The Broken Destiny (35 page)

“Maya,” I said softly, remembering her navy blue eyes, her rosy cheeks, her ivory skin and how it contrasted with her dark hair, her sweet scent. I imagined her in my head as if she were tangible and standing right in front of me.

“
Where are you?
” Her voice flew into my mind, distant at first.

I showed her, with my mind.

“
Ava?
” Her thoughts were transmitted into my mind again, a little louder this time.

“
I’m fine. Great actually,
” I thought. “
Hurry!
”

I showed her a vision of Enoch’s body.

I felt her smile.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Uprising

T
he witchdoctor finally arrived, ceremonial paints of red and white covered and marked his entire body, neck and face like a second skin. Despite the brave face he was putting on, I could see the panic in his eyes. His son had gone against his wishes, had screwed it all up for him, and it was entirely my doing? Inside, I was laughing hysterically. If there was one thing I was good at, it was manipulating people to do exactly what I wanted them to do. I’d been doing it my entire life, and it was paying off.

“You
will
let me and all the villagers go free,” I said, the second he walked in.

“They do not belong to you,” he sneered.

“You,” I stressed as I stomped toward him, “do not own anybody.”

Between his contorted fingers, he held a dark orange clay pot. He pressed it toward me.

“The remains of your beloved,” he said with a smirk.

I knew he was lying. It was plastered all over his smug face. I smiled dryly.

“I won’t tell you again,” I threatened.

He fell silent. I walked back to where Enoch had lain earlier and crouching, looked down at the tiny black specks on the wine-red carpet – his blood. I smiled up at him, challenging him.
Did he want the same fate?
I mused. I stood still, smiling at him. Quickly, he grabbed his staff, and before I could react, a bolt of lightning shot out from the skull and penetrated my chest. My body knotted under the pain.

“Oh, Ava,” He laughed. “This is how wrong you are.”

He smashed the pot on the ground and walked toward me. I rose slowly, one limb at a time, my skin on fire. Nothing I couldn’t handle at that point.

“You have stolen my son’s essence. You stupidly forgot that my blood runs in his blood, which means I own you.”

Another bolt of lightning came hurtling toward me. My chest rose and fell rapidly as I gasped for air. I closed my eyes and took the sting. When my mind finally recovered from the shock, I drew in a steady breath and filled my lungs with warm air. My smile returned. He didn’t know it, but the poison that was running through my blood was slowly being diluted by the stronger bloodline, a bloodline I didn’t understand, but could feel its power working for the first time – in the way I needed it to. I don’t know how I knew this, I just did. It was the same as what had happened earlier, when I had known how to do things I had not done before. It was as if my soul had remembered what my mind could not. The details were still unclear to me, but I was sure that the chain of events leading up to Troy’s death had sparked something within me. Consequently, Troy’s death had been the catalyst that had set it all in motion and sparked my destiny. My body and soul crossed over when I had given myself to Enoch, brought on a power I hadn’t yet explored. I pretended to yield to the witchdoctor. Why I hesitated to kill him right there and then, I’ll never know. I guess I couldn’t stand the thought of touching him. He swallowed a vial of dark liquid, pulled me toward him and blew dark smoke into my mouth. My eyes widened in shock as the smoke clung to my taste buds, causing me to gag and hurl a few times. He began his ritual, speaking, chanting, dancing all around me. The drums echoed throughout the night air. The same acid I had thrown up when I was in the infirmary was now streaming down my throat once more, burning its way into my lungs and stomach, slowly filling me up with an angry presence. It was a different kind of darkness, it was not my own. I stood staring in disgust and horror.
What was happening to me?

“Feel it, Ava. Feel the power of
our
ancestors work its way through you.”

I screamed and gasped for air. My mind began to fog over. I was heading into the unknown, not consuming it. I started to tremble all over. I tried extremely hard to keep my mind afloat as it reached and clawed for freedom. All of a sudden, an unfamiliar voice echoed through my mind as one more bolt from his staff rippled through my body, bringing the fog to the forefront of my mind.

“The spirit of Shaka will rise again!” The witchdoctor’s voice boomed throughout the room.

