Kate Fox & The Three Kings (19 page)

“You and I both know how untrue that is,” I jerked my arm from his grasp.

I snatched my jacket off of Hemming’s office chair and skedaddled to the barn, where Helen loitered outside, appearing uncharacteristically shaken.

“Did you open this door?” she yelled as soon as she saw me, and then directed the question at Hemming who followed closely. We both shook our heads ‘no.’

“Well, this is just perfect,” Helen breathed sarcastically. “We’re not suppose to do the ritual if it’s after 3:33, the mirrors spontaneously break, if your alarm doesn’t go off, OR IF THE GODDAMN DOOR IS OPEN WHEN YOU KNOW YOU CLOSED IT!”

“Why?” Hemming and I both asked in unison.

“I don’t know. You read the same rules as I did. The author didn’t bother explaining, but it was plain and clear if anything was amiss, not to play,” she rattled off, exasperated. I glanced at my phone: 3:30. Three minutes left to claim my throne. I ignored Helen’s panicky rambling and snatched the candle out of her grip.

“What are you doing?” Helen snarled, trying to jerk the candle from my hands.

“Time to play, now or never, hocus pocus,” I rolled my eyes and plopped my butt down on the hay bail between the two mirrors. I reached into my jacket pocket and slipped my mother’s ring onto my right hand and glanced back at Helen and Hemming, who appeared to be in a wordless argument judging by the daggers they were staring into each other.

“Just leave,” I ordered, turning my back to them and settled into my position for the Game. I clutched the candle between my sweaty palms. I checked my phone again: 3:32. Hemming’s hand squeezed my shoulder, but I stared ahead and pressed my lips together. I had no intentions of listening to him try to convince me to delay the Game.

But it wasn’t Hemming’s voice that broke the silence. “We’ll be outside. The doors close in less than a minute. They open at exactly 4:33,” Helen paused. “Are you listening? Don’t look in the mirrors! Look ahead. Not-at-the-mirrors. We’ve been over this. Remember what I told you, Kate,” her voice softened. “Good luck, I guess…”

As soon as they exited the barn and slid the doors closed, the candle ignited, and I straightened my posture, attempting to stay alert. The Three Kings Game had begun.

S
cratchy
, androgynous voices chanted in unison. Their final words sent a shiver down my spine, raising all of the hair on my arms. Despite the chill, I focused on the flame emitting from the candle and concentrated on its warmth. With a slow tug, my mother’s ring fell from my finger to the dusty floor.

“She’s so sweet,” a man’s voice purred my left ear.

“With a nasty mean streak,” a woman breathed on my neck. I resisted the urge to gaze into the mirrors, but my resilience was weakening with each moment. The voices sounded familiar.

“Enough,” I broke up their exchange, and endeavored to make myself sound more confident than my inner turmoil relayed. Although seated, my knees wobbled, and I felt like I might pee my pants at any moment. Helen’s voice, insisting I stay in control echoed through my mind. This was a game, after all, and I was playing defense. “Tell me what you know of my condition.”

“Oh my, look how demanding this one is,” the female voice patronized. “Little miss Katie—she grew up with nothing and now she wants everything. She thinks she’s a big girl now! Isn’t that just adorable?” a hollow laugh boomed off the barn loft, mocking me. I didn’t like how the voices spoke as if I wasn’t here, as if I couldn’t hear them.

The man didn’t return her humor. “The Fox thinks she can get answers without sacrifice. Why does she feel entitled? What has she done to deserve the answers that others have searched for to no end?”

“Entitlement runs in the family, my king,” the woman answered. “Daddy went lookin’ for answers that he wasn’t ready to find—and you know what happened to him as a result,” she produced a presumptuous tsk-tsk sound between her teeth, and I pictured her shaking her head in distaste.

“My father played the game and made the wrong move,” I stated flatly. “He knew the consequences, and so do I. Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll play.”

“She wants to play, my king!” the woman burst out excitedly.

“Then we shall play, my queen,” the king responded, sounding amused. Somehow his presence became more smothering, even though I couldn’t see him. He took up the whole barn.

“I will go first,” I volunteered before my mind had time to process the words leaving my mouth.

“She can’t go first! She doesn’t know the rules yet,” the queen whined.

