It is a beautiful summer day, but I can sense doom closing in. It makes the sunny day feel darker than the stormiest winter night. My skin seems covered in slime. The magick all around is chocking me.

 

I walk out in the middle of the class. I wasn't paying attention anyway. I walk in the first empty room, which happens to be a biology lab. I lock it behind me magically before I start the ritual.

 

I've never done a query ritual in such speed. The buzz of urgency is deafening. It's like a swarm of wasps has enveloped me. I want to put my hands over my ears but I know it wouldn't help.

 

My hands are shaking as I draw the pentagram. It's not good shaking either. It's fear. Terror. I left my mind too open to the power in the attempt to soak as much of it as I can, and now I'm channeling something.

 

I don't care. I have to know what's going on. Something cold and dark seems to wrap itself around me. I taste bile in my mouth. I don't have any herbs or crystals to use to perform the spell. I'll have to do it using raw magic. It's going to hurt and tear parts of my mind, but I'm too afraid not to do it. I break a glass beaker and use a shard to make a cut across my palm. I let the blood drip on the chalk outline of the pentagram to seal the circuit, willing my power to bend the laws of nature and learn the future before it unfolds.

 

The image comes hitting me with the force of a lightning strike. I sway under its power. Blood. Death. Love. Absence of love.

 

"TARAAA!" I scream.

 

I point my hand to the lab door, causing it to explode with a simple flexing of my will. I growl in frustration when I can't make the teleportation spell work on me. I run to the car and step on the gas all the way to the floor as I drive home. Through the blinding pain which is the unavoidable repercussion of casting the spell directly, I manage to mutter a wind spell to help me drive even faster.

 

Everything around me is a blur in my rush to get inside, to get to Tara. I've only taken a few steps inside the house when I hear the shot. The warm light that was part of me for the past few months blinks out of existence. I am too aware of reality to be able to deny to myself, even for a second, that Tara is no longer part of this world.

 

I run into the death room, the human part of me wanting to be next to her. Too much of myself is already crossed over to see the dead body as more than the shell of the woman I loved. The pain is too dark and too intense to hold inside. It bursts out of me, like blue lightning, death courses through me, from the tips of my fingers, into the demons. Her murderers.

 

"Tara!"

 

I know it's not my voice. Something runs past me, looks like a girl, but I cannot see very well. I look at my lover's body. There is no light in the world. Only dark pain.

 

Sounds make their way to me. It sounds like a bark. Sounds like a hell hound barking in obscene welcoming of the beautiful soul that left us.

 

I force the noise into a speech pattern.

 

"Dawn, come here."

 

Cold awareness makes the pain worse. I understand now. I know who is to blame for her death. I cannot run anymore. I stalk out of the house, ready to inflict punishment on the real killers.

 

The vampire and the girl are still outside. The undead can feel it. He is afraid now. He tries to shield the girl from me. Silly dead man. I can blast both of them into nothingness with less effort than it takes for me to keep breathing now.

 

"You killed her," I say. I want them to know what they pay for.

 

The girl jumps out the dead man's grasp. She is talking to me. Her whiny begging doesn't reach me in the form of words. I can't even see her as anything other than an energy pattern. A whiny, slimy greenish blob. The vampire is like a black rip in the patterns of life. His voice sounds like a bark. They're talking to me.

 

"You are responsible for her death. You will pay for it," I have to force myself through blindness and pain to enunciate the words.

 

Their words mean nothing to me. I need them to understand why they are going to die.

 

I raise my hands to unleash my power fueled by pain in the form of the blue flash, bringer of death. I know it's not enough but I cannot think of a worse thing I can do to them.

 

I pause. I see another pattern. The green energy and the black are intertwined. I have only seen this once. Mine and Tara's. The connection between the killers is stronger than death. If they die together, their energies would melt into one another. It would be no punishment at all.

 

I stand back from the spell casting stance. I let them think I changed my mind. The girl hugs my physical body and I have to contain the urge to push her away. Her touch is like acid on my skin. I have to push the down the pain and reach for the remnants of my humanity to set up the lies.

 

"Leave now. I wish to be with Tara."

 

Yes. This is something they would believe. The fools. I am no fool. I know that I cannot be with her. Not for a long time.

 

They walk away, and I study the design of the green and black energy fused around the edges, stripes of black invading the green, and green stripes across the black. I smile. Now I know how they can be punished.

 

I'll use the strength of their connection to make them consume one another. I dig the nails of my right hand in the cut I have made with the shard of glass across my left palm.

 

"You will both pay," I whisper, letting the blood drip to the ground, sealing my promise.

 

I go back in the house, my mind focused on refining the love curse.

This journal is set up for role playing purposes only.