Page 64 of A Foster Fling

John. I lean out of the window further, and sure enough, I can see it there in his features. He looks like Pearl.

“How did you get inside the meadow?”

“My mother and I share the same blood. Her magic has no effect on me. I followed her here before. She’s been using you, siphoning your power. She never plans to let you go. You need to leave.”

“I know that,” I laugh, the sound sarcastic and dry. “I already know that. I can never leave.”

He turns to look over his shoulder, his chest moving rapidly with each breath.

“What is it?” I ask.

John doesn’t answer. Instead, he runs around to the other side of the tower. I look out and see her as she breaks out from between the trees.

Pearl’s jet-black hair hangs down to her waist, her skin is so pale and luminescent in the last of the sun’s light. But there, clutched in her hand, is something that wrenches a scream from my throat.

In her blood-soaked hand, she holds up Abbe’s severed head. Her cackling laugh echoes across the meadow as she throws it toward the center of a patch of blooming daisies. I watch the man I love glide through the air, then hit the ground with a resoundingthud, and bounce to stop with his face facing me. I fall against the stone sill as I begin to cry. In her other hand, she has a necklace with what looks to be a lock of my hair and she holds it up in the air.

“You let him take my hair!” she screams.

I can’t speak… I can’t do anything but sob as I look down into the dead eyes of my lover.

“How dare you let him take a lock of my hair?” she continues to berate me.

I don’t know when he took that lock of hair… It must have been while I was sleeping. Something to keep on him, to remind him of our love, because surely, he wasn’t trying to steal my essence… Was he?

She walks toward the tower as storm clouds gather behind her. The rage is evident on her face, and I know once she reaches me, I am in for a world of pain. The locks open with her power, and I stand there helpless, still leaning out of the window and crying for the life of my lover.

The door swings open, the metal banging off the stone. Wind howls in through the open door, rushing up the stairs, and flitting through my hair. She steps inside, blood dripping from the tips of those long talons, and those mismatched eyes find mine.

“I took care of you,” she says, her voice sounding like thunder, booming around the stone walls. “I cared for you as if you were my own. I fed you, I clothed you, I protected you. This is how you repay me?”

“How?” I ask. “How did you know?”

“Abbe was also my lover,” she declares. “Do you really think I wouldn’t know what his scent was? How he tasted? When I put my fingers in my mouth that day, I knew he had been inside you.”

“Why did you have to kill him?” I ask as I drop to my knees on the stone floor. “Why?”

She steadily walks up the stairs, her hair flinging out behind her, the wind crashing against my face.

“Because you are mine,” she grits through her teeth. “No one else gets to touch you. Do you realize he was using you? That this lock of hair around his neck was keeping him virile and strong? Not to mention young.”

“Then you’re using me too,” I snap.

“Using you? Using you… I think it’s a pretty even exchange that I’ve let you live this long, with my protection, no less.”

Pearl grabs me by the top of my hair, her talons digging into my scalp, and yanks me to my feet. She drags me across the stone floor, and as much as I try to struggle and fight her, she’s just too strong.

“Now I have to teach you a lesson. That’s what a mother does when their child misbehaves. They get punished.”

She throws me into the chair, grabs my hands in front of me and ties them together with a rough twine. She does the same to my legs, and I whimper from the harsh grip of the rope.

“What are you going to do to me?” I ask.

“I’m going to drain you,” she says. “I’m going to completely drain you, and then if you survive, you will have learned your lesson. Right, Zelinda?”

“Pearl.” I look at her, I try to see the mother I once loved. “Pearl, please don’t do this.”

She takes a bloody knife from inside of her robe, and I know instantly it’s what she used to cut Abbe’s head off. I begin to cry, and she mocks the sound as she grabs a handful of my hair. She begins to roughly cut through the strands, and I watch as they float to the floor.