My body jolted as the spirit of the ancestors took hold of me. My mind clouded over until I was no longer looking through my own eyes. They became strange to me and the room became unfamiliar. I robotically grasped the witchdoctor’s staff. I felt alive with a rotten hatred that coursed through my veins – the taste of revenge hung in the air, this too, was not my own. When the witchdoctor bowed, I could feel a piece of myself beating faintly inside me. My soul smiled. Me – I was still there, inside somewhere. But my face never smiled back. As the foreign eyes looked down at my arms, a strange voice, nothing like my own, screamed out of my mouth, “A white girl!”

Wrapping my hands around the staff, I shot a bolt of lightning toward everyone in the room. They all tumbled to the floor. The witchdoctor bit down hard. I could see that he was hurting.

My pulse raced with fire coursing through my veins, unlike anything I had experienced of late.

“Leave me!” Said the voice that had entered my body.

I knew that I had been possessed, but I also knew that the process of taking over my soul wasn’t complete, because I was aware of everything this
thing
was forcing me to do. My body walked over to the window, stared up at the dark sky void of a single star’s shimmer.

“No!” I screamed and turned to glare at the witchdoctor. “It’s too soon! Your timing is off! What have you done?”

The witchdoctor crept closer.

“Oh, Great Spirit,” he bowed. “Please forgive me. The girl is strong, my Lord, I had no choice but to take hold of her before…”

My hand struck him. His body was hurled across the floor and it smashed into a wooden chair, rendering him unconscious for a split second.

“You doubt my power? The power of your ancestors? Your punishment will be brutal.”

The witchdoctor tried to get up, but fell down again. After a few attempts, he eventually got to his feet.

“This mind is restraining me and it is fighting me. Go! Prepare for the ceremony. The ancestors will clear the skies so that the three moons may smile upon us.”

The witchdoctor bowed.

“Fool!” I spat, as I threw another bolt of lightning at him. My chuckle tainted the air with cruel laughter as I watched him scamper away.

The staff shook in my grasp and they all left in a hurry. I was alone with that
thing
inside me. My thoughts became more detached from my body the longer I lurked in the shadows of my mind. I was watching myself through my eyes as if they were a window. The spirit inside me perceived the world vaguely. I wondered how old it was. It must have been old, as King Shaka lived during the 1800s back on Earth. I also knew how he had died; betrayed by his own family and murdered. He was back to finish what he had started on Earth, to build the prefect race, to breach the underworld and avenge his murder. I turned and walked over to the mirror once again. The sensation of walking on a dead leg pervaded my entire body. From head to toe, I felt numb and unhinged from any blood flow, but, unlike when a leg has simply fallen asleep, my mind could not control my body’s actions. I finally knew what all ‘those dreams’ were about. When I had struggled to free my body from being paralyzed, I hadn’t been paralyzed, I had been possessed. In a way, I had seen what was coming for me. Staring into the mirror, I was aware that it wouldn’t be much longer before the spirit figured out that I was still inside, thinking freely and plotting against it. But, I was okay with the darkness coming for me. I wished there was someone there who could help me, who could free me from the grotesque spirit that was strangling me from the inside out.
Or, am I inside of it?
I pondered. I felt what it felt and saw what it saw.
If only I could hear its thoughts
, I mused. I was standing in front of the mirror looking at myself through someone else’s eyes. At first, I felt repulsed, but the longer it stared, the better I felt and the stronger I became. Within my stormy gray eyes, I was coming through. Then, envy rose up inside me. The feelings were not my own. I watched as my gaze fell on the pieces of clay on the floor. Anger rippled through me. Those masks were of other ancestors that were supposed to be summonsed the following night. Inside, I laughed. This
thing’s
weakness was its anger. With sudden realization the spirit knew I was there, challenging his every move. So, I watched as the hatred and rage took over and screamed out as my hand grabbed a sharp piece of clay and started cutting away at my face, and then continued on to the rest of my body. Once again, my fear had paralyzed my ability and I begged for it to stop. The ancestors’ spirit was taking over and I was allowing it to.
I can’t let this happen!
I told myself. I screamed for Maya, but there was no answer. I was being overpowered. I was slipping away. Abruptly, everything came to a screeching halt. There was a figure standing behind me. It was Troy. The spirit used my face to smile.

