BURDEN OF AN ANCIENT OATH, Joshua Brown [books like beach read .txt] 📗

get to him. Jack liked to control every situation; he wanted to stay in charge and stay ahead. But with something like this, with all the unknowns, there was no way to know the outcome before it happened.

“Oscar doesn’t know anything about the men that tell him to write the letters.  He’s just a pawn in all of this, but he’s something,” Jack replied. “But let’s not worry about that tonight. You need to take your mind off of what happened, and I have just the thing.”

Jack smiled, sliding a hand into his coat pocket and drawing a small bottle of bourbon. He collected two glasses from the kitchen, pouring me one, and we walked over to the living room.

“I can’t believe that you still have all this stuff, and it looks like it never gets used, either,” I teased him.

“That’s because it doesn’t. This place is pretty much where I sleep; the office is my home,” Jack laughed.

“You can say that again,” seeing it from someone else’s perspective made me realize how similar my situation was. My house, as much as I loved it, was little more than a bedroom. I was there maybe ten hours a day, just to eat and sleep before getting back to work.

“But look, you stay here as long as you need to. We’re going to get through this, Gwen. I know we are,” he said, collapsing into the sofa. I dropped beside him.

“I know we are, Jack. You’ve never led me astray before, and I know you won’t now,” I said, placing a soft kiss on his cheek. I don’t know why I did it, nor did I expect this to go anywhere else.

It just felt like the right thing to do.

Jack and I spent the rest of the evening on his sofa, watching terrible, old black and white Western movies. We drank whiskey, and he pretended to be a cowboy. If nothing else, it took my mind off the events of the evening, and that’s all I wanted.

But I knew tomorrow would be another day, and hopefully, it would be better than today.

Chapter 20

The Witchfinder General

As was my business, I knew the Williamson family’s routine as though it were my own. Every morning, Spencer would walk his children to school. Any typical day, they would walk themselves, meeting friends along the way. Now, with the threats from the Order’s letters, Spencer took it on himself to make sure they arrived safely.

These morning walks with their father became a habit for the children, a boy named Jackson—after Spencer’s adoptive father—and a daughter named Sarah, after no one in particular. Once at school, Spencer took the ten-minute return with great haste, readying himself for work and driving off to his office. There, he’d be busy all morning, going out for lunch with the boys every Thursday, lying to his wife that they were with his boss.

Spencer was a driven man, though work never came before play with him.

Caroline Williamson shared a very different morning routine. A housewife, living her dreams of old, traditional values, spent the morning lazing in bed. Once Spencer returned from dropping the children off at school, she got up, pretended to be busy, but once he left the door, she got back in bed. She lay there most mornings until noon, watching TV and getting lost in the mundanity of her existence.

Lunchtime, she’d often make herself the same sandwich, a humble peanut butter and jelly, eating it outside beside the pool. She always brought a book with some motivational self-help piece but opted to play on her cellphone instead.

On Tuesdays, she’d spend time with a lover—a Scotsman named Henry Graham. Far too old for Caroline, but he gave her money, and gifts, and trinkets. Much like Spencer’s lies of being with his boss, she told him she was out for pilates with the girls.

I found, on more than one occasion, that Caroline would see Henry some evenings. Caroline would make excuses, saying she was going on a girls’ night out. Spencer would often stay home and watch pornography on the computer. They rarely spent time together, even when they were both home.

Their lives were in tatters, and I had a front-row seat to the show.

Caroline was in charge of picking the children up from school, around two in the afternoon every day, apart from Wednesdays and Fridays. Their son, Jackson, practised football, and their daughter, Sarah, did choir. On said days, she’d leave the house at a quarter past three.

They lived uninteresting lives, spreading nothing but hatred and lies without ever realizing it. Had they been more in line with the Dench family, better people, perhaps I’d feel more towards their situation. Though I didn’t believe I would, not really. My task was to clear the world of these sinners—these monsters, and I’d never stop until the world was pure.

They were the descendants of the devil himself, and soon, they would no longer plague my city.

I waited in my car, dressed mostly in my black outfit all apart from the mask. Today, I opted for a clown. A simple plastic mask with a white face, red bushels of hair coming off the top, and a bright red nose. The cheeks were decorated with splashes of blue and yellow. A wide smile appeared on the lips. In a few minutes, I knew Caroline and the children would step around the corner. The boy would be gasping for air, having just run laps while the girl would be humming a tune. Caroline would be rolling her eyes, ready to crack open a fresh bottle of sparkling wine the moment she stepped through the door.

As predicted, the children came around the corner first with Caroline not a few steps behind. With her phone in hand, she paid little attention to where the kids ran off to. I