Clair

         The night is now as dark as the pit that Clair climbed into an hour earlier. Standing on the edge of the pit she looks left and right searching for the trail that she followed to the pit. Low black clouds cover the stars and the moon that had provided her light when she entered the pit. Now the clouds only spews cold rain that soak her to the bone.

         “Has it only been an hour?” she thinks, looking reflexively at the wrist where her watch had been.

          “It seems like an eternity” a small voice answers inside her head.

         Entering the pit had been easy. What she had done in the pit was what had been almost impossible. The image of the voodoo priest, a dull green light glowing from his eyes as she pushed the knife into his chest, searching for and then finding its way to his heart, remains burnt into her brain. He was dead. She had made sure of that. After he had fallen to the ground she slashed the razor-sharp edge of the knife across his exposed neck and the jugular under the skin. She watched as his blood pooled around him on the ground. He had fallen back, his arms scattering several of the black candles arranged around a chalk circle etched on the ground. Clair cared not for now she had the small leather bag that he had worn around his neck. The bag that contained the dust that she needed, no, the dust that she had to have.

         Stumbling through the darkness Clair found the car she had left on the shoulder of the dirt road. The road was clear and, as she drove toward the glow of the city, her thoughts raced.

         “Darin will be at the studio by now.”
         “He is setting in the make-up chair getting his touch up before he goes on the air.”
         “The look on his face when I walk up and splatter the dust across it.”
         “He will breathe it in, it will fill his mouth, his nose, and then cling to the wetness of his eyes.”
         “After what he did he deserves what this will do to him.”

****

         Clair, now in the darkness of the studio, moves quietly from one shadow to the next, the bag containing the dust clenched tightly in her hand. She makes no sound that might attract the attention of the crew working behind-the-scenes as she inches close to the set where Darin reigns supreme behind a brightly lit desk, two cameras focused on him.

         “A quick lunge and I will send the dust into his smiling, unsuspecting, arrogant face.”

         Opening the bag Clair slips between the two cameras. Breathing hard she looks deep into the face of the man she once loved and now hates. Lunging forward, the bag clutched in her out stretched hand, her foot hangs in one of the many cables scattered across the floor. Falling forward Clair sees a cloud of dust float up from the bag and, only for a moment, two glowing green points of light within the cloud. Then her head passes through the dust and, screaming she strikes the floor, her wet foot making connection with the dislodged power cable. Her scream is cut off in the next instant.