Don’t read this unless you like a jaw-dropping ending.
Like seriously. I am about to take a happily ever after and stomp all over it.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
After the epilogue…
I woke and smiled as I stretched. I loved waking up. Every day was awesome.
It felt good to be important. Powerful. Loved.
I reached for Kane, but his spot was empty.
Shame. I loved waking up beside him, especially when I woke up with him inside of me. I rolled over to see what time it was, not that I cared. I never slept in too late. Some habits never died. Although I sometimes lay in bed for hours with my lover.
The more I awakened, the more I felt ugh. Heavy, bloated. My joints ached something fierce. Had I eaten something I shouldn’t have? Since my god blessed me, I no longer had to worry about counting carbs or calories.
I threw my legs over the edge of my bed and stared.
Stared at my heavy-set thighs, my puffy feet hovering above ratty slippers and that horrible dusky pink carpet my cheap-ass husband wouldn’t pay to replace.
The carpet in my old house. The one that burned down.
I stood and gasped, not just because of all the aches and pains. What was wrong with me? A glance down showed more than a hundred pounds of wrongness. Another peek at my surroundings showed me in my old bedroom.
It had to be a nightmare. No way had I gone back in time to that horrid place and my prison of a body. I’d shed all the dead weight in my life. Flesh and husband. I was Naomi Rousseaux, god maker. High priestess. Loved by Kane, the almost-as-high priest.
Pinching only hurt my flesh. I didn’t wake. I’d have to wait out the nightmare. The longest nightmare in existence. My body tortured me. The appearance of my dead husband horrified. Not that I dealt with him much. I tried to wait it out in my bedroom.
One day.
Two days.
On day five, when I realized I’d been returned to my past, I pulled a Lizzie Borden. I knew what I had to do. Where I had to be. The blood moon was coming. I needed to free a god.
They arrested me in the ruins of my grandmother’s cottage. The structure had collapsed, the majestic lake of my youth, shrunken to a muck-covered pond.
I drew sigils to stop them in their tracks. But they must have had stronger magic because they countered it.
They called me crazy. Said I’d killed my husband. Asked me dumb things like if I’d taken any medication or licked any frogs.
I told them I worked for god and that my george would smite them for their treatment of his most honored priestess. When that didn’t work, I screamed for Kane. It was when I began carving the symbols in my flesh to escape that they gave me drugs. So many drugs. As if they could keep me caged.
I would escape.
I’d gotten close the last time. So close to slipping the prison they put me in, and when I did, I’d destroy their pathetic world.
The diamond glass case, more than a foot thick all over, entombed the source of magic. Its surface etched in thousands of symbols and guarded every hour of every day. Even more so since it had managed to open a tiny crack. Already the source strained to escape. They managed to repair it but not before a smidge of it escaped.
Would it cause a problem? The last time they lost a spark it spawned a family of witches.
Kane stood staring long enough at the glowing shape within the diamond coffin that he was joined by another, the biological birther of his current vessel.
“Here again. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you regret your role.”
“No.” A small lie. A part of him wished the moment on the ice could have gone differently. He’d been the one to insist Naomi be given a spell to make her dream. She’d been inside a vision when they trapped the body that held the source.
“If you don’t care, then why do you come here every day to see her?”
“Wouldn’t you if you’d slept with a goddess?” He regretted nothing. Especially not his seed growing in her womb.
And that is the most scream-worthy ending, the kind I love. Thanks for coming with me on this epic journey of discovery.