A vague pain in his palm brought Ken's attention back into the real world somewhat, making him pause in his striding and release his hand from its tightly-clenched fist to look at it. One of his nails and punctured the flesh due to the strength that he was clenching his hands with and blood was pooling in the crescent-moon-shaped gouge, threatening to spill over and run down his wrist. He stuck it into his mouth and sucked on it, walking onwards again. Who cared about a little bit of pain, especially when he'd been put through the pain of all of that embarrassment at lunch.
Ben. Ben had done it. Ben had somehow stopped his power working and then had mocked him when everyone realised that 'nothing' had happened. When he knew full well that something had happened. He'd seen his new energy blasting power leave his hand and head for the Coke can. He knew what he had done. And, even after the power just mysteriously vanished, the Coke can had gone and the table where it had been was slightly scorched in a black ring exactly the same shape as the Coke can. So something had happened and Ben had stopped it. Probably with one of his stupid rhymes. It was Ben's fault that Bridget had looked at him expectantly and then laughed at the lack of anything happening. Ben's fault that he had looked stupid in front of Bridget. All because Ben and Bridget were dating and Ben was too pathetic to handle a little competition.
It made him so mad! He ground his teeth and punched the air. A trashcan exploded with a loud metallic clanging noise, spewing rubbish all over the grass and the sidewalk. He breathed hard, looking down at his hands. Okay, so the power happened to be a little hard to control but he was getting better. He'd managed to get away without blasting Ben earlier when Ben had pissed him off.
Ben and Chris had looked at him with panic, though, when he thought about it. That was not a bad feeling. Actually, it was a pretty damn good feeling. He grinned. He'd freaked out two juniors (with insane amounts of power) and he was just a lowly freshman. But then they'd left him just sitting at the table, saying that they all had to go and they had dragged Bridget and Nixa with them. Instead of congratulating him and welcoming him into their group because he had a power, they'd just dumped him. Why hadn't this new ability made a difference? It wasn't fair. Even though he'd scared them, he still hadn't managed to become part of their group.
He looked around the deserted parking lot. It was after lunch now and he should be in class but, for the first time ever, he'd just skipped out and had come to the front of the school to fume. In hindsight it probably hadn't been the best idea, considering that he should be in class and yet he was wandering around in plain sight of everyone, but it didn't matter. There was no one here, anyway, but… but there was Ben's jeep.
Ben and his stupid jeep. Ben and his stupid jeep and his stupid licence to drive said stupid jeep. The stupid jeep in which Ben and Bridget had made out. His eyes burning he spun on his heel and wrenched a twisted piece of metal from the remains of the trashcan with a loud screech. It was jagged and pointed at the end and he tested it with his thumb, slicing a thin layer of skin off, but not enough to warrant bleeding. He crossed the parking lot and slipped between two other cars until he was standing in front of Ben's jeep. His mouth turning up maliciously at the corners he flicked a wrist with relish and sent an energy blast hurtling at the windshield. It immediately shattered, raining whitened pebbles of glass onto the front two seats.
The alarm sounded shrilly and the headlights flashed at him. He knew that he didn't have long before people started to come out to see what all of the noise was, so he grabbed his jagged spear of metal and quickly began scratching deeply into the hood of the car.
Quiet Please, I'm Stalking
Rolling his eyes, the shopkeeper bent at the waist once more to retrieve several candles from the floor that had fallen from their table and their pyramid formation. Something had to be done about this. There had to be a better way to display them, surely. He just dumped them on the table, in no mood for tidying. The shop was closed now and all he wanted to do was get home to the TV and a microwave meal. The last thing that he wanted to do was be stuck here picking up stupid candles.
He walked back to the counter and, reaching over, began flicking the switches that operated the display lights. One by one they darkened until only the dim overhead bulbs were left lighting the room, filtering down from the ceiling which was wreathed in gloom. The main light switches were at the back of the shop, next to the back entrance, which was how he intended to leave the building for the night.
The front door rattled as he crossed to the back of the shop and he looked up, slightly startled, before checking the clock hung behind the counter. The shop had closed an hour ago, and the closing times were posted on the door. He shrugged. If whoever it was couldn't read then that was their lookout. He wasn't going to delay his plans any longer. He flipped the first of the switches off and heard the door rattling again, this time more urgently and more violently.
