Of Thorns and Hexes by C.J. Canady

Author:C.J. Canady
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Black Girl Magic, Witch, African, African-American, Love, Tragic Fantasy, Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Afro-Fantasy, Occult, Dark Fantasy, Dark Magic
Publisher: C.J. Canady
Published: 2021-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

PRISON.

I’ve landed in prison yet again. I pray my stints in the doghouse don’t repeatedly occur for the entirety of my life. I don’t belong here. My first bout inside the slammer: Yes. I killed a man who put his hands on me and tried to violate me in the worst way. My second time: No. I’m an innocent woman who was at the wrong place at the wrong time. I’d never intentionally harm anyone, and certainly not an elderly wizard who couldn’t defend himself.

My prison cell is not like the one I stayed in briefly in Yardenfeld. Where human prisons have steel bars and reek of urine and mouse droppings, Parnissi’s definition of jailhouse is... different. Thick, green vines box me into a small space that I cannot move about in, and snapdragons, hundreds of them, jut out from the vines. The pink and white flowers emit a sort of glow that pulses through me, knocks a shiver down my spine. What magical properties are possessed within snapdragons? I’ve got to know.

“P-Pardon me,” I say, voice hoarse, body thirsty for a drink of water.

A female guard peers at me over a newspaper she reads from her desk. “What is it, inmate?”

“I’m curious about the snapdragons, ma’am.”

She sneers before she lifts the paper to cover her face.

I guess I’ll have to do some research later. If there is a later, that is. I swear I’m innocent, and yet not one guard will listen to my plea. The guards have questioned me for hours on end about my accomplice—Percy. They wanted to know his first and last name, where he lives, and if he has any connection to someone named Buster Killigan, a rebel wizard who tried to destroy Parnissi almost fifty years ago.

I told them the truth. “I don’t know Percy’s last name. I have no clue where he lays his head at night. And I don’t know much about him except that he frequents the home of Vahilda Marguerite.”

Mentioning Vahilda’s name made every guard in the prison cease from asking me any more pressing questions. Whatever images Vahilda’s name stirs up in their minds surely had them retreating from me as if I foretold their coming deaths.

A couple of hours later, the vines imprisoning me shudder, and the snapdragons shrink away inside the thick green creepers. The undulating shiver that’s been coursing through me vanishes the instant those flowers disappear. I begin to wonder if maybe snapdragons suppress magical powers when Vahilda and her cat walk to my now nonexistent cell.

Vahilda is pissed. Veins throb in her forehead. Her lips are pinched into a thin line. Her rose-red dress flutters behind her as she stalks to me. Her cat, whose head is oddly bruised, a purple lump in the center, hangs its head almost shamefully.

The irate witch says not a word to me as she drags me by the arm, forcefully escorts me down the corridor, down a flight of steps, past a crew of officers, and out of the jailhouse.

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