Brew (Salem's Revenge Book 1)

  But do I dare? I learned from a very young age that to give away one’s heart is to risk its destruction. And the walls I’ve built around my own heart are tall and thick and surrounded by a moat full of hungry crocodiles.

  Will I lower the drawbridge for Beth?

  I pull back suddenly, knowing the answer is yes and that I already have. I know exactly what I have to say, as if the words are running through my veins.

  The words disappear. They have to be perfect, for she deserves no less. What would I write in my journal? What have I written in my journal?

  My mind goes blank, a black sheet of empty space. I’ve got nothing.

  “Uh…”

  “Rhett Carter, if we stopped kissing for ‘Uh,’ we might as well go back to picking apples,” Beth says, but there’s no real anger or truth to her threat.

  “No, I—” I start, my mind cycling through random words that don’t seem to fit together the way I want them to. “I just wanted to tell you that…” I love you. I freaking love you, Beth, with all of my heart, in every waking moment and in every dream at night. The pedestal I have you on is so high it communes with the clouds, touches the moon, showers starlight across the night sky. You saved my heart the moment I met you.

  I picture my fingers stabbing the keys, bringing my thoughts to life on my screen. I could say them out loud. I could.

  “Just tell me,” she says, a twinkle in her eye.

  “Kiss me,” I say.

  “Now that’s a demand I can get behind,” she says.

  And when her lips meet mine this time, I don’t stop, willing the words I left unspoken to reach her through each and every kiss.

  ~~~

  I wake up gasping.

  Can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t

  Breathe

  I realize my nose is congested and my mouth closed, my lips shut tighter than a clamshell.

  I open them and suck in a ragged, shaky breath, the whoosh of air sweet and somewhat painful in my lungs.

  I never had the chance to tell Beth everything I felt for her. Could she feel it? Why couldn’t I…

  (…just say it?)

  Why did she have to…

  (…die?)

  Hot tears spill from my eyes, rushing down my cheeks, dripping off my chin, soaking Mr. Jackson’s blanket.

  I sit up quickly, the empty sadness morphing into a hot plume of anger in an instant. I want to throw something, to hit someone, to cry into someone’s shoulder, to run and run and run until my legs give out and my heart explodes and I’m so exhausted that I can’t feel anything.

  Instead, I turn around and hit my pillow as hard as I can.

  Sobbing, I fall back, my head fitting perfectly into the punch-hole in the pillow.

  ~~~

  Today we’re going on what Mr. Jackson referred to as “a field trip.” I’m guessing it won’t be to a museum or the planetarium or the zoo. Well, unless the zoo doesn’t have cages and habitats, and the animals are free to slaughter each other as well as the people paying to see them. Then it would be exactly like going to the zoo.

  We transition from the suburbs to the city, sneaking along back alleys and the sides of buildings until we reach our destination: the service door for a hotel on Market Street. The elevator doesn’t work, so we climb the stairs and file into one of the rooms, which was apparently unused on the night of Salem’s Revenge, its king-size bed still tightly made. Mr. Jackson motions me to a thick-draped window and we peer down to the street four stories below.

  “What are we looking for?” I ask.

  “You’ve been asking a lot about what’s happening in the world beyond my house,” Mr. Jackson says. “Well, you’re about to find out.”

  I spot a young girl, no more than nine, barefoot and creeping along the sidewalk, hiding behind cars and peeking in garbage cans. Scavenging for food, most likely. “Is she a witch?” Mr. Jackson asks. A test. Part of my training, which seems to have become a 24/7 part of my life.

  “She’s too young,” I say.

  “Wrong, son.”

  “So she is a witch?” I ask.

  “No,” Mr. Jackson says. “But your reasoning was wrong. Witches are born, not raised. Age is meaningless when it comes to magic. The most wizened old warlock or brand new witch babe are equally deadly to us.”

  The thought of child witches—baby witches—almost makes me gag.

  “So what then?” I ask.

  “Think,” Mr. Jackson says. He’s started saying that more and more, like I’m some idiot jock and not in three AP classes and taking an early SAT prep course.

  Was in three AP classes and taking SAT prep.

  But I do. I think about it. “She’s being too cautious. Witches think they rule the world. If she was a witch she wouldn’t be scavenging or hiding.”

  “Right. Now watch.”

  I hear them before I see them. A keening howl from the sky. I look up, but the blue atmospheric expanse is unmarred by cloud or intruder. The girl starts to run, her little legs carrying her forward much faster than I would’ve expected.

  But not fast enough.

  A strange ripple creases the air, almost like a disturbed pool of water, providing the only evidence of the attack. The girl falls, her long black hair flapping behind her like dark Halloween streamers. “Mr. Jackson!” I shout, starting to get up. “We should help her!”

  “It’s too late,” he says. “We’ll all die if we try to intervene now.”

  I hesitate at his logic, with one foot stuck firmly in place and the other aimed for the doorway. Frozen in place, my mind races with indecision.

  The howling grows louder and louder, and then the sky is filled with dark streaks, rocketing toward us and past us, trailed only by their shrieks and laughs. Witches and warlocks, riding…broomsticks?