"We're closed!" he yelled in the general vicinity of the front of the shop. "We're open again for business at nine tomorrow. Please come back then." The door stopped rattling and, satisfied, he flipped the remaining three light switches, plunging the shop into almost entire darkness.
A loud explosion suddenly made him jump backwards into a mirror hanging on the wall, dislodging it from its hook and sending it careening into the floor. The frame split and the glass shattered, spilling reflective shards onto the floor with the melodic tinkling noise of falling glass synonymous to that coming from the front of the shop. Someone had smashed the glass in the door with the explosion.
Footsteps – shoes crunching on shards of glass – reached the shopkeeper's ears and he groped around for the light switches, finally locating them and flicking them all on at once. The lights above him were filtered by a thin smoke coiling up towards them and he could see that glass had been blown down the entire corridor of books and had spilled into the shop beyond. The crunching of footsteps came nearer.
"Who's there?"
"A customer," the blunt reply sounded, before the voice's owner stepped into the light. "So, how about some service?"
"You!" the shopkeeper sputtered, his eyes widening. The teenager he'd sold the dark arts book and all of the ingredients too. The kid's eyes were the wrong colour. They were darker and seemed to glint malignantly in the light, but perhaps that was just because of the extra light glittering off the dilated pupils. He seemed paler, as if he'd got sick, and the blowing up of the shop's door had covered his face in a fine film of soot, through which a bead of sweat meandered, wiping his face back to its natural colour as it went. He was breathing heavily, as if he'd been running.
"Me," Ken said coolly, adding a shrug. He leaned against the bookcase on his left, trying to act nonchalant and threatening whilst using the support to try and stop the shop spinning. "I'm going to be needing another one of those weird skulls. Now."
"You've blown half of the front of my shop in!" the shopkeeper yelled accusingly, recovering some of his bravado. "I'm not going to give you anything!"
"Well, give it to me, watching me take it as you lie on the floor… It's all the same to me. Neither option stands out as the best one. However, for you… you'll probably make the smart choice. So I'll be needing one of your skulls. Please. As quickly as possible."
He had decided that he needed to do the entire ritual again and gain another power. He had spent a lot of time thinking about it and realised that, if Bridget still felt the need to dismiss him then he still wasn't as good as Ben and Chris with only one power. So he'd get another one. As simple as that. There was a small part of his mind that he seemed to have retained telling him that what he was doing was wrong, irrational, completely reckless and stupid but it was getting easier and easier to squash that part of his brain. It belonged to the old loser Ken anyway; the one that would have come back at nine tomorrow for the skull instead of just taking it. This Ken had the power to get things done the way that he wanted them and, by God, he was going to use that power to the best of his advantage. And now the advantage was getting another skull and then going home and doing the ritual and receiving another power and demonstrating that to Bridget and sending Ben Olsen flying across the quad if he dared to interfere this time.
"Get out of here before I call the cops," the shopkeeper snarled, glaring at Ken. "You're just some punk kid and have no business ordering me around. Get out."
Ken laughed mirthlessly, smirking. "Yeah. Some punk kid you gave a book to that pumped him full of dark arts that allow him to do… this." He flicked a wrist and sent an energy blast at one of the round tables, blowing it to pieces and scattering the contents of its top around the room. The tablecloth fluttered to the floor, smouldering around the edges.
"Giving you that book was a serious misjudgement," the shopkeeper said. "I never should have assumed—"
Ken shrugged. "You were blinded by dollar signs. Not your fault. However, I think I overpaid last time. So a skull please. Now." He paused, cocking his head. "You know, I think that's the third time I've had to repeat myself. I don't like having to repeat myself. Because the dumb kid I was before had to do that all of the time, because nobody listened to him because he was some stupid stuttering loser. So I really don't want to be repeating myself anymore. Got it?" He flicked another wrist and the glass in the counter imploded, setting off a shrill alarm and showering the swords within with glass. "You've got lots of stock to destroy and I could probably do this for a while. So…"
"Karma," the shopkeeper spat, rounding the counter and reaching underneath for the requested skull and turning off the counter's alarm at the same time. "It's called Karma. And, by God, you have so much bad energy coming towards you you're going to feel like you've been hit by a Mack truck."