“PLEASE shut up!” I ordered, irritated. “Y’all are more annoying than a bunch of Jehovah’s witnesses. I figured y’all might be bored with your old game, so I wanted to play my own.” I sucked in a deep breath, anticipating interruption, but there was none. “Here’s how it will go, I make a request of you, you make a request of me, so on and so forth, until one party refuses the request. The remaining player is the winner and leaves the game unharmed; loser stays in the Shadowside.”

“The queen and I make the first request,” the king stated, agreeing to my terms.

“Fine.”

“Make her take her eyes off of the night. She has to look at us. She has to look in the mirrors!” the queen told her king with excitement in her voice.

Ho boy. I cringed internally. This was the top rule Helen urged me not to break. “’Don’t look at the goddamn mirrors,’” as she put it. Looking into the mirrors would be like going to the top of Mt. Vesuvius, ignoring the tour guide’s warnings and plunging a hand into the molten lava. But I had cornered myself into this situation by setting my own rules. If I didn’t play the game I constructed, I’d be stuck in the Shadowside for an eternity—or longer, and if I desired answers, I needed to display a bit of vulnerability.

“Well then, child. We are waiting, but our patience has its limits. We lose interest easily,” his tone read condescending and pompous. Listening and obeying the king compelled my eyebrow to twitch. I swallowed and tried to muster up an iota of bravery and finally shifted my eyes to the left mirror, from where the queen’s taunting voice resonated. Though it was dark, the candlelight provided just enough illumination to make out a figure in the looking glass. I shook my head, doing a double-take.

I stared at my own reflection; it was me but it also—-wasn’t me. She was the exact vision of me, the night of my high school graduation: from my tightly bound top knot, to my clunky sandals and drab black dress that grazed the ground. When I met her eyes, they were dark and mocking. She wore a sly, lopsided grin. The girl mirrored all of my actions, from the double-take, to my jaw dropping, reaching towards my face, and finally, extending my hand to touch the mirror. I stopped just short of the glass.

Without being prompted, I spun around to peek in the right mirror; the inclination was heavy on my chest. My heart palpitated and I gasped for air when I saw a short little girl with grass stained knees and messy red hair giggling at me. She wore the same yellow t-shirt and ripped jean shorts that I had been dressed in the night my grandparents died. She mirrored all of my actions, my interest, and my confusion.

“What do you see?” The king’s voice echoed behind me.

“I see…m-m-me,” I sputtered out. Answering a follow-up question from an original request wasn’t part of our deal. I needed to focus on enduring the game. I gave one last, lingering glance at twelve-year-old me and took my seat on the hay bail once again.

“Tell me what you know about me, how I’m different from other folks,” I spoke as calmly as possible, but I was anything but calm. A bead of sweat dripped from my forehead and hit my upper lip as I shifted to glance at both mirrors again.

“Like father, like daughter,” the queen answered, but her voice was coming from the left mirror, where the older me mouthed her words.

“My father played the game to find out more about himself, too?”

“Oh no, dear. He wanted to know more about you,” she grinned.

“We will tell you exactly what we what we told him, even though he wasn’t satisfied with the information we provided. I suspect you’ll feel the same, but no matter—Kate Fox, born to George Fox and Jamie-Lynn Moon. A child very ordinary and unremarkable, but with foxfire pumping through her veins, awakening something old, something unseen for many years. Legends of the Fox originated centuries ago, telling of beautiful beings with black in their hearts, unnaturally long life, and power unmatched.”

“But you, Kate, have no control over the darkness, do you? It obeys when convenient, but you are not its master,” the queen was coy. Her voice caused my toes curl; it reminded me of all the times Joy told me to eat a salad while she and Bob shoveled pizza down their throats. I found the queen irritating, because she divulged nothing new. Helen and I had been over the whole Fox thing already; the only fresh nugget of information was that my father searched for the same answers.

“You’re right. I have no control over anything,” I admitted, my voice tapering off as I studied younger me in the reflection.

“Ah, that’s why she’s here then,” the queen chuckled to her king.

“It’s power you desire…You have surprised me, Kate. I thought your motives were more…pure. We believed you might be playing to contact your grandparents, or maybe even your father, perhaps. I request that you peer in the mirror again; tell us who you see.”

I hesitated to stand but found my feet quicker than expected and peered straight into the mirror. This was progressing into quite a shit show.

“You look like your mother,” a sad voice whispered to me. His eyes were like mine, but his were sunken in where mine were bright. His hair was shaggy and light brown, disheveled like he ran his hands through it often. I had pictured him so many times from the few details Grams  relayed, but in every daydream of meeting my father, he wore a smile across his sun-kissed face and arms wide open, ready to wrap me in hug.

