Home > The Bitterwine Oath(5)

The Bitterwine Oath(5)
Author: Hannah West

When his lips connected with mine, soft and unfamiliar, euphoria rushed through my veins. The cobbler slid off my plate onto the grass. Why he was kissing me, I couldn’t say. But it was sudden and sure, wild and surreal.

He pulled away to study my face, to confirm that I wanted it as much as my lips implied. I answered by dropping my paper plate, standing on my toes, and gripping the solidness of his shoulders through the sweaty cotton shirt. I could sense turmoil inside him, tight in his muscles. His hands moved earnestly, streaming through my hair.

My only thought was wow.

We overheard his mom ask someone where he’d gone. Instead of startling apart, we took our time letting the kiss taper off, his thumb brushing over the apple of my cheek. We stared at each other before he said, “I guess I should get back.”

I nodded.

He left.

Now, as I sat in his passenger seat, that moment felt like a fever dream. If Levi hadn’t just apologized, I’d think I was as delusional as poor Lillian Pickard.

His tires kicked up chalky dust as we turned onto my driveway. I couldn’t decide whether I was relieved or disappointed that our time together had ended so soon.

“Are you coming to Toledo Bend on Sunday?” I asked.

“Yeah, I think I will.” He got out, opened the tailgate to release the dogs, and met me on the passenger side.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said.

“Any time.”

Levi Langford’s truck rattled over my driveway as the sun sank over the fields.

I had to wonder if that sound, like the kiss, would be a just-this-once thing.

 

 

THREE

 

 

The screen door banged shut behind me.

“Don’t look!” my mom called, peeking her perfectly coiffed blond head out from the living room. Jodi Colter couldn’t even pop into the nearest gas station without a quick hair tease. “I’m wrapping your presents.”

“Not looking,” I said, shielding my eyes as I traipsed over the creaky hardwood toward my room, but there would be no surprises. Mom insisted on wrapping the dorm supplies we’d picked out together, including the four shopping bags of school-spirit merch she’d hoarded for me. At her insistence, she and I even had matching gold-and-purple Tigers sweatshirts. My future roommate would run for the hills.

“Make sure there’s space on the camera for pictures tomorrow!” Mom called after me.

“I forbid you to take more than a hundred,” I called back.

She muttered something akin to “We’ll see about that” as I closed my bedroom door. I grabbed the backpack I’d tossed at the foot of my bed after school, digging through graded papers—As in history and English, low Bs in science and math—to find my cap and gown, still wrapped in plastic.

Outside my window, night eclipsed the pink-and-lavender sky. Growing up in a town that was notorious for its unexplained tragedies, I couldn’t help but fear the dark. The half-serious superstitions had baked frightful fantasies into my imagination. Secret terrors seemed to cluster in the shadows of particular places.

One time, during a sleepover, I’d snuck into the hollow sanctuary of Calvary Baptist at night to touch the lectern on a dare. The Dixon twins were friends with the daughter of the church handyman, and they’d stolen the keys so we could play the most thrilling game of truth-or-dare in San Solano history. The fear I’d felt as I tiptoed between the pews was so primal that I’d barely brushed the lectern with my fingertips before forsaking my dignity and sprinting back to the others, who giggled nervously from the foyer.

The same fear set upon me any time my friends and I went looking for thrills by driving down the road that dead-ended near the cabin in the woods, the place where Malachi, Lillian, Dorothy, and Johanna had gathered a hundred years ago.

Legends of the magical clearing predated even the old cabin that sat on it—but since Malachi had come along, those legends of that strangely hallowed ground had been subjected to a century of gruesome embellishment. According to town lore, in the weeks leading up to the copycat massacre, blood-drenched talismans made of bones, twigs, and twine had dangled from the trees, and remains of mutilated animals had been scattered on the ground. The cabin itself, where the girls had supposedly conjured evil, took on a fetid—one might dare say, sulfuric—smell. That was one of the campiest claims, and I couldn’t help rolling my eyes every time I heard it.

But it got campier. Some professed to see a blond girl in the woods, wearing a gown stained with blood from the waist down—Malachi in her baptismal robe. We had the town’s recollection of the particularly eventful Easter Sunday service in 1918 to thank for that imagery. Malachi’s father, Reverend Rivers, had resolved to baptize her in hopes that a public profession of faith would help curb her wild behavior. But when Malachi surfaced, the water in the baptistery filled with blood, and Malachi cackled. The entire congregation witnessed it. Some called it a young girl’s lark that had gone too far. Others believed it to be the work of a demonic spirit that had possessed her. Now it was widely believed to be an incident of mass hysteria and collective false memory.

I flicked on my desk lamp and shut the blinds as if to put these thoughts to bed. But I found myself drawn to the bookshelf in the corner.

Amid historical novels and dense biographies, Lillian’s book looked lean and unassuming. It was my grandmother’s first edition. The worn paper jacket was matte black with the silhouette of a pine forest in a sickly hunter green. The outdated, all-caps title always felt like it was screaming at my eyes.

After briefly riffling through the pages, I reshelved it. As a kid, I’d scoured every word and studied the Malachian mark for hidden meanings beyond what Lillian described, fantasizing that I might be the one to find a secret clue and solve the murders. That morbid fascination—okay, maybe it had been an obsession at one point—could easily engulf me again.

I didn’t need to dredge up fear like dragging a lake for a body that had already wasted to particles. Nothing would come of this anniversary. Nothing. And then everything could go back to normal.

Leaving my sweaty clothes in a pile on my bathroom floor, I stepped into the shower and closed my eyes. The water soothed the scrapes from my fall.

Now that I was alone, the reckoning I’d been dreading since last August finally came. I had to face the fact that the kiss with Levi wasn’t just a delectable memory that would dissolve if I dwelled on it for too long. Levi wasn’t ephemeral, like the last ounce of my grandma’s discontinued perfume in the vial on her dresser, which I feared to open in case the memory of her essence should evaporate forever.

He was here. In town. For the summer.

And he was sorry.

I wouldn’t read into his apology. I would not.

I skulked back to my room, changed into sleep boxers and a tee, and started typing a group text to Lindsey and the twins about the talismans. But actually seeing the words raised fine hairs on my forearms, so I erased the text and sat crisscross to blow-dry my hair in front of my closet mirror. I’d barely gotten started when I noticed that Pagans of the Pines was sticking out from the top bookshelf as if someone had pulled it to try to access a secret room.

Through a cascade of dirty-blond strands, I glared at the reflection of the book, feeling oddly powerful, half expecting it to fall off the shelf or fly and hit the wall. It didn’t. It remained there until I pushed it flush with the others, turned off the lights, and fell asleep to an orchestra of crickets and katydids.

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