Ken cocked an eyebrow and, with effort, pushed away from the bookcase and crossed to the counter, grabbing the skull. "Yeah," he said, tossing the skull into the air and catching it. "I'll do my best to bear that in mind." He walked off back to the shattered front door, turning around and flicking a wrist and blasting a display case to pieces. "You have a good evening now." He stepped over the wreckage of the door onto the street and quickly disappeared.
Quiet Please, I'm Stalking
"My dad is going to kill me," Ben groaned, leaning backwards on the couch and covering his face with his hands. "He's actually going to be digging my grave the second I tell him about it."
"That is all you've been saying since you found out that it was your car making all of that noise in the parking lot," Bridget told him in exasperation. "Will you just quit it before I do your dad a favour and kill you before he finds out?"
Ben sighed and rubbed his hands over his face. "Yeah. Yeah, I know. I'm sorry. I just… ugh. It's not exactly something that I can just buff out, you know? It's not like he wanted to trust me with the car in the first place. He's been complaining about my irresponsibility ever since my grandparents bought it for me."
"What do you mean, you can't buff it out?" Nixa asked sarcastically, looking up from her nail filing. "I'm sure you can polish out a completely shattered windshield, two broken headlights and 'Bitch. Die, scum' scratched onto the hood. Elbow grease is all it'll take to fix it."
"Well, considering that you're so chirpy about it how about I hand you a cloth and you can put that theory to the test?" Ben asked.
Nixa frowned, pretending to consider. "You know I would in a heartbeat," she said at last, "but doing so would leave me with my tips shot to hell." She waggled her nails at him and put on an apologetic face. "So I'm going to have to turn down that generous offer, I'm afraid."
"Well, find out who did it and then claim from them… somehow. Maybe your dad doesn't have to find out," Chris suggested with a shrug, not looking up from the Book of Shadows.
"That's a good idea! I'll have plenty of time to get the claim from someone in the hour I have before he gets back from work. Or, better, I'll just go and strike him blind! Then he'll never know!" Ben chirped sarcastically, nodding hugely. "Chris, you genius you!"
Chris did look up to shoot him a glare. "Okay, firstly, doing two things at once here—"
"—a miracle for a man," Nixa interjected loftily, stretching out both of her hands to check that her self-manicure was as even as it was going to get.
Chris rolled his eyes. "Can we burn our bras and do the Up With Women stuff another time? Like, after I've finished my sentence?"
Nixa nodded sagely, as if what Chris had said had been very profound. "Okay. Yeah. I agree. That will give me time to run home and grab one, right?" Ben and Chris cocked their eyebrows at her or, rather, her chest and it was her turn to roll her eyes this time. "I'm seventeen, guys. I have three years, tops, left of being able to do this. I'm going to do it all I can, okay?"
"So… no bra at all?" Ben asked, cocking his head. "Huh. Wait, does that—"
"Hey! Yeah. Hey. Chris, go back to looking up ways Ken could have turned demonic. Ben, go back to bitching about your stupid car. This conversation is rating a twenty-seven out of ten on my Uncomfortable-O-Meter. The thing is about to explode. So let's all just forget about the last few minutes. Okay?" Bridget implored, fixing them all with a look. "Okay?" she intoned slowly, more threatening. Chris looked back down at the Book and Ben began picking his nails. "Okay. Good!"
Chris blinked, rubbing his eyes and turning another page apathetically. This was hard when you didn't know what exactly you were looking for. In the demonic world, there was never just a single nasty out there that could have done one particular crime. Ken could be possessed, but then again he could also be being used as a vessel for power brokers. Or a million other ways that the power could have just appeared. Chris twisted his mouth in thought. "Ben, can you get us a look at Ken's school record?"
Ben snorted. "Don't insult my by asking me if I can. Of course I can." He had slid his bag underneath the couch that he was sitting on and he reached underneath and retrieved it, pulling out his laptop. Give me five minutes." When the laptop had loaded, it connected automatically to the Manor's wireless network, just as he had configured it to when he'd set the entire thing up for the Halliwells. He still held the master password for the router written down somewhere at home. He doubted any of the family even knew it. They didn't need it — he'd made sure all of their computers connected automatically as well. He began typing, determined to get down below his personal best for getting in to something with as lax security as the school.
"Can't they tell that you've been looking at all of their files?" Nixa asked, walking around behind Ben and wrinkling her nose at what was the undecipherable mass streaming across the screen.