“It’s…it’s my father,” I mumbled loud enough for the king to hear.

“You shouldn’t have come!” George croaked out, slamming his hands against his side of the looking glass, causing the frame to rattle. His pained face forced my heart to lurch in grief. His appearance hinted that he was once handsome, but now, he appeared frail, hunched over as though osteoporosis had already taken a toll and completely defeated him.

“You should’ve been strong enough to win—otherwise we might not be in this predicament!” I hissed through my teeth, not recognizing my own voice. I pushed past my feelings of pity for him and replaced my sorrow with anger. Left with nothing else to say to my father, nor he to me, I backed away, allowing myself to study his face for a long moment—maybe I so I could memorize him—I’m not sure.

“Don’t—Kate. Leave now,” George looked pathetic when he begged. “Blow out the candle. Break the mirrors. You don’t want any more answers…I love you, please just—”

“How do I control my power?” I interrupted, maintaining eye contact with George, but prompting the king.

“What an abbreviated reunion! Please continue, it was just getting interesting,” the queen pleaded.

“Enough, my queen. We shall have our fun with them later. The girl wants to know how to control her power.” I wondered what he meant by ‘we’ll have fun with them later,’ but I urged myself not to dwell, especially since the king perched on the cusp of dishing out the main course.

“Your question, Kate, has been asked for many centuries. The answer is simple, but most find that they cannot handle the task, and in turn, darkness devours their flesh,” I could hear the smile on the king’s lips,  “You must take the life of an innocent.”

“That’s it?” I laughed. “I have to sacrifice a virgin? Wow, how original.”

“Please don’t mock the messenger, it’s not very becoming of you, dear,” the queen replied sweetly.

My jacket pocket drooped with an unexpected new weight. I slid my fingers into the pocket, grazing a cold object, possibly forged of metal.

“Go ahead. Take a peek,” the queen screeched, doing a horrible job of hiding her excitement.

Holding the candle in one hand, I unveiled the new object with the other.

“A gun,” I breathed. It was cool and heavy in my hand. My grandfather owned one almost exactly identical that he kept in his sock drawer, some kind of short, stocky revolver. I held it flat in my palm like a child studying an inchworm.

“What brilliant offspring you created, George,” the queen said flatly and directed her next order to me. “Look in the mirror behind you. What do you see?”

“D-don’t do it, honey,” George pleaded, sobbing. I glanced at him for the last time and spun around to the other mirror.

Bile ran up my throat. Out of all the people to see in the looking glass, he was the worst. I felt like I’d been sucker punched when I saw his form—stretched out on the bed, his coloring a wretched hue of yellow-green. Although glass separated us, my nose scrunched from the decay radiating off his maimed body.

“Katie, I—” he started to call out when he saw me, but choked on phlegm and coughed up a spatter of blood onto his already saturated pillow. His eyes were endless, dark pools on his hollow face. Gideon lay before me, alive, but he wasn’t really living.

“Who do you see?” the king inquired for the third time.

“Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay,” I tried to soothe Gideon through the glass as he struggled to crawl from under the covers.

“I’m s-so sorry, Katie,” Gideon’s frail body shivered as he freed himself from the blankets. “It wasn’t my fault,” he implored, trying to convince himself as he staggered forward and crumpled onto the ground from weakness. “I would never hurt ya. Not in a million years.”

“Shhh. I know,” I nodded with understanding at his gaunt face, offering a small smile of assurance.

“Everythin’ hurts all over,” Gideon coughed, unable to get back to his feet. He dragged himself back to his blanket and crawled into a ball on the floor.

“It’ll all be over soon. Nothing will hurt anymore,” I comforted him, gripping the pistol behind my back. The shadows of the king and queen lingered in my peripheral.

I gulped and raised the gun, my hands shaking enough to rattle the loaded magazine. I shot Gideon a final glance. He hacked again, forcing phlegm from his lungs. The pneumatic fit ended in a puddle of vomit on his only blanket. He gasped for air, clutching his throat. He pleaded with his eyes. Gideon begged for mercy. He yearned for his end.

I wanted to believe Gideon, but I knew better than anyone that, in order to allow evil into your life, an invitation was extended first.

“Who do you see?” the king demanded. His voice bellowed through the barn, leaving me no choice but to answer.

“Three fools,” I responded, steadying the gun against my temple. My finger squeezed the trigger, and the world faded to black.