The Bitterwine Oath Read online

  But when I shut the squealing mailbox, I noticed something odd at the base of the nearest fence post: a smooth stone with a neat engraving. I bent to scoop it up.

  My mouth went dry as I traced my thumb over each familiar component of the design. A triangle pointing down with a horizontal line through the bottom third. Earth.

  Two diagonal lines crossing through the triangle. Bone.

  A smear of dried, dark red at the center. Blood.

  It was the Malachian mark.

  TWO

  Fear caressed my vertebrae, one by one.

  A staggered procession of identical talismans followed the fence posts in both directions, stretching out as far as I could see.

  It had to be a hoax, right? Probably the boys’ track team. A few weeks ago, we’d stolen all their car tires during practice and devised a scavenger hunt that took them hours. Capitalizing on the massacre anniversary to retaliate was wicked, but admittedly clever.

  I imagined the boys meticulously carving each symbol, mixing corn syrup and food coloring to add that macabre touch of fake blood. I admired their dedication. Still, I couldn’t leave the stones for someone else to find. Even my levelheaded parents might get upset. They had let the local news interview us for a profile, hoping to get ahead of the publicity, but they were tired of the attention and disruption. My dad might mention the talismans to the sheriff, and then one of these idiot boys would get in trouble. I didn’t want that to happen.

  Jamming the envelopes back in the mailbox, I made a basket out of the hem of my tank top and started collecting the stones. Maverick and Ranger loped ahead of me to follow the scent of cow patties, their twitching noses as purposeful as divining rods. By the time I had amassed a pile, I dabbed my temples and stared down the road. How many more could there be? The boys’ most elaborate prank so far had involved wearing masks to scare us during fall cross-country practice.

  I studied the engraving again. The lines were careful, precise. Other than the copper-red smear at the center, each stone was identical to the last. This had taken time, skill, maybe even special tools.

  The sputter of an approaching engine startled me. I looked up to see a rusty blue pickup slow to a stop on the road.

  I dropped my collection of stones, watching them tumble to the grass underfoot. My heart clambered up my throat as though trying to escape the inevitable. But I tightened my wilting ponytail and put on a smile.

  To my surprise, Levi Langford didn’t just shout hello and drive by. He pulled over into the grass on the side of the road, got out, and rounded his truck to greet me.

  It had been so long since I’d seen him that I couldn’t help looking him over. He was redheaded, tall, and broad-shouldered. Fine lashes fringed his deep-set hazel eyes. Full, almost pouty lips softened the angles of his square, clean-shaven jaw, and a pale dusting of freckles across his ruddy complexion made him look utterly guileless.

  “Nat Colter,” he said, sliding his arm around me in a polite hug. If he minded my sweat, he didn’t show it—and if he’d seen me collecting rocks, he didn’t acknowledge it.

  “Levi Langford. Good to have you back.”

  “It’s good to be home.”

  A few feet of distance rematerialized between us. He tucked his hands in his pockets and the veins in his arms swelled beneath the sleeves of his gray tee. Whatever else I thought of him, those arms were the Lord’s work.

  “What are your plans this summer?” I asked, wondering if they included staying longer than a few days. He hadn’t even come home for Christmas.

  “Nothing exciting. Cutting lawns and helping my mom around the house. What about you?”

  “Babysitting again and volunteering with the Heritage Festival.”

  “Interesting year to be a part of that,” he said, furrows manifesting on his freckled forehead.

  “Interesting year to live in San Solano at all,” I replied. I nearly brought up the talismans just to have something to talk about, to squirm out of the awkward silence I could see coming from a mile away.

  But he patched over it quickly. “Congrats! I heard you swept regionals and took fifth at state in two events. You’re heading to Louisiana in the fall, right?”

  “That’s right. I heard you had a couple poems published.”

  “Yeah,” he said, but didn’t elaborate. Instead, he deflected. “What are you majoring in?”

  “History. I either want to teach or be a library archivist.”

  “Ah, that makes sense,” he said. He looked down at his shoes while I watched the sun droop like a ripe apricot.

