The boys had been bothering him to come out and play everyday for the last few weeks. Warren hadn’t been out to play stickball since half way through summer break and the new school year was right around the corner. There were only two more weeks of true freedom, but nobody in the whole neighborhood knew exactly why he would be staying upstairs in his brownstone instead of out playing with the rest of the kids. The rumor had been that he was having bad headaches and waking up with nose bleeds. None of the other kids really knew what was happening, but since he had always been sort of distant, they didn’t really feel comfortable knocking on the door and asking directly. None other than his best friend Kevin, who was spending the summer up north with his Grandparents, as he did every other year, could really be that comfortable with Warren’s family. In Kevin’s absence, Warren tended to be somewhat of a loner. This had always seemed to suit him just fine.
“Baby, I think your little friends are out front playing again, do you feel up to going out and joining them?” Warren, instead of answering his mother’s inquiry, rolled over in his bed by the smudged window to peer out into the muted sun light to see a group of boys playing the time honored game in the street just up the block from his building. The old cars parked along the road were usually spaced far enough away from each other to serve as make-shift diamonds on the concrete stickball field. Once in a while, one of the kids from up the block near the corner store would have presence of mind to grab a piece of cardboard to serve as home plate. He always savored the details of the game, the things that most people took for granted. He liked watching them play more than he liked playing with them, most of the time. Everything seemed so much more interesting and tangible when he watched them from above. They were not only important in their functionality, but also in their aesthetics from his perch in the window. “No thank you. I’m not up to playing with them today, my head still feels funny.” He could hear the sound of his mother’s heavy footsteps coming toward him from the kitchen at the other end of the hall. Her thick frame filled up the open doorway as she planted her hands on her hips and looked worriedly at her son’s slim figure lying in his unmade bed. “I just spoke to your Grandmother today, she says you’ll feel better if you just get up and get some fresh air, and I’m inclined to agree with her, baby,” she said in a sweet, yet authoritative tone.
He knew better than to argue when she had been talking to Grandma. It was already set in stone that his new course of action had been decided. He rolled over on his back and laid his head on his pillow to heave a frustrated breath at the thought of going outside. “Yes ma’am. I’ll give it a try,” he conceded. He slung his legs over the side of his small bed to place his feet on the ground and sit up straight. His mother watched as he reluctantly grabbed the old sneakers from just under the steel frame of the cheap twin bed he occupied. He looked up at her from under his brow to see if she was still watching him get dressed. A small wave of disappointment washed over his face when he realized that she was. There was no way to escape it now, he was going outside today, and that was that.
As he finally made his way down the narrow hallway that lead from the two bedrooms and single bathroom that he, his mother, and little sister shared, he dreaded the thought that Ricky, the neighborhood bully, might be outside with the rest of the boys. Of all the kids in the neighborhood, Ricky was the only one that ever picked on Warren. Everybody else seemed to dislike Ricky too because he was mean to everyone at one point or another. Just at that moment, the colors in the front room all seemed to swirl around, just the slightest bit and a very subtle ringing started in his ears. Warren began to feel unsteady on his feet and swayed in place for a second as he was reaching for the door knob to the front door of their meager apartment. His response was to sit down in the chair a few feet away, but his hand couldn’t seem to reach it. The ringing became more intense by the breath and his vision became blurred. He started to feel suffocated as he could barely turn his head to look over at the old wooden chair. He knew he was going to collapse or black out again, and it was going to hurt to hit the floor, again.
Suddenly, something inside of him said to look up and focus on what he wanted. He could feel a pulling sensation starting to well up in his chest. It felt like his heart was reaching out from behind his rib cage and grabbing for the chair. There was a cold sensation in his right arm that ran all the way down to his finger tips. The colors of everything in the room other than the chair had all but faded away. The chair began to move slightly. In his mind, he told the chair to come to him. In what seemed an eternity of watching the event unfold in front of him, the chair slowly screeched along the hard wood floor of the apartment toward his hand. “What in the world!” His senses all came rushing back to him in a flood of stimulation that all but dropped him to his knees. He swayed back on his heels before regaining his bearings. He whipped his head around to see his mother standing a few yards away at the kitchen door gawking at him with wide eyes. He could taste blood and he felt a warm trickle of something coming from his nose. Instinctively, he reached up and touched his top lip with the first and second fingers of his left hand. He slowly looked down at the dark red blood on his tan skin. It seemed as if days passed in that moment. He looked back up at his mother’s shocked face before the darkness overtook him. He felt himself hit the floor and heard his mother scream before fading off to sleep.
As he tried to focus, he heard screams in the small room. It was cold and the light above him flickered like a hallway light in one of those scary movies. He finally got his eyes to start focusing. He was laying on some kind of a bench and his arm had a hospital band on it. There was some machine around his head that looked like a bomb had went off right where his face was and blew it all apart. He was suddenly terrified. He sat up and looked around. The walls were scorched and concave; it looked like an angry elephant and been had been left in the room and was trying to get out. There was a big window just to the right of him that had been shattered to bits but still held together, like one of those car windshields. He looked around at the floor and saw two doctors laying on the floor, one of them was bleeding from the mouth but still breathing. The other one, the lady doctor, had her eyes open and her head was turned around too far; she wasn’t breathing and Warren knew why. The young man felt a wave of terror. Just as he felt tears well up in his eyes, he noticed the door at the far end of the room was open. His mother stood there with a somber look on her face and a very meek smile. “Baby, don’t worry. Grandma will know what to do.”
He stood up and ran over to his mother and they both collapsed into each other. His hospital gown barely covered his slight frame as he desperately clamored for the safety of his mother’s embrace. “Momma was right. You are the warlock born every hundred generations of our line. No wonder she told me to name you Warren”, she said in a small and comforting voice. The pair finally got to their feet and hurried back to the room where the boy had left his clothes. His mother kept a vigilant watch at the door as she goaded him to dress as swiftly as possible. As soon as he was done, they were on the road to Grandma’s house in the backwoods of Georgia. Warren needed to know who and what he was, and quickly. If he had another fit like that, he could likely take out the entire eastern seaboard. His powers were growing exponentially faster than any other witch in the bloodline, that’s the only thing his mother knew. Hell or high water, he needed to get to Grandma’s house, she was the only one that could save Warren, and all of us from what was sure to come.