LoveSpelled – Chapter 1
Megan Booker drove out of Hansen, Georgia for the last time in the muddy blackness that was nine p.m. after a massive storm. Fog reached out, snaking tendrils across the road as it seemed to steam in the summer night.
Then again, the shimmer on the road may have been from the sheen across her own eyes, tears she refused to shed. Harsh, hurtful words lingered in her head though they hadn’t been said out loud at all. She thought she was immune to that by now. That she’d grown a thicker skin. The pain clenching her chest said otherwise.
It had taken all of an hour to pack everything she truly owned, everything she would take with her. It hadn’t been a pretty job. She shoved blankets directly into the trunk of the car, glad she kept it clean. A few small appliances, an insulated mug, and a bag of shoes stuffed the foot wells in the back seat. On top of the seats were several boxes of her favorite books. Never unpacked from when she’d moved home after college, they’d been easy to shove into the car. On top of that lay her hanging clothes. Though she’d rubber-banded the hooks together, the clothes weren’t even covered with so much as a garbage bag. The garbage bags weren’t hers—despite the fact that she’d paid for them—and she wasn’t going to take them.
Next to her in the front seat was a massive pile of her folded clothes. It was shifting each time the road curved, but she didn’t care. As long as it didn’t get in the way of driving fast and far from here, it didn’t matter.
Hansen, Georgia was its own special kind of hell, but she’d stayed anyway. Megan thought of her mother, of her younger sisters—Lizzie and Ari—and wondered what they would do without her. Then she almost laughed out loud. They would do what they always did: defer to her father.
Megan was done with it.
She had everything she owned in the little car, and she owned the car, too. She had money in the bank and some in cash in her wallet because her father wouldn’t let her help with the bills. So she only helped with the ones she could sneak in. Now, she had nowhere she needed to be.
Before she unplugged her laptop, she’d logged into the wi-fi she paid for and penned a quick note to her boss. Due to a family emergency, she was taking a week off. She would check email when and if she could. She was sorry.
Megan had almost written ‘unforeseen family emergency,’ but she should have seen it coming from a mile away. Once she set up her leave time, she canceled the entire phone and TV and internet service, since she’d been paying for that, too.
She wanted to leave it. Let the girls and her mother have cable TV, even if her father didn’t let them watch it. They’d been pretending they just got it by accident, they could keep doing that. She wanted them to have access to the outside world, but she didn’t know where she was going or how much money she would need, and she was angry at all of them.
Broken branches littered the road, and despite her need to get out of town and fast, Megan watched carefully for them. The only way this damp and ugly night could go more wrong was if she had an accident and wound up stuck in the local hospital. The local minister would visit her and pray for her rapid healing.
She couldn’t have that. The local minister was her father. The same man who’d finally kicked her out of the house earlier in the night. He would pray for her rapid healing, but he would also pray that the demons that inhabited her soul be gone. He would pray that she was anything other than what she was. He would call her evil, suggest she invited it, and then, if she wouldn’t denounce her very self, he would demand she leave town.
No, she wasn’t going to get in an accident here.
She swerved around a large branch that blocked her lane, fog rising from it like smoke. The storms here could get epic. The humidity only added to the feeling of evil creeping in around the edges. Megan tried to explain to her father that the air vapor and even the storm itself was a scientific act of pressure and weather fronts. He insisted it was Megan and her evil soul that invited the storm and the damage to the town.
She pointed out that storms happened all the time and would happen after she was gone, too. He countered that the storms had never been like this before she was born.
How was she supposed to refute that?
She didn’t know. But she’d been trying and failing for twenty-eight years.
Megan took I-75 north into Chattanooga. Though it was midnight when she hit town, she didn’t stop. Instead, she hooked onto I-24 and drove several more hours to Nashville. There, she faced a series of forks in the freeway and found herself accidentally on I-40 Westbound and figured that was the best direction anyway.
She didn’t stop until the sun was coming up and all evidence of the storm was far behind her. She rented a room in a cheap hotel and slept until one p.m., missing the free continental breakfast. Consoling herself with fast food, she hit the road again, this time sticking to I-40 West and wondering what town she would hit next. Where she might stick.
Little Rock didn’t appeal. On a whim, Megan took I-30 and dove southwest toward Dallas. The summer heat beat down on the little car. Where she’d had the air conditioning on to fight the humidity when she left Georgia, she now had it set to the coldest possible setting and could still feel the sun on her arms. She’d expected the air in Dallas to be drier. It wasn’t. It felt too much like Georgia, so she headed onward to Austin.
It was a full hour later that she realized the whopping tangle of freeways in Dallas had taken her up into the sky but not aimed her toward the city of her choice. Not familiar with the area, and still upset about everything that had happened the night before, she decided she’d gone too far to turn back. She didn’t know anyone in Austin anyway. Maybe this missed turn was serendipity.
She continued on through Abilene and Odessa before being merged into I-10. With no music playing in the car, only thoughts of anger, regret, and her newfound freedom to keep her company, Megan discarded the advantages of every city she saw. Instead, she cataloged the problems.
Too humid. Too dry. Too tall. Too gray. Too many restaurants. Not enough activities that looked interesting to do.
For a girl with a job that was internet portable, she was open to anything and closed to everything. She just didn’t want to stay in any of these places.
She spent the night in El Paso. It was cool, sprawling, interesting looking. But in the morning, she hopped in the car and made sure she was still headed farther from home.
Megan stopped routinely for gas, chips, coke, and the occasional health bar. She ate dinner that night somewhere with salads and service, a book in hand.
She repacked her clothing into the suitcase she’d originally filled with office supplies in her haste to get out of the house. It was hard to organize your life when you suddenly realized you were getting kicked out of your childhood home with no time to plan. It was difficult to do anything the right way when you were being blamed for the storm tearing shingles off the old roof. It was harder still when you heard your father’s thoughts and knew that for all the vitriol coming from his mouth, all the foul things he said about you, he was actually holding back.
Megan fought tears again. Her father was supposed to love her. She’d read enough books and seen enough TV, met enough other people in college and through her job that she knew he wasn’t normal. Maybe it hurt even more that her mother loved her, but didn’t stand up for her. Megan worried about her sisters, but there was nothing more she could do. Besides, her father was already getting to them. How many times could they be told that their older sister was inhabited by demons before they started to question it? And they had started to. Megan heard the thoughts in their heads. When the storm began in earnest, Lizzie wondered if it was Megan’s fault, if Daddy was right. Then she’d looked at Megan in fear, knowing her sister heard her thoughts.
That had been the worst.
So Megan drove. Farther and farther away.
It was sunset on the third day when she could go no farther.
Turning around and looking over her shoulder as though she could see all the way back to Georgia, Megan thought about what she’d left behind and what might be in front of her.
There were apartment buildings nearby, she could see them from where she parked. Maybe she could afford one; she was educated, made a good salary. People walked by her, mostly they were happy. She could tell.
That was what convinced her to stay.
She could go no further forward, and she wouldn’t go back.
She needed a place for the night and tomorrow she would start hunting apartments. Work wasn’t expecting her to clock in for another four days. So she turned and looked out at the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean.
