Heaven and Hell Read Online Free

selected for her. Her background as a youth probation officer for the county gave her more credibility and more contacts within the system than a confused teenage girl. Eventually, committing her daughter to a mental institution was a simple matter.
    Serena had been confined in that nightmarish realm for more than three months. Those were the darkest of the dark times. The drugs, the incessant testing, the mind games that they referred to as counseling, broke her will. In a world of profound isolation, she was compelled to conform to her mother’s will and admit her own failings. Anything else was self-destructive.
    She remembered night after night praying for deliverance from that dreadful place. As time passed and her prayers went seemingly unanswered, her mind descended into a sort of fantasy realm, a place of escape from the unpleasant reality around her. She imagined herself as a fair maiden imprisoned in a dark and foreboding dungeon by an evil wizard. Her surroundings, though far from the stereotypical medieval dungeon, reinforced her fantasy—locked doors, cries in the night, constant heavy-handed supervision.
    In the end, it was her stepfather who had been her knight in shining armor. It was he who had finally brought her home, against her mother’s wishes. In the ensuing years, he was the diplomat who had managed to keep their home in a state of uneasy peace. Yet the rift between Serena and her mother remained until her mother’s death nine years later.
    Still the dark times continued.
    Although she was an exceptional student in school, well-mannered and well-liked by her teachers, the fearful months in the mental hospital had marked her both socially and emotionally. She had become very quiet and withdrawn, making few friends of her own age in school. Most of her classmates stayed away from the thin, plain-looking youth who had spent time in the “nut house.”
    All sorts of stories about her mental state were rumored throughout the school. Because of her good grades, she was inducted into the National Honor Society, yet even this accolade gave her no status among her peers. When the school day came to a close, she withdrew into a world of her own.
    Now, standing in the arena gazing toward the throne, she saw herself at home, in the midst of reading book after book on the occult. They had seemed harmless enough at the time, yet they had inevitably led her down a twilight path to paganism, tarot card reading, and magical rituals that gave her the illusion of power. They replaced the all too familiar sense of helplessness. She found escape in a variety of dark pursuits, imagined ancient gods and goddesses, and other fantasies that seemed preferable to the realities of her existence.
    Somewhere along that path to perdition, her moral fiber had become tattered and frayed, as her affair with a married man 20 years her senior had demonstrated. She was 18 at the time—a wild fling with one of her former high school teachers. The affair lasted only a few months, and as far as she knew, no one had been the wiser. After all, these things happen—no one is to blame.
    But now in the vision she saw it all very differently. There had been suspicions, innuendoes, talk of impropriety. Inevitably, the rumors had reached her lover’s wife through a variety of channels. Serena had been instrumental in weakening an already strained marriage, a marriage that eventually and inevitably dissolved.
    “All lives in the world touch all other lives,” announced the angel who stood behind the podium. “It is within our power to influence them for the better, or for the worse. Your actions, your sins, brought about the latter.”
    Serena’s life rushed forward in a dizzying collage of imagery. She witnessed her first marriage. She’d known Kevin since high school. He had been one of her few friends. Like her, he was an outsider and interested in the fantasy world of renaissance festivals and occult powers. It seemed a perfect