And Ruin Followed Behind Her

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1

I hadn’t been back to Chandler for two years. Not since the Cult of the Bloody Dagger opened a portal to Hell and released the dragon Aziolith onto the Earth so he could run amok. It turned out Aziolith was a pretty chill dragon, but the cult didn’t know that. And the demons that invaded Earth with him certainly weren’t chill. They were the anti-chill.

Luckily, I was able to close that portal and destroy all the demons—with Aziolith’s help, no less—and escape the city with my mother before the military descended on us.

My poor mother.

That’s the reason I’m back in Chandler. She died just a couple of days ago. For the past six months, she was only staying alive to see Bob Marley sing at the Smile Jamaica concert. When somebody shot him a few months ago, I thought Mama was gonna die on the spot, but that beautiful man came out and delivered one hell of a performance. He sang on and on forever, and Mama was ecstatic the whole time, enraptured by his words, and alive in a way she hadn’t been since her struggles with cancer zapped all her strength.

It’s true the blood of pixies ran through our veins, and thus we were blessed with long life, but we were still mortal in the end, and susceptible to the same diseases as humanity. Cancer could take us at any moment, and it took Mama right before Christmas. She told me she wanted to die in Chandler; she wanted to be buried in Chandler and I had to make that happen for her, even if I hated the place.

The doctors at Chandler General Hospital told me that the US government swarmed the town after the portal closed and they killed the last of the demons. They interviewed everybody in town, took soil samples, cleaned up dead bodies, and threatened the whole town to keep their goddamn mouths shut if they didn’t want to be a science experiment. It was brutal for that first year, but after eighteen months, the government abandoned Chandler in the dead of night to track down some other horrible thing, and life kind of returned to normal.

Chandler was always good at sticking its head in the sand when it came to the big, important things—like my father’s lynching, along with those of dozens of other black men and women during my childhood—and this was just another secret in a long line that stretched back well into the Jim Crow era.

That’s why I tried my best to stay away from Colorado, and America as a whole. Since I could disappear and reappear at will, Mama and I traveled the world. We could flash to Switzerland for hot chocolate, and then head down to Jamaica to see Bob Marley, before having dinner in Egypt overlooking the pyramids.

When I first learned about my powers, I needed a special pixie dust to move between places, but after enough practice I learned to move with just my mind alone. As my mentor Elka once said, pixie dust was a crutch. With enough effort, we could travel the world in the blink of an eye without using it. It was a great power, and my old mentor Elka would be furious at me for using it to tour around the world instead of helping our people.

Our people. As if I had any idea what that meant. Elka taught me how to unlock my powers as a pixie, but she didn’t tell me anything about helping the last of our kind. During her life, she was the great protector of monster kind. I had no interest in following in her footsteps, though, and risk dying young. I just wanted to see the world and live a quiet life.

When I first left, I thought I would get bored of traveling eventually and return to Chicago, my first love, but the more of the world I saw, the more America looked small and cold. I preferred Asia, or Europe, or Africa to America.

Still, time made fools of us all. My mother’s health took a turn for the worse, and then she dwindled away until she laid dead before me in the same hospital where I was born, leaving me to pick up the pieces and figure out how to carry on without her.

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