"The school probably could if it looked hard enough, which it won't. It doesn't even have a warning to let them know when they're security is being breached. Their system sucks and they should fire the technician who implemented it. However, if they DID have a warning then it's likely that they'll have the resources to trace it, in which case I'd be careful enough to bounce the signal to somewhere else, so—"
Nixa cut him off with a disgusted noise. "Why did I ask? Why? I still can't manage to put videos on my iPod and yet I go and ask him about what he's doing," she grumbled to herself. It made her feel inadequate, in a way, because Ben had such a skill and such a talent that she couldn't even ever hope to acquire. And therefore, there was someone in the room more intelligent than her at the moment. She sighed. These arrogant moments sucked and she hated them but what she was feeling was true. Being second-best bugged her. It always had and would always continue to do so. And it was irrational, she knew, and also completely unexplainable to boot, but… but she wouldn't be her without it.
Ben hummed to himself quietly as he worked, not even entirely sure himself of the tune. He was nearly in. He typed more earnestly, determined to beat his best time for breaking into the school's system, watching the clock in the bottom right hand corner. But it was twelve minutes before he was in, which was tying with his best time and he sighed, shrugging as he accessed Ken's permanent record. "Okay. Got it. What do we look for?"
"Do you think the school notes down things like demonic power acquiring?" Bridget asked. "If so, I really worry about what's on my permanent record…"
"Well, I can assure you that there is nothing about you acquiring demonic powers on your permanent record," Ben told her, shaking his head. "So you're probably safe."
Bridget exhaled sharply through her nose in annoyance. "Okay, do you know how unfair this is? Can we get a look at your permanent record?"
Ben scratched the back of his head and then tilted it in a pantomime of thought. He inhaled through his teeth, pretending to consider it. "You know, see, you could, but I'd be ruined if the secret double life documented on it got out into the public domain. Things would never ever be the same."
"You mean like the time you set fire to that pasta you were boiling in the Home Ec lab and dropped the extinguisher on your teacher's foot, putting her on crutches for a month? That kind of thing?" Chris cut in with, grinning lopsidedly at his friend's death glare.
Ben sniffed. "No, actually," he said as dignifiedly as he could, looking back at the computer screen and scrolling down.
"So we're talking the library books you returned thirteen months late?" Chris asked. "I swear, you've got to be the only kid in history to get something like that noted down on his permanent record." He paused. "Or, you know, the only kid in history to wait a year and a month before returning some books… You can take your pick."
"OKAY," Ben began loudly, completely drowning out a comment that Bridget had been about to make. "Okay. Here. Ken has… done absolutely nothing of interest in High School. He's never had a detention, he does his assignments, a pretty solid C stroke B student… Oh, hey, look at that. He did nothing of interest in Junior High either. Go figure. No clubs… No societies, no athletics… He's beige." He continued scrolling down, not finding anything that jumped out at him as strange and unusual in the slightest. No strange behaviour leaning towards the new power he had and the stalkerish tendencies he was exhibiting. He sighed and was about to close his laptop when he had a thought. "I'll pull up his schedule for tomorrow. We can tail him and see if he does anything odd. Can I send this to the printer in your room, Chris?" To top off access to the Halliwell's wireless network, he also had each of their printers' software installed on his laptop. Chris sometimes complained that Ben had more use of the computers at his house than he did.
"Tail him? Can we put someone else on that duty?" Bridget asked. "He's been following me around all of this time. The last thing that I want to do is do the same thing to him and give him completely the wrong idea. He might think I'm madly in love with him or something. And then he'd have to lose his head. And I'd get arterial spray all over me. And that would be gross. So I don't want to stalk him. Someone else gets that job."
"Chris, the printer is going downstairs and I didn't touch it," Wyatt's voice came from the stairs. "And I don't know why it's doing it. It's probably broken again. Is your loser computer geek of a friend up there with you on hand to fix it?"
Ben rolled his eyes to the ceiling and sighed heavily, slumping back in his seat. "Yup. The loser computer geek of a friend is sitting right here, Wyatt. And he's also using the printer. So you can go back to your night alone with your right hand."
Wyatt's footsteps sounded on the stairs and Ben sighed again, louder this time. "Just my right hand? Yeah. That's never enough. My left just has to be part of the deal as well. It's imperative," he called. There was a pause as four faces were pulled at that particular piece of information, and then Wyatt continued, "Hey, is Skanky Barbie up there too? Perhaps I could use hers. It never hurts to have spares."
