🗡️ Chapter 02🗡️

Luckily for me, the front doors were still standing.

Reinforced steel core, my father had said when he had them installed, back when I was young enough to think he was just being dramatic.

I understood now why he'd done it. I understood a lot of things now that I was standing in front of a burning house with nowhere else to go.

I threw myself at them and they gave.

The heat that came out was staggering. A wall of it, immediate and physical, like the house was exhaling something it had been holding in too long. Inside, the fire had made itself at home, climbing the walls in long orange fingers, eating the corners, turning the ceiling into a churning black cloud that had nowhere to go.

I went in anyway.

"Mum! Dad!"

My voice disappeared into the roar of it. I screamed their names again, louder, my eyes burning and watering before I'd made it three steps.

I scanned the foyer, my eyes stinging, my heart hammering so hard it felt like it would burst. I was praying, begging whatever gods were listening, that they weren't home. That they had escaped.

But the world went cold when I saw him.

My father was the first one I found. He was lying at the bottom of the stairs.

The world didn't slow down. That's the thing they never tell you, in the films it always slows down, goes soft, gives you a moment to process. It didn't. One second I was scanning the foyer and the next I was on the floor beside him with no memory of crossing the distance, my hands gripping his shoulders, shaking him like I could rattle him back into consciousness.

"Dad! Dad, wake up!" I screamed, slapping his cheek to get a reaction. "Dad, I’m back! Zelda’s back! Your daughter is home!"

The words kept coming out even after I saw it. Even after my eyes finally registered what the rest of me already knew and had been refusing. His chest. The hollow, terrible wrongness of his chest.

His heart was gone.

Not stopped. Not failed. Removed. Torn out with a deliberateness that turned my stomach inside out and replaced everything I'd been feeling,the fear, the panic, the desperate hope, with something that had no name yet.

Something that was going to need time to become whatever it was going to become.

I pulled him into my arms.

I don't know why. He was already gone and holding him wasn't going to change that and I did it anyway.

A raw, guttural scream tore out of my throat,I rocked back and forth as I cried bitterly. The heat of the fire was nothing compared to the cold agony slicing through my soul.

"Who did this?" I choked out through the sobs. "Who?!"

I stayed there for what felt like forever with my father's body in my arms and I screamed until my throat gave out but then I kept screaming without sound, just my mouth open and nothing left to give.

But then, a terrifying thought broke through the grief.

Mum.

I laid my father down carefully.

I forced myself to stand up, my legs shaking and my vision tunneling, as I turned to go look for my mother.

I looked around, desperately hoping she’d managed to get out.

But then I spotted her.

She was against the far wall, half-collapsed, her shoulder against the floral wallpaper that she'd spent two weeks picking out when I was nine years old because she'd wanted something that felt like a garden inside the house. I crossed the room at a run and dropped to my knees so hard I felt it up my spine.

"Mum! Mum!" I slapped her cheek, my hands shaking so much I could barely aim. My hands found her face. Her neck. Searching. "Mum, please. Answer me. Please."

There was no reaction. I sat there, paralyzed, the sound of the roaring fire fading behind the sound of my own sobbing.

Just then, I felt a weak, flickering squeeze on my hand. My head snapped up. My mother’s eyes were cracked open just a sliver, glazed but focused on me. "My daughter... you are back..." Her voice was a ragged, wet whisper, her breathing heavy and shallow.

I swallowed hard, a tiny spark of hope flared in my chest. "Mom... thank goodness. I’ll take you to the hospital. Right now." I started to stand, trying to hook my arms under her to lift her up, but she gave me a look, a look so heavy and final that it stopped me cold.

"Zelda."

"Mother, please let me save you! I beg you!" I cried, the tears spilling onto her shirt.

She slowly raised a trembling hand, her fingers grazing my cheek. "I'm sorry," she said. "We had plans. For when you got home." A breath. Careful. Costly. "I had a whole dinner planned."

"Stop." My voice cracked down the middle. "Stop talking like that."

She swallowed hard, a grimace of pain crossing her face. "We’ve done a lot of things in the past, Zelda... and we deserve this. Just because we were your best parents in the world... doesn't mean we were good people." Her voice cracked, failing her.

I shook my head violently, my face a mess of tears and mucus. "No, no! You were good people! The best parents ever!"

A tiny, sad smile touched her lips.

"We weren't good people." She said it quietly, without flinching. "Your father and I. Before you. We were part of things,we did things,that we spent seventeen years hoping would stay buried." Her eyes didn't leave mine. "They didn't stay buried."

"Who." My jaw was so tight it hurt. "Who did this. Give me a name."

"It's alpha drakan.." she muttered.

The name sat in the air between us.

Her eyes seemed to wander for a second. "But it isn't without reason... we caused it... Just... just don't let him get you. You can return to the UK... and..."

Her hand slipped from my face and thudded onto the floor. Her eyes went still.

"Mother? Mother!" I slapped her cheek again, harder this time. I waited for her to breathe, for her to blink, for anything. But there was nothing.

I screamed. I sat there in the heat and the smoke and I just screamed. My beloved parents,the only people who ever loved me,they were gone.

"No, this has to be a dream," I choked out. I reached down and pinched my arm as hard as I could, twisting the skin until it bruised, praying I would wake up in my seat on the plane.

But I didn't wake up. The fire kept burning, and my parents stayed dead. It was real.

A heavy roar of thunder shook the ground beneath me, and a second later, the sky broke open.

The rain came down in a violent, sudden sheet, as if the heavens were trying to wash away the sin of what had happened in this house.

I slowly forced myself up, my muscles screaming and my lungs burning from the soot. I couldn't leave them here to be consumed by the flames. With a strength I didn't know I had, I grabbed my mother’s hands and dragged her toward the door, then went back for my father. I coughed so hard I thought I’d heave, my throat raw from smoke and screaming, as I pulled him across the floor and out onto the wet grass.

***

I sat there on the lawn, the freezing rain drenching me to the bone, staring at my parents’ bodies. I was numb, yet every time I looked at them, a fresh wave of tears blurred my vision, mixing with the rainwater streaming down my face. I just couldn't wrap my head around it. In a matter of hours, I went from a student coming home to a girl with nothing but ghosts.

The fire that had been roaring over the mansion started to hiss and die down, the downpour acting as a cold, indifferent blanket over the ruins of my life.

I eventually stood up, moving like a puppet on strings. I found a shovel in the gardening shed near the edge of the estate and walked to the center of the garden, the place where my mother used to sit in the sun. I began to dig. Every time the blade hit the mud, a sob escaped my chest. The more I dug, the harder I cried, the dirt staining my hands and clothes until I was as much a part of the earth as they were about to be.

I was burying the only love I had ever known, and with every shovel of dirt, the girl I used to be was dying right along with them.