Chapter 1

Light or darkness one's good and one's bad, and i've always been told to choose one or the other. Choose light and you'll be inherently good forever, choose dark and you'll be bad forever. Well I chose dark but everybody in my family thinks i've chosen light because i'm good at disguising it, only Ridley knows that I'm bad but that's ok, she's bad also. I remember when my powers first started to manifest, I was fourteen, and even then I was experimenting with dark powers, not as much as I do now but still a bunch, and it usually involved snakes. Now I'm sneaking out at night with Ridley to work with my powers because she's the only one who understands, and the only one I can't hurt badly.

This particular night, a Friday, it's raining hard and I start to wonder if it's worth the risk to go out into the woods for this. But Ridley convinces me it's ok to go and we do, it's close to midnight when we creep down the staircase, and out into the dead of night. We head to the woods behind the house and once we're in deep enough she finally talks to me. "You ready to do this Larkin, it might be rough because you haven't done this before"she asks, "yeah, as ready as all ever be"i say.

She stands behind me with her hands on my shoulders as she tells me what to do, and at first I don't get it but then I finally do. The rain eases up until it's a drizzle leaving us to listen to the silence of the woods in the night. I think I'm ok as we walk back towards the house but suddenly as we reach the back porch I start to feel dizzy and I fall forward to my knees on the steps as ridley comes behind me. "You alright"she asks, "I don't know, is this suppose to happen after you use that power the first time"I ask, "it depends, sometimes this happens because your not used to having this much power flooding your system at once"she says, "ok I trust you"I say.

She helps me to my feet and leads me inside, then that's when we run into trouble, mom and gram mama are sitting at the kitchen table. "where have you been it's well after midnight"mom asks, "out, we didn't go far we were out in the woods"she says calmly because I can't, "if that's so why does Larkin look like he doesn't feel well"gram mama asks, "he started to feel bad after we had been out awhile, that's why we came back"she replies, "OK, come on,lets get you to bed" mom says gently. She grabs my arm away from Ridley and helps me upstairs, once we hit the top step, I know I'm going to be sick. "Mama, I'm going to be"I barely manage to get out, "ok come on baby"she says. We make it to the bathroom before I get sick and then I do. Mom stays with me and rubs my back as she let

s me do my buisness, once we're done she takes my temperature, 103 she mutters. Then she takes me to bed and gets me out of my wet clothes and into a t shirt. Then she wraps me underneath a old quilt, kisses me on the forehead and leaves the room. I hear the rain start up again as I slowly fall into a semblance of sleep as I worry how I'm going to explain to them what really happened.