The Lethal Equation

By Jacquel Clark

Icee Edmond is a fifty-nine-year-old collector of souls; this is her destiny. Following her destiny costs Icee the dream of a conventional life she harbored as a child. However, the price of ignoring her destiny was too great as it led to an existence of continually facing demons inclined to end her life, depression and mere survival.
While held captive by a killer, Icee is introduced to her lifes lot by Crazy G, an Indian ancestral great-grandparent known as the demon mother. Crazy G convinces Icee she has special powers that protect her from the demons and allow her to collect souls. Believing Crazy G, she sets out to fulfill her destiny. Icee and her traveling companion, Mason, stalk and kill those who have sold their spirit, and bloodlust becomes a part of their everyday lives.
While attending her estranged husbands funeral, Icee suffers a brain injury and slips into a coma. Mason, who is secretly Satans deputy, forces her to connect the fragments of her psyche to create a unified whole, allowing her embodied spirit to be propelled forward and be held accountable for its moral performance. Icee always believed she was one of the good guys. However, a look at reality and resurrected memories make her question her entire existence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514438039

Jacquel Clark

Since retiring as a vice president and treasurer of a Florida-based Fortune 500 company, Jacquel Clark (alias Jay Clark) instructed thousands of business professionals and authored several articles published in academic journals. This is where she developed her love of writing. As a second career, she now applies her accounting degree and her MBA from Stetson University to provide college students with opportunities to master the skills needed to be successful in future college work and the business world. She teaches accounting and finance-based subjects, and in her spare time, she writes about those things that demand to be put on paper.

Book preview

PART I

And the gamekeepers had their eyes trained on me

The game plan was so entrenched in my imagination

That I even contributed to the contrived situations

My life was but a conduit

For the demons and my ancestors knew it

I played the game well

And I’ll go to hell

Unless I can beat the game

By becoming the same

***1***

T HE DEEP SLEEP was coming. I could feel my mind forced through a narrow tunnel into something that had been or could be; I had no way of knowing. What I did know was that it never seemed to end up very well. As bothersome as the entire affair was, I did look forward to the momentary quietness. Those brief few seconds where the darkness descended, the voices ceased and everything apparently went into a state of calm. Unfortunately, when I emerged on the other side of the passageway, the sense of well-being evaporated. Its memory faded to a faint trickle, like a glimpse of what might have been but was just out of r each.

The whole thing started when I received a notification from one Mr. Simmons from the Cayman Islands. His purpose, other than to bring me to my knees, was to inform me that my husband had passed and that I was listed as his next of kin. I was stunned into absolute immobility; my husband had been gone for years. I could not move, and the mind went into a state of meltdown; why would anyone notify me, of all people? I stared at Mason, who had no idea what was going on. I was finally able to ask Mr. Simmons if he meant Luke Daniels. He rewarded me with a response directed to a three-year-old. And so the death march began.

My name is Icelander Consumo Edmond. It seems as if my mother, God rest her weary soul, had an odd sense of humor. Iceland is an island that lies in the path of the North Atlantic current and is just south of the Arctic Circle. The weather is notoriously variable but inevitably colder than the more welcoming features of the Florida Keys with its barrier coral reefs, deep blue waters, sandy beaches, and lush tropical nature trails. Iceland was a fitting description of my mother’s heart—cold, isolated, and scandalously erratic. I often wondered where she came up with my middle name. It wasn’t until I was in college, studying Latin, that I realized this was the Latin word used to refer to using up, wasting away, and destroying. How curious that she even knew Latin as a language and that she would saddle her only child with this particular word for a name. But then, I guess that was how she viewed children: little beings that would spend up her life and destroy any chances she might have at happiness.

Stella, my mother, believed in the widespread mind-set that regards children as a financial obligation, a burden, and an obstacle that hinders their parents’ success and enjoyment of life. And so in the beginning there was life. Most people do not know my proper names, much less the etymology, and I prefer it that way. They know me merely as Icee.

This is a tale of the countless hours, days, who knows, maybe even months or years, I spent right before and following what I like to refer to as the ice-pick incident. During this period, time had no boundaries, and voices came and went, some tethered to this world and some not. I, for all the walls erected around my heart and soul, was forced to look beyond those walls and to reckon with both the familiar and unfamiliar. Mason was my only friend and guide and had been with me through the lost years. How apt her name, since she was obviously an artisan that specialized in tearing down the brick walls that I had so carefully erected over the decades that constituted my life. The lost years were just that, a ten-year period of very faint memories where Mason and I travelled the back roads of America. Most memories lost to recollection.

