Page 1 of Lust
1
Mercy Devereux stood on the edge of a bridge, staring into the abyss below.
One foot slipped against the stonework. Mercy latched onto the ledge, adrenaline pumping through her system as her heart flurried in alarm. For a moment, she reconsidered her intentions, but that was instinct. Survival. Millions of years of evolution at work inside her brain, which had miraculously formed inside her mother at a time when cavemen no longer existed. She hadn’t asked for it to know the instinctual difference between danger and safety. Hell, she hadn’t asked to be born.
This night was a long time coming.
Mercy unearthed her vial of liquid courage and let the alcohol burn her throat. It warmed her against the cold, breezy night. It could not warm the rest of her, however. Not after she had numbed herself to the emotions that had burdened her for so long.
“Just fucking do it,” she muttered, hair blowing in the breeze and obstructing her view of the blackened water below. Nobody survived a fall from that bridge. The reputation of such a place had become so dismal that signs littered the pathways, imploring would-be jumped to “Not do it,” and that, “God is with you.” Or maybe she should, “Call this number if you have dark thoughts.” Well, Mercy had long learned that if there were a God, He had no interest in her life. Probably because she was a sinning lesbian who drank too much and smoked pot without guilt.
Besides! Shehadcalled those numbers. All of them! Each time she was met with the condescending, tired voices of people swearing that they knew how shefelt.What she wasgoingthrough. As if. When Mercy sat on her bathroom floor, sobbing and drinking, asking the hotline why her girlfriend of four years beat her and her best friend left her, she was given sputtering emptiness and an emptier, “It will get better!” Mercy couldn’t convey how much she detested that phrase.
What was death to her? Only an end to the pain she put up with for the past year, and the depression for far longer. Pills didn’t work. Therapy was a joke… Mercy had nowhere else to turn to except this bridge, infamous for the number of people who jumped off it every year.
She clutched the railing and swung her leg over, the wind now stronger as it nearly lifted her into the canyon.
“What are you doing?”
Mercy looked over her shoulder, expecting a bystander. Instead, she saw nothing, aside from the empty road and the shaking trees.
“Over here.”
Slowly, Mercy turned her head again, legs still straddling the railing.
Nothing was in her line of sight. Aside from a ball of white light.
“Oh, my God.” She was hallucinating. Already. Was this what it was like to be on the brink of death? Had Mercy already fallen? Was this life on the other side? The Beyond? A hot, white light appearing at the end of a tunnel? Fuck it. The thing was talking to her. She might as well hang up the hat and slip into that abyss beneath her.
Mercy leaned toward the side of the road, stomach tumbling as it prepared to throw up the alcohol she had been drinking all night.
“Are you Mercy?”
That thing was definitely talking to her. The white light, which grew brighter by the second, had Mercy grabbing either side of her head with a moan.
“You are, aren’t you? I’ve been watching you, Mercy. We all have.”
“Great. Now I have supernatural stalkers.” Mercy bent forward, placing her cheek against the cold barrier. At least it wasn’t digging into her crotch now. No, only some fairy giving her a hard time. “Been a long while since I hallucinated like this. I didn’t think I smoked anything.”
A hint of red flashed before Mercy. She attempted to shake the shock out of her system, but the light was still there. Apparently, it had more to say, too.
“I am not a hallucination.”Was it growing in size? Or coming closer? Mercy could hardly tell, thanks to her brain betraying her every time she attempted to focus her vision on what floated before her.“I am a deity. I amyourdeity, Mercy.”
The universe had to be kidding.
“Are you there, God?” Mercy drolly asked the night around her. “It’s me, Mercy.” That made her chuckle for the first time in days. “What does some mothball want with me? Come on, let’s get this over with. I have plans for tonight. I’d like to get them over with.”
“That’s it, Mercy. I am here to stop you.”
“Fuck that.” Mercy should have known that her plans would be foiled by a meddling god.I almost got away with it, too.Her mother might have warned her about this once. Or was it church? Wasn’t it amazingly difficult to separate the spiritual lies she had been told throughout her life? To think, when she had been a small child, she almost believed in literal sky fairies. Now there was one hovering before her, claiming to come and save her from herself. At least it wasn’t bright enough to make Mercy’s headache worse.
“You shouldn’t do this,”the voice said. Was it a woman? A little girl? Hard to tell when there was no face to go with the feminine whispers in the cold air. Was this one of those gender-non-conforming deities? She always heard that angels didn’t have genders. Would make sense for her literal guardian angel to defy all checkmarks at the doctor’s office.“If you make that jump, you will die.”
“That’s the point.”
“It is not worth it.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, thanks.” It was official. This hallucination annoyed the shit out of Mercy.A woman can’t stand on a bridge without some deity trying to interfere. Go figure.
