Free The Witch and the Werewolf by John Burks Page A

now?”
    The boy just shrugged.
There was no reason to tell her.
    “ I’m sorry.”
    “ You lost someone too,”
Jeremy said. Not a question. He could see her loss like a black
spot on her otherwise azure soul.
    “ How do you
know?”
    “ I can see it in
you.”
    She nodded in agreement,
closed her eyes, and concentrated as if the bubble protecting them
might disappear at any moment.
    “ You’re not normal, are
you?” the boy asked.
    “ I don’t think either one
of us are,” the girl responded.
    “ No, I guess not,” the boy
said.
    Eight year old Jeremy had
no idea how his life could change so much in a single day. Was this
weird ability to see without eyes always apart of him or did the
arrival of Wormwood somehow change him?
    He watched as cars and
buses pushed by the bubble. The inatimate objects had their own
life-force, that he could see, and were mostly a dull gray. He
cringed when one car, intact and apparently fairly waterproof,
whipped by, a family pounding on the windows to try and get out.
Their auras were a bright red, pulsating with fear. There were
bodies too, by the hundreds; so many that he the girl’s eyes were
closed. The water was filled with garbage and debris. He panicked
as a huge cargo ship passed over them, the bottom of its hull
scraping the top of the bubble.
    “ You don’t know how you’re
doing that?” the boy asked again, as if to confirm.
    “ No,” she said softly.
“But I think my mother was a witch.”
    “ So you’re a
witch?”
    “ I think so.”
    “ Do you have any other
cool powers?”
    Cassandra shrugged.
“Maybe. But my mother is gone, now. I don’t know how I’ll find out
if I do or not.”
    “ How do you not know the
powers your mother had? Wouldn’t that be like Bruce Wayne having a
son and the son not know his father was Batman?”
    “ More like Wonder Woman,”
the girl commented and Jeremy, despite the situation, couldn’t help
but smile. “But no, I don’t know. She kept me pretty sheltered. I
didn’t get out much and that part of her life was a secret.” He
could hear the sadness in her voice.
    “ Those things got her,
didn’t they?”
    “ Yes,” she said, and the
bubble faded to bright red, matching her anger. “Werewolves. I’m
going to find them and I’m going to kill them.”
    “ They were black as
night,” the boy told her. “I mean… their, colors,”
    “ I think aura is the word
you’re looking for,” she said, interrupting.
    “ Yeah, auras. They were
black like evil.”
    “ What do you mean? Is that
how you’re seeing? Like colors?”
    “ Yeah… your glow, when
you’re mad, is red. Before that you were blue, like the bubble. I’m
kind of a purple. Those things, though, they were black. I didn’t
like them at all.”
    “ I don’t blame you,
kid.”
    “ Don’t call me kid. I’m
almost nine.”
    “ Sorry,” she said with a
grin. “Maybe we’re both witches.”
    Which would be about the
weirdest thing Jeremy could think of to happen at the end of the
world.
    “ How long do you think you
can make it last?”
    “ The bubble?”
    “ Yeah,” he added. “Do you
feel weird or anything?”
    “ I’m tired,” she
said.
    “ Can you keep it up till
the water clears?”
    “ I…” the doubt was evident
in her hesitancy. “I don’t know. I don’t even know how I’m doing
it.”
    Jeremy watched as another
ship passed over them, churning sideways and pushing an island of
garbage in front of it. He could see men alive, inside the holds of
the ship, glowing red with panic.
    It was going to be a long
night.
     
    “ We made it,” Ross said as the waves receded. “We really made
it.”
    The Merick had come to a
rest in the remains of downtown Houston, Texas. Buildings were
ripped away and the streets were filled with the debris and remains
of cars and, worse, so many corpses. His wife stood next to him on
the deck, looking over the side at the devastation Wormwood had
wrought. The skies were filling with black