"Ew!" Bridget shrieked indignantly at Wyatt's advancing footsteps on the stairs. "Not even if I had a vat of acid to dip my hand in afterwards. Bite me."
"Whereabouts? Wait! No. Don't give me requests. I'll surprise you," Wyatt told her, sticking his head around the door and wiggling his eyebrows in Bridget's general direction. His face cracked into a grin. "Aaaah… So many places to choose from…"
Ben screwed up his face, revolted. "Oh, God, that is gross. Ew. Someone burn my eyes out please? I don't want to be seeing images of that all of the rest of my life. One of you needs to pay for my therapy, just so you know. I don't mind which one, as long as someone does because, Jesus. Ew. Isn't it some kind of crime to unleash that kind of thing on the public?"
"Seriously, if those teeth come anywhere near me I'll knock them out and wear them as fashion accessories," Bridget threatened, getting to her feet and shifting her weight forward, balling her hands into fists. "And I totally mean that."
Wyatt gave a huge pretence of sighing and then crossed his arms across his chest, his legs at his ankles, and leaned against the doorjamb, grinning one more. "So, that's a no to teeth but a yes to hands?"
Bridget's nostrils flared and her eyes darted around the room, alighting on the couch on which Ben was sitting. She snatched the couch cushion from underneath him, bumping him suddenly down about three inches. She flung it at Wyatt.
"Hey! Ow!" Ben whined, shifting his laptop off of his lap. "That hurt! Just leave me here to sit on the springs, why don't you?"
"Hey! No dissing Aunt Pearl's antique couch!" Wyatt chided, waving his hand and sending the couch cushion hurtling back into Ben's direction. "It may attack you back."
Rolling his eyes, Ben flicked a wrist and created a solid block of ice hanging in the air. The couch cushion hit it and glanced off, bouncing towards Chris. The witch-whitelighter looked up just in time to see the slab of fabric and springs careening towards him and gestured, freezing it in midair and then swatting it to the floor in annoyance.
"Hey, can we focus here? This is kind of important, you know?" he asked in exasperation, fixing Bridget and Wyatt with a look.
"Why?" Nixa whined, extending the word childishly. "Why is it so important? I have calculus to do that's due tomorrow. That's important."
"Well, if you want to be on the receiving end of a psycho's possibly-uncontrollable new power then nope. This is so not important. Don't worry about it. However, if you'd rather you didn't get hit by whichever freaky-ass power he was demonstrating, then I suggest you stick here with me until we get to the bottom of this."
"Chris, chill. Your neurosis is going to drive you into an early grave," Wyatt informed his brother, rolling his eyes. "Calm down. And tell me what's going on. It sounds kinda intriguing. And dangerous. And I always like to think of Ben going into danger."
"Oh, funny," Ben bit back sarcastically, closing the lid of his laptop and sliding it back into his bag. "Did you ever think of trying stand up for when you're laughed out of every college you apply to?"
Wyatt snorted. "Come on. Look at me. Like this face is going to get me laughed out of any application board meetings. Providing there's women on the panel I'm in."
"What if they're all lesbians?" Nixa asked in a deadpan tone, but still managing to convey a spark of interest, as if she was generally wondering. "Then what will happen?"
"Well, they're hardly going to be lesbians once they've met me, are they?" Wyatt replied with a grin.
"Nope. They won't be lesbians anymore. You'll drive them to being nuns," Bridget shot at Wyatt scornfully. "They'll never feel clean after the slime oozing off you gets an airing."
"Huh. That's funny. So when are you picking up your habit, Sister Bridget?" Wyatt asked her with a smirk, which went wider as he saw the glare she was giving him. "You know, you don't look like you're on your way to getting hitched to God and we spent rather a lot of time together in that closet…"
Nixa's eyes widened and she put a hand to her mouth. "Closet? Oh my God, Bridget, you didn't? Tell me you—"
"—need to kick him in a very delicate place to crank up his voice a dozen octaves or so? Yeah. Yeah, I do," Bridget finished pointedly, glaring at Nixa.
Ben frowned and was about to ask a question when Wyatt cut him off. "So, kiddies, what's the what up here? What's going on?" He sat down on a spare chair and took in Ben's laptop and his brother combing the Book of Shadows. "It looks like research mode… Something serious? Something serious after Ben that could be a serious threat to his life?"
