felt it in his heart, a cold and difficult sensation, like fear, yet exciting.