Up until the notification, I would categorize my life as taxing. I had no children. Not that I didn’t want them, I just never actively pursued having them. It was just the husband and me until one day he went for a ride and never returned. That would not have been so bad, except he took off on Lola, our customized, tricked-out Harley-Davidson Softail. Riding on that bike was freedom at its best. We would journey to climb the mountains, pay reverence to the ocean, or bask in the desert. Often we would just take a ride for a couple of hours to feel like kids again, letting the wind blow our hair and leave the troubles of the mundane existence behind.

That was many years ago. I’m not sure what I miss more, riding on the motorcycle or him. Don’t get me wrong; he was a good man. At least I can’t recall anything to the contrary. I just think we became roommates instead of spouses, and we seemed to end up growing in separate directions. As I found out, his direction ended up being the Cayman Islands, while I stayed near the coast of North Carolina. It’s not that I stayed at the ole homestead, waiting for his return or anything like that; I just had no place else to go, and besides, that was where my work flourished.

Ah, my profession. How falsely proud I was of my professional accomplishments. In many ways, it defined who I was. Although I knew family should be the most important, it seemed as if they always took a backseat to work. I fooled myself for nearly a quarter century by telling myself the job was a means to an end. It was merely a way to obtain the monetary rewards necessary to provide every luxury possible for the husband and potential children. I even told myself this well after it became obvious there were to be no children in my life. But it was never enough. The more I had, the more I needed. I was trapped in a cyclone of activity that would bring about my ultimate destruction.

A desire to be the best at my job, to climb the success ladder at record speeds, to be a member of the team, and to affect meaningful change created a drive in me that bordered on obsessive. Somewhere, the desire went into overdrive, defective you could say, and entered into the realm of psychoneurosis. Eventually, I left the Bureau, but while I was there, I came to know many individuals with questionable morals and ethics. They were usually brilliant, and their money spent as well as anyone else’s. Eventually, things began to focus, and I saw the job for what it was—nothing more than a finely played chess game. Make the laws work in your favor; stay three to five steps ahead of the opponent. Right and wrong were never part of the equation.

The one good thing that came of my time with the Bureau was Luke. He was hired as one of their investigators, and soon we were married. We were quite the duo—loved by most in the establishment, hated by most of the criminals. But when Luke slipped into the night, I knew; I knew that the realities of life sometimes trumped the rule book, so I took matters into my own hands. That was when the repercussions of not adhering to ethical and moral principles rained down and ripped the very fabric of my existence. Luke, he bailed, but I dealt with the consequences handed down by a merciless god, who, with his ceaseless lessons, drove me into the welcoming arms of madness.

***2***

S TELLA FELL IN love with the superstar of the roller-staking rink in Backwoods County, Georgia. He was the James Dean of Skate-a-Rama. Every little chickadee squealed with glee when he glanced in their direction and flashed a smile with his perfect white teeth. The night Stella was asked for a slow skate was the highlight of her young life. What he wanted, he got, and that was certainly the story with Stella. Nine months later, I was born. However, Mr. Too Cool denied any affiliations with me, as well as the string of fatherless babies he left in his wake. Now considered damaged goods, Stella had a baby to take care of, as well as her self.

Therefore, born to a lower-lower-class situation, I was always told my father was a womanizer, a thief, and a liar and was afraid of commitment. Years later, when I was about to start school, Stella found her own snake-oil salesman, Frank Emerson. Within months of their introduction, they were married, and we moved from the pecan groves in South Georgia to my stepfather’s house in Gretna, Louisiana. I hated the nearly 140-year-old house, and I loathed the man who was its master. He was both verbally and physically abusive, and my young impression stated he was obviously possessed by one of the retarded ghosts that lived in the house. Although I was the only child, life was not typical or pleasant. I did not receive a lot of time and attention from the parental units as they were preoccupied with their own lives. I tried to hide my despicable homelife from the world by not engaging and just accepting my wonderful status as the household scapegoat. That lasted until I became a teenager. No teenager, and I was no exception, just accepted the status quo.

I was never really alone in Frank’s house. The ghosts of the past that occupied the house shared my every sleeping and waking moment, always there, whispering to me of the joy of the kill. Often I would walk into a room and catch a whiff of a heavy, festering scent. It would stop me in my tracks, and I would sniff in all directions to find the source, to no avail. I would lick my tongue to the top of my mouth and taste the air, usually returning with a light unidentifiable metallic tang. Was I smelling something, or tasting something? It seemed as if my brain was confused and didn’t know if it should process smell or taste or both. Later I would realize this was the faint smell of blood floating on the gentle breezes as they rolled through this chilly dwelling. The place always felt damp, and there was always a chill that went straight to the bone.

By the time I was a preteen, I often fanaticized of killing the man my mother had married, and if it wasn’t for her, I think I might just have taken on that chore. I like to think I didn’t attack because of Stella, but the truth is, I would have died at an early age, and every bone in my body knew it. Frank