"Oh, God! My sides! The pain of them splitting!" Ben threw back, heavily sarcastic. "My advice before still stands. Try stand up. Standing up and leaving."
"Hm…" Wyatt mused, tilting his head. He shrugged, slid lower into his chair and then interlaced his fingers behind his head, crossing his legs at the ankles. Stretching languidly, he continued, "Well, upon major consideration, I've decided that you can go to hell. So, demon? Warlock? Big bad in neither of the above categories? What have we got?"
"Psychotic, possibly demonic stalker for Bridget," Chris filled in for Wyatt shortly, still not looking up from the Book.
Wyatt's eyebrows shot up. "Huh. How weird. Someone wants to stalk Bridget?"
"Thank you! That's what I said!" Ben said, throwing his hands in the air. "See, Bridget? It's not just me."
"Ben…?" Nixa asked suddenly, her voice pitched higher. She smiled at him and began twirling a strand of hair around her finger, tilting her head. "You know how you're like my best friend…?"
Ben groaned. "Oh, man. Requests that begin like this suck. What? What do you want? And how long is it going to take me?"
Nixa shrugged. "That depends how good you are. Okay. So. It looks like I'm going to have to just blow off my calculus work. Because this is taking more than a while, and I can't go to the class without anything done, so… you know, just this once, because I don't want to lose my attendance record and because this is demonically related and demons ruin my life enough as it is… can you make it look like my teacher marked me as present tomorrow rather than absent?"
"Miss Moral and Ethics, huh?" Bridget asked, a wry smile twisting her mouth. "Welcome to the dark side. Once you get to this point, there's no leaving."
Nixa sighed. "Fine. Fine. Yes, you're right. I'll just stay up and do the damn work and hand it in tomorrow."
"What? Wait!" Bridget implored. "You only just got to the dark side! You can't leave now! We have… mini muffins and stuff!"
"Baked goods and you, Princess McSlutstein? Wow. What's holding me on this loser-ish side?" Wyatt asked. "This Dark Side that you speak of sounds incredibly alluring round about now."
"The fact that it's highly likely that Bridget baked said goods is what is keeping you on this side," Ben told him. "I mean, she once had a disaster once boiling water."
Bridget narrowed her eyes, walked over, and clipped him upside the head. "Firstly, that wasn't my fault. I forgot about the water and it all just disappeared. Secondly, I'll have you know that I bought my goods from the Dark Side's bakery. So they will taste good."
"Fine. And ow. But fine. The fact that you purchased your baked goods rather than baking them yourself gives me some confidence. But hang on. I'm just trying something…" He had been typing furiously since Nixa had asked him about changing her attendance record, and slammed his finger home on 'Enter'. "There! I knew it!"
"What? What did you know?" Nixa asked, crossing the room again and standing behind him so she could see his laptop again. "What are you doing?"
"I'm looking at Ken's attendance record. The teachers take attendance at the beginning of each lesson, and they are then fed into the computer at the end of the day. Anyway, look. Ken was in class all morning today and then, look, it hits lunchtime, he flips out and shows us his demon powers, and he suddenly skips the entire afternoon. And trashes my car."
"I'm with you up until the whole 'trashing your car' thing. How do you know that he did it?"
"I know," Ben said simply, shrugging and closing his laptop. "Trust me. I just know."
Quiet Please, I'm Stalking
Ken fell backwards onto his bedroom floor, a wide grin plastered all over his face. His face and forehead were damp with sweat and he felt a little dizzy, but, most importantly, he felt alive. All over. Tingling and crackling. He was invincible. He could do anything. And, this time, he hadn't smashed the skull so he could do the ritual over again if he wanted to. Drunkenly, he watched the ceiling lurch and watched the display of floating lights shimmering across it. He gasped and his pupils expanded and his grin drew wider. This was… This was power. Real, proper power. And he had it. He had another power and he could get more so easily. There was no limit to his abilities.
Tomorrow, Ben was dead.
Firstly, I want to say that there is no way I'll ever take this long to update this fic again. My mother fic is another matter (cough) but, for this one, I won't take this long, I promise, and have even started on the next chapter. Anyway, things are building towards the climax now. Hope all was enjoyed.
Twisted Flame