“This is your destiny, Ava.” It told me. My bloody hands reached for Troy’s neck, got a good grip around it and squeezed. Troy didn’t resist.
Troy, it’s not me! You have to do something! Stab me! Do something, please
, I begged. He just stood there, letting that
thing
inside me strangle him to death. His face turned red and then purple. I was going to kill him! I couldn’t let that happen. I would rather have killed myself. I dropped Troy and fell to the floor beside him. He lay there gasping for air.

“I will kill him now.”
It
smiled from within. I still felt detached from my body, which unexpectedly flung itself into the mirror, smashing it and sending a shower of silver shards to rain over us. The spirit was frantically fighting back. It had realized what was happening and its plan was failing. We were struggling against each other, within one body. This was like something out of a horror movie.

Troy gasped for air. “Ava.”

I hardly heard him. I had to shove that thing out of me,
soon
.

I fell to the floor again; blood ran down my face, burning my eyes, but it was the pain inside my head that was threatening to suffocate me, take me asunder. Still, I would rise!

I would not allow this thing to kill my loved ones for the sake of revenge against me, the one who threatened to ruin it all. I reached for an elongated shard of glass from among the shattered pieces of mirror on the floor and picked it up.

“I will kill every last one of you!” The
thing
screamed at me.

I had no time to think – I just did it; buried the glass deep into my body. Perhaps if the body was dying,
it
would, too? The
thing
laughed, so I imbedded the razor-sharp shard even deeper. There was no pain, at all. I blocked the healing ability – I had to. When I saw the terror in Troy’s eyes, the pang of regret sobered me up. I fell to my back, struggling to breathe, felt the warm sticky goo drain from my body. No matter how many breaths I drew, I could not breathe. My hands were numb and lifeless. I watched Troy watching me and I pledged to him that the spirit of the ancestors would die with me. I could hear its screams in the distant recesses of my mind as life faded. Troy grabbed me and jerked me toward him.

“Ava, no! Not like this…” My mind was fading and he become fuzzy.

My senses blurred, zooming in and out of focus. I could feel his warm hands holding onto me and then the feeling disappeared. I could hear his soothing voice and then it, too, was gone. He was alive. That was all that mattered. I had saved one life already and my death would save many more.

“I saved you,” I said faintly. I couldn’t feel the smile I was trying so hard to project.

“No, Ava,” he said angrily. “You die and I die too.” He was actually tearing up.

My heart sank. I thought I would have felt peace as my life drained away, but I didn’t. Something was wrong – horribly wrong. I began to think that Troy was right and that my death wasn’t the answer. I realized that killing myself might kill the spirit of the ancestors, but it wouldn’t stop the witchdoctor. I realized that he would try again and again, first going after my sister and then Troy, if he found out he was still alive. I realized I had to hold on. I realized I had made a mistake.

“Troy.” I reached for him.

He didn’t have to say anything. It was all there in the way he looked at me. My future was slipping away.

“I failed. I’m so sorry.”

For a moment, I could feel warm tears streaming down my face, but the warmth soon disappeared.

“Kiss me.” I said.

And he did. I felt his warm lips brush against mine, but moments later when he kissed me fully, I had already lost the sensation on my entire face. I couldn’t smell him; I couldn’t draw in his scent one last time before I died. I could smell his sweet scent no more. I summoned the last bit of will I had left, just to feel him one last time. His lips claimed mine once more and it felt like nothing I had ever felt before. A strong, warm and natural sensation enveloped me. It felt like I finally belonged. When he kissed me it felt like I had found the only place where it would all be okay. There was nothing I had done that couldn’t be fixed by that feeling.
I have to pull through. I have to have more of this.
My head started to spin. I wasn’t sure if it was from loss of blood, or yearning. At that moment, I could have consumed all of him and never let him go. I would carry that with me into the next life. I drew in more of his scent, thinking that this should be the part where the golden light came raining down on two lovers and one is saved by the other’s kiss. It wasn’t. It only got darker, my senses numbed and I felt depleted. He disappeared entirely. He vanished from my sight, my touch and my heart. It was lonely and it was dark. I had failed again and I knew that that would be the thought that stayed with me for all eternity.