  Eventually, he cleared his throat. “I’m sorry if I gave you whiplash. Before I left. I know it must have felt…abrupt.”

  The straightforward apology threw me off. By the most generous estimate, our romance had lasted less than a minute.

  One encounter. One kiss.

  It happened at his going-away party. We’d been standing in Maggie Arthur’s garden, swathed in the fragrance of flowers and fresh-cut grass. The secret kiss had tasted like a pinch of salt in clear water as the tiniest beads of sweat had found their way into our mouths.

  A perfect storm of raw emotions and attraction. That’s all it was. I hadn’t allowed myself to feel anything else. That brief encounter didn’t warrant feelings.

  But his apology broke the levee I hadn’t even realized I’d built. At once, I recalled every succulent detail, the sudden charge of intensity that came like a crack of white lightning, the way it felt to rake my fingers through his shock of red hair. How it had taken him leaning down and me standing on tiptoe for him to kiss me good and proper. Hold the proper.

  My voice shook a little as I said, “I know you were going through a lot with your dad passing away. I didn’t expect…” I trailed off with a dismissive wave.

  “I’m still sorry,” he said.

  “It’s okay.”

  He cleared his throat. “Do you want a ride home?”

  Glancing back, I realized I’d walked farther down the road than I’d thought. My family owned thirty acres. The crickets had started to trill their twilight tune, and I didn’t want to be out alone after dark. I hummed my indecision and finished with, “Sure, thanks.”

  “Sorry it’s a mess,” Levi said as he opened the door for me. I climbed onto his cracked leather bench seat. A pair of work boots caked in mud took up my legroom, and a travel mug in the cup holder smelled of strong, black coffee.

  “Do you want to bring the dogs?” he asked, circling the truck to unlatch the tailgate.

  I leaned out the window and whistled. Maverick and Ranger cocked their heads, their ears standing upright, and bolted back from our next-door neighbor’s pastureland.

  I almost propped my feet on the dash before I remembered that Levi and I weren’t that comfortable with each other. We’d always belonged to the same big friend group. We’d both run track and cross-country. I’d tutored his younger sister, Emmy, for a history exam. Mr. Langford would have been my senior English teacher if he hadn’t passed away.

  But over the years, I’d noticed Levi avoiding me. He would fall quiet when I joined a conversation and wander away soon after, letting just enough time pass to prevent seeming rude.

  Our mutual friends remained oblivious to this dynamic, especially the twins. They’d grown up in church with Levi, attending all the same summer camps and Bible studies. They wouldn’t believe that I could live a couple miles away from Levi, know everyone he knew, and never once hold a one-on-one conversation with him. It was statistically impossible.

  And yet the kiss had been our first-ever private encounter. Even then, only a garden trellis had separated us from the other party guests.

  I could think of just one explanation for Levi acting so slippery, however unreasonable it seemed: the history between our families.

  Levi was Lillian Pickard’s great-great grandson. Lillian was one of the four San Solano girls who had been tried for the 1921 murders of twelve men in the sanctuary of Calvary Baptist.
In the late sixties, she had published a tell-all book detailing her friendship with Malachi Rivers, rambling in awe about Malachi’s supernatural powers. Instead of dismissing Lillian’s account entirely, the public deemed her silly and gullible—and therefore innocent.

  But then the copycat massacre occurred three years after the publication of Lillian’s book. The same people who had laughed her off began to blame her for sparking the secret fanaticism that resulted in a dozen more murders. Despite her narrative’s unreliability, the book grew popular thanks to the assumption that it inspired dark deeds.

  Personally, I was more interested in the historical facts that could be gleaned from the heaps of nonsense—the details about Malachi’s past that couldn’t be found in public records. In my eyes, the book gave meat and marrow to the hollow bones of a mysterious legend.

  It was a riveting read. Even my late grandmother—Malachi’s granddaughter—had owned a first edition of Lillian’s book, bound in a faded dust jacket. I’d read it cover-to-cover more times than I could count, but Grandma Kerry had never spoken much about the massacres.

