Clay Franklin lived a charmed life. He was the son of Leo Franklin, a boxer who had parlayed his Olympic career into real celebrity. Clay was born in North Carolina, but grew up in a veritable mansion in rural Charleston, South Carolina. The mansion was nice and Clay loved his life wandering through the big, live oaks with branches that seemed to struggle under their own weight and brush the ground. He spent a lot of time alone in those trees, and he would stare at the dead ones from the safety he felt in the live oak. The dead trees sent shivers down his back. There was one very prominently located on his father’s property. It occupied a hill alone and his father had instructed the landscapers to abandon that section of the property; coincidentally, the hill was overgrown with grasses and the only things that ever occupied the hill were unfortunate birds that often met their end after sitting on the twisted tree.
Despite the darkness of the world around him, Clay and his family enjoyed a peaceful existence and his father had taught him the importance of giving to those less fortunate. He had found himself in Guadalajara, Mexico because of his father’s philanthropic spirit, and it seemed he had been the impetuous for a curse being lifted in the small town of Borges.
At the second whitening, when the soundless lightning came so bright that everyone in the town was blinded, Clay could feel things set right, but he could also feel something else. He wanted to be happy, and he smiled with his father and the men that had brought him to the town, but inside, Clay was furious at a man that he did not know and he wanted to see him dead. More than dead in fact, he wanted to see the man’s body incinerated.
When Clay was in the car on the way back to his father’s gym in Jalisco, he felt rage that made his eyes go white. He sat in the back seat and the men in the car talked around him, and when they noticed him, Clay was breathing heavily and his eyes seemed to glow. His nomoli statute that he had carried close to since he took a trip to Sierra Leone with his father, lay neglected on the seat next to him.
“Buddy,” Leo said, turning to the back from the passenger’s seat. “What’s going on?” He wanted to touch him, but he was afraid and that fear made his voice tremble slightly.
Suddenly, Clay exploded from the car, and that is the best word for what happened. It seemed that he was inundated by energies until there was an explosion under his seat that sent him rocketing through the roof of the car and into the air quickly.
The car flipped, and though the driver died almost instantly, Leo survived, and when the car came to a stop on its roof, he tumbled out of the window, crawling in the direction he thought his son had gone.
“I’m coming Clay,” he struggled to say aloud. One of his legs was broken, but he pulled himself along the road, worried that his son’s dead body was somewhere in a Mexican desert.
The Don taught Ivan many dark rites and Ivan felt bad as he enacted them. The rites, the spells and rituals that the Don had gathered from a dark source facilitated by his use of nightshade, usually required a blood sacrifice and Ivan reluctantly learned the art of killing whatever animals they could trap around the house, and he learned to cut and rend their bodies to produce a cartoonist spray of blood. He was often spattered with it and he could smell death on himself all the time. His clothes were never properly washed, he scrubbed them by hand himself in a nearby stream.
When Ivan resisted the dark rituals, his grandfather would beat him, and then he would shock him with a bolt of lightning from his hands that made Ivan rise from the ground and he would scream in agony until he lost his voice.
Shortly before his tenth birthday, when his grandfather was barking at him to levitate and shooting bolts of white lightening at him, Ivan’s eyes went white and his body seized the lightning from his grandfather.
Ivan yelled loudly as the white electricity sparked off of his body in flourishes. He wanted to scare his grandfather who he was sure would be upset.
But the Don was smiling and laughing gleefully. “I knew you could do it,” he said in Spanish and Ivan calmed, surprised to have genuinely pleased the cruel, old man. He was nice to Ivan for a day. Then he was back to cruelty.
Until Ivan brought the lightning directly on his head, and he imagined his grandfather incinerated by the energy. Ivan stood over his grandfather’s body after the second whitening, disappointed that he hadn’t turned to ash.
And what seemed like another flash of lightning appeared through the hole in his roof. Ivan was startled by it and he was surprised to see the young man who seemed to be composed of the white lightning standing before him.
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