  “They call themselves Destroyers,” Mr. Jackson says. “The flying spells only seem to work well on their kind.”

  He catches me staring at the little girl, who is trying to get up, but can’t seem to push against whatever invisible force is pinning her to the sidewalk. “The Destroyers have also mastered the dark art of petrification.”

  I feel the urge to do something, to try to help the girl, but it’s just not in me. It’s never been in me. Two seconds later, it’s over. The air ripples again and the girl screams before she crumbles like stone, breaking into fist-sized chunks that scatter across the sidewalk.

  My heart seems to deflate like a popped balloon and I say, “We let her die.”

  “Better than all three of us dying,” Mr. Jackson says. “You can’t save everyone.”

  “I can try,” I say. Do I really mean that?

  “Then perhaps my trust has been misplaced.”

  “Go to hel—”

  “We’re already there.” Mr. Jackson’s tongue is quicker than mine. Just like his sword.

  My face frown-heavy, I stare at Mr. Jackson, anger and resentment smoldering just beneath the surface. I’m angry at him, but I’m even angrier at myself for not acting. Mr. Jackson stares right back, and I wonder where the kind and emotional man who embraced me yesterday has gone.

  I turn away to look out the window. The dark smears stop painting their way across the sky, becoming the very real witches and warlocks that they are. No broomsticks, just black-leather-garbed people—I use the term loosely—hovering in the air, laughing and joking and gazing down Market Street.

  They stop laughing when a thunderous BOOM! explodes from somewhere in the distance. A huge black ball splits the street in half, knocking one of the Destroyers from the air before the others can even consider moving. The blond-haired leather-wearing witch flies back fifty feet before slamming to the street, her body a mangled mess of exposed bones and spouting blood.

  Witches bleed just like the rest of us. Mr. Jackson made a point of saying that three times before I’d even had a bite of my breakfast this morning.

  Mr. Jackson pushes in beside me again. “Slammers,” he whispers.
If Destroyers are the ultimate air threat, then Slammers are the ground forces, built like tanks. Just yesterday, after I almost got us killed, Mr. Jackson taught me all about the largest witch gangs, how they’re all locked in the ultimate struggle for territory and power. They might’ve united at the beginning in order to wipe out most of humanity, but as soon as the dust settled they splintered like split firewood, as different from each other as dogs from cats. How he’s learned all that from his staticky shortwave radio, I have no clue.

  As if the witches hunting us aren’t bad enough, now the world has erupted into witch gang wars, fought with magic and a level of violence beyond the bounds of technology and the strength of men and women.

  But hearing about it was one thing; watching it in action is a whole new universe of crazy. The Slammers have the ability to grow to the size of two men, giants, walking on legs that are more like tree trunks, sporting fists the size of bowling balls. They march down the street, barely taking notice of the dozens of ripples streaming through the air, sent toward them by the Destroyers.

  When the ripples hit them, the Slammers freeze for a moment. Can it be? I think. Can the Destroyers paralyze them as easily as they did that poor little girl? A moment passes, and then another.

  More ripples in the air, crashing into the Slammers, who now look hard and chiseled, like monstrous statues. One of their feet moves. Then another. Then their arms. With the sound of a wrecking ball demolishing an old brick building, the Slammers break free of the petrification spells, slamming their fists together with cannon-like BOOM!s.

  Black balls fly from their pounding fists, knocking Destroyers out of the sky like flies on the face of a flyswatter, turning them into witch and warl mush. Some of the balls hit buildings, shattering glass and knocking through walls, sending shards of rubble to the street below.

  Only two of the Destroyers manage to survive, retreating high into the sky, where the Slammers’ weapons can’t reach.

  Once the Slammers have stomped away, we sneak back to Mr. Jackson’s house.

  I refuse to speak to Mr. Jackson after what I witnessed.

  Today I got my first real taste of the new world. I brush my teeth a half-dozen times before bed and my mouth still tastes sour and bitter.

  Chapter Seven

  “They deserve to die,” I say. My mouth feels hot, as if the words are superheated.

  “Maybe,” Mr. Jackson says, which is quickly becoming his favorite response to anything I say. He could make a career out of never telling me anything.

  “Maybe? Did you see the same magic-born I saw? They’re murderers, all of them. They can’t even get along with each other. Don’t you think the world would be better off without them?”

  “Do you know each and every one of them?” Mr. Jackson asks.

  I grit my teeth and throw him a look. “I’d rather not, thanks.”

  “How do you know they’re all evil and deserve to die? Who made you judge, jury and executioner?”

  I look away, because, in a way, I know he’s right. What they did to us, we did to them. Only they did it on a much larger scale. “It was genocide,” I say.

  “If you can’t even be honest with yourself, how can you possibly be honest with me?” Mr. Jackson says.

  “I—” I don’t know what to say, because I’m not sure what he means.

  “Look, son, you’re not pissed because the witches killed a whole bunch of people you didn’t even know. It might make you sad and disturbed and a whole lot of other things, like when you watch the news and some strangers are killed in a car accident, but this is not about everyone else, is it?”

