Courageous Love - Jerry Cole Page 0,2

what exactly did my dad mean? Where on earth was he sending me?

Chapter Two

This is ridiculous,” I muttered as I strained my eyes out of the tinted windows of the family car. We had been driving for hours to my new prison.

“I know how you feel,” Stacy said next to me, her expression hardened. “They really did it this time.”

My dad didn’t let me even check through the trunk before he called his car to take me to “my new home”. And at the same moment he let Stacy know that she was going to accompany me there and stay in order to keep an eye on me. I had a feeling that was one of the twin’s ideas. They’d always wanted me and Stacy out of the picture and I bet they were banking on me to fail this little test so it would be a bit more permanent.

“Do they want me to starve?” I asked the car and received no answer. They were cutting me off. No money, no anything.

“There’s enough food for a week or two so you can find your footing,” my dad had said as he took away every credit card he’d given me and pocketed my phone.

“I know you can find a job,” my mother said as she gave me a hug. I couldn’t raise my arms to hug her back. “You are a smart man.”

“We’ll write to you little brother,” Rosidae said with a fake smile.

“I bet you’ll end up enjoying it, little brother” Isaac added.

They never called me “little brother” except in front of our parents. They usually called me “the accident.”

I tapped my head against the cool car window and sighed. Maybe I was a little more irresponsible than my siblings but I didn’t deserve this either. It felt like I was being cast out. My father kept repeating that this wasn’t a punishment, that it was a test. But I didn’t know how he could see it that way. I was twenty-five, I could decide to leave and not go through with all this, but they were cutting me off either way. My only other option was to live in the city without any support and no money. In complying, at least there was a place I was promised to have; a house my grandparents bought years ago in a quaint little town they found on their way to a business trip. They apparently vacationed there all the time but I had never heard of the place.

I sat up once I realized we were in civilization again. So far, we had been passing rows and rows of cornfields, but now I could see buildings. Not many buildings, but buildings. We turned into what must have been main street for the little town and passed shops with antique signs and I could feel the car stumble under us with the uneven pavement. I saw all the signs that said: Ravenwood. I guess that was the name of our new home. A few people walking around the shops watched the car pass with fascination. Maybe they’d never seen a car like this before? The car slowly started to go up a rather steep hill, so steep I thought the car might start to slide backwards.

Eventually we made it and I wasted no time getting out of the car with my luggage, finally free from being practically forced into it for hours. I looked around and saw where I would be spending the foreseeable future. The white paneling, the black detailing… I slowly came to the realization that this house on the hill was a smaller version of the mansion I’d grown up in my whole life. My grandparents must have liked this place so much they spent millions on duplicating it for our manor.

I turned around and looked back at the town. I could see nearly all of it from the driveway. The town couldn’t have more than ten streets and it was surrounded on all sides by a green forest of corn. It was the kind of town you’d find in horror movies. I turned again and walked closer to the house before stopping in place.

I hadn’t seen what was behind the house yet.

“Are you stuck? Why aren’t you moving?” I heard Stacy ask as she hauled her own luggage next to me. “Oh.” She must have just noticed it too.

On the other side of the hill was a sprawling landscape dotted with thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of headstones.

“They’ve sent