  And she had never associated with the descendants of Lillian Pickard.

  But that resentment had ended with Grandma Kerry and went unreciprocated. My parents were friendly with everybody. Maggie Arthur, Grandma Kerry’s contemporary and another descendant of Lillian Pickard, was a family friend. She was the one who had encouraged me to volunteer for the Treasures of Texas Heritage Festival. Her granddaughter, Kate, had provided me with three full summers of well-paid work babysitting her daughter.

  In other words, Levi had no reason to care about old interfamily drama.

  But why else would he have avoided me all this time?

  After slamming the tailgate shut, Levi hunkered in the driver’s seat and turned the air vents toward me. A solicitous Southern gentleman.

  “I bet your mom and sister are happy to have you back for the summer.” I caught a glimpse of my untamed hair in the side mirror and frowned.

  “They are,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “Happy to put me to work, too. Apparently ten months is plenty of time for an old house to fall apart.”

  As we crept down the road, Levi rested his elbow on the window frame, frowning into the distance. It had to be difficult coming home after what happened. Maybe up in Dallas, he’d found a way to ignore his grief, stuff it in a closet with his San Solano Wolves track tees, become a new person who could pretend not to feel pain.

  I remembered the strained expression he’d worn at the going-away party, just shy of a month after his dad’s passing. I’d thought his mom cruel for making him suffer through the whole affair, the lemonade sips and the small talk. She seemed to have already cried herself dry, but Levi looked, in the politest way possible, like he would rather be anywhere else.

  I couldn’t stand to watch him like that, in the throes of grief, enduring countless pats on the back and stale questions about his future. So I braved the August heat, carrying my plate of strawberry cobbler out to the garden. I took refuge behind a trellis thick with trumpet vines. And then Levi appeared. When he noticed me there, sweating like a sinner in church, I thought he’d either paste on a stiff smile or continue his quest for solitude.

  But he did neither. Instead, he gave me a thoughtful look.

  “Sorry,” I said abruptly, like I’d intruded on him changing in his bedroom. “You’re safe here. No small talk needed. I’ll go back and say I never saw you. Better yet, that I’ve never heard of you.”

  That earned a laugh. “No, you don’t have to go. Let’s hide here for a minute.”

  It surprised me that he would cast his lot with mine. He stared down at his big hands with their freckled knuckles. “It feels like my mom is punishing me for going to college. She’s not going to let me leave without an embarrassing parade.”

  “She just wants to show you off,” I said, not quite sure why I was defending her. “SMU is a good school.”

  “She wanted me to defer until next semester. I get it. There’s so much to take care of here…sorting through Dad’s things.…” His hazel eyes met mine, their pulsating pupils ringed with fern green and lustrous amber. “But I’m afraid if I don’t leave now, I’ll never go. I’ll convince myself to stay.”

  I chewed on my bottom lip. What did this grieving boy need right now? No more idle chitchat or claps on the shoulder.

  “I think the hardest part is the regret,” I heard myself say. “My grandma always wanted to share her sage advice with me, and sometimes I just brushed her off. But when she could barely hold a lucid conversation, I missed her ‘teachable moments.’” I laughed softly, fending off the ache of tears. “Is there anything you regret?”

  His lips parted in surprise, and then a ghost of a smile tugged at their corners. “No one’s asked me that,” he said, turning toward me and tangling the fingers of one hand high in the trellis. The stance made one lean line of his torso.

  “Sorry,” I repeated, shaking my head like a fly had flown into my ear. “I shouldn’t have—”

  “No, I’m glad you asked,” he said. “I don’t regret anything. The only thing I’d regret is missing out on opportunities he’d want me to take.”

  I smiled a half smile. “Then you’re doing the right thing.”

  Something intense passed between us then. Our eyes locked. The taut silence felt as charged as an electric field. I realized with equal astonishment and certainty that he wanted to kiss me, and I stepped closer with no fear of embarrassment, no fear that I’d misinterpreted. My chin tilted upward. He leaned down slowly, reading in my eyes the answer to his unspoken question.

  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 t
omorrow!” 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.