  I swallow because I know he’s right. This is about Xave and Beth. Even my righteous anger at the murders of my latest family takes a backseat to my two best friends. And that’s when I know what I have to do. “I want revenge,” I say, hating how much I love the sound of that word in my mouth. I almost say it again, because of the way it makes me feel, how powerful I can be when I’m focused on that one thought. It’s almost as if I was never sad and broken at all.

  “Okay,” Mr. Jackson says. “At least you’re being honest with yourself now. Someday you might have your chance.”

  “No,” I say. “I want revenge now. I appreciate all you’ve done for me, Mr. Jackson. Saving my life and taking me in and…everything. But I’m leaving. I can’t stay here any longer.”

  “Okay,” Mr. Jackson says. “You can leave when you can defeat me in combat.”

  All the strength and hardness blows out of me in a single breath. I’ve never been much of a fighter, but I am athletic and he’s old. “Thanks,” I say, confident I’ll be leaving in no time.

  Chapter Eight

  Before training one day, I ask, “So we’re going to try to find a group of Necros?”

  “Not until you’re ready.”

  “But once I am ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because they’ll be collecting corpses and transporting them to some kind of a central location?”

  Mr. Jackson frowns. “Yes. Why?”

  “I want to be prepared.” I force myself to meet and hold his stare, unblinking. The second I have a chance, I’m out of here. But he doesn’t have to know that.

  When my eyes start to burn, his expression relaxes, and he says, “Good. I’m glad some of what I’ve taught you is finally sinking in. Look, I probably should have told you this sooner, but I’ve been hearing chatter about a large scale movement that’s begun.” He leans forward, his eagerness obvious in his posture.

  “What sort of movement?”

  “Witch hunters,” Mr. Jackson says.

  I blink.

  Mr. Jackson rubs his hands together. “They’re all over the country now. First there were a few ex-military types who got sick and tired of hiding and drinking their own piss and living like animals…they started finding weapons or using their own weapons to kill a few witches and warlocks. They were bragging about it all over the airwaves. People got excited, you know?”

  I do know. Just hearing about people fighting back sends a ripple of thrill-fear down my spine. “And it’s growing?”

  “Big time,” Mr. Jackson says. “There are dozens, maybe even hundreds of witch hunters now. Some of them hunt alone, and others are forming groups to hunt in packs. They’ve killed a few entire witch gangs already.”

  “And they’re surviving?”

  Mr. Jackson’s excitement wanes just a bit, his smile vanishing, his eyes tightening. “There have been casualties,” he says, like it’s a war. But it is a war, isn’t it? The fight for our lives. For our existence. If we lose this war humans will become extinct.

  Extinct. Like the dinosaurs and thousands of other species. The word throbs in my skull.

  “So we’re going to become witch hunters?”

  “When you’re ready,” Mr. Jackson says. I fight off a frown. What if he never thinks I’m ready?

  “And our goal will be to hunt down the Necros?”

  “Our goal will be to hunt down witches who are doing evil.” Not this again.

  “What I still don’t get is how the witches could’ve defeated the U.S. Army,” I ask. Mr. Jackson starts to respond, but I cut him off. “No, not just the army. The Marines, the Navy Seals, the Air Force, the Army Rangers—what happened to all of them? They’re supposed to be unbeatable, right?”

  I pretend not to notice Mr. Jackson’s hands, which twist and writhe over each other. Despite how hard he tries to hide it, his anger is evident in his clenched jaw and the tight line of his thin lips. If nothing else, he hates what the witches did to us. “What’s the quickest, easiest way to defeat your enemy, Rhett?” he asks.

  He’s given me so much advice on fighting that I can’t possibly narrow it down to one right answer. Hit them hard and hit them fast. Use double the force required for the job. The element of surprise has won wars. I shrug.

  “Rip them apart from the inside out,” he says.

  My stomach curls slightly as I pictur
e an alien clawing its way from my stomach, chewing on my organs and bones. “So there were witches in the army?” I manage to ask without losing my breakfast.

  “Not just the army. There were witches in every major organization within the U.S. government,” he says.

  The implications of what he’s saying rolls through me like an earthquake. “While they slept?” I say.

  He nods. “First the weapons were secured, so they wouldn’t be able to fight back. Then each of the traitors took one of the barracks, in bases and forts across the country. They murdered them before they knew there was even a threat.”

  “Impossible,” I whisper, my entire body numb. The entirety of the world’s greatest military devastated in the blink of an eye. My body feels like it’s rising from the couch, floating over the room. Even after weeks and weeks I still can barely believe the world crumbled so easily.

  “No,” Mr. Jackson says. “It was entirely possible. That was the problem.”

  “How do you know this?” I ask, pressing my luck.

  “No more questions,” he says. “It’s time to fight.”

  ~~~

  Every day at training, Mr. Jackson hammers home the point that I’m not just preparing for survival, but to be a witch hunter. While others hide from the witches, I’ll be seeking them out. Tracking them. Fighting them. Seeking my revenge.

  Today training starts two hours earlier, at 4am. Mr. Jackson says if I want to leave so soon I’ll have to train longer and harder. All I have to do is beat him in combat.