AURORA- The Last Phoenix

The back room of Vale's Curiosities was less a room than a controlled avalanche. Boxes were stacked to the ceiling in towers that defied several laws of physics, each one labeled in grandfather's careful handwriting with a date and a source, a system that made perfect sense to exactly one person on earth, and he'd been dead eleven years now, so the family had simply learned to decode it by trial and affection.The Holloway boxes sat by the window, four of them, water-stained cardboard that smelled like someone else's grandmother. I pulled the first one toward me and started working through the layers of newspaper padding. In it were a set of chipped teacups, a mantel clock missing its hands, a small ceramic fox that made her smile despite herself."Anything good?" Mom called from the front, where the bell had chimed twice more in the last ten minutes, the particular rhythm of a slow Tuesday."That depends on your definition of good. There’s a clock in here that only tells you it’s a

I was unable to sleep and kept rolling on my bed trying to figure out what the problem was. I mean I know what was keeping me from sleeping, it was sitting about 6 feet away from me but there was also this nagging feeling at the back of my mind.It was like the calm before a storm. Like I knew something was going to be wrong but at the same thing, what could go wrong? I have this habit of being overly optimistic even when I know something is really wrong somewhere.The grandfather clock downstairs struck nine-thirty. I know this because I counted the way I always did, half out of habit and half because counting felt like doing something, and doing something felt marginally better than sitting very still and thinking about the fact that my mother had said she would back by nine and I haven’t heard a peep from her. I checked my phone to see if I missed her message but there was nothing. And if mom said she would be back by 9, she is never late."They’re fine," I told the book, which did

Cillian ran and I ran, my lungs burning with every breath I took and tears blurring my vision but I pushed on. Behind us, the house that had raised me kept getting smaller and I wanted nothing more than going back to properly grieve the two people that dedicated 25 years of their lives to me. Nova will find them in the morning. Somebody will realize something is wrong and would bury them properly. It’s a small town after all. I don't remember most of the first few streets but I do remember gravel biting through the soles of the shoes I wore. I remember Cillian's hand closing around my wrist every time I slowed down, not gentle, not asking, just towing me forward like he'd already decided grief could catch up with me later, once I survive this phase. I remember thinking, somewhere underneath the panic, that May Town had never once in my life looked like this. These porch lights I'd walked past ten thousand times were suddenly strange and hostile, ev

"Orion." Cillian's voice, sharp with warning. "You're frightening her. Say what you mean.""Forgive me." Orion exhaled, some of the stillness draining out of him, though not all of it. "It’s a habit, going quiet when I have a lot to say but don’t know how to word it. Aurora, have you ever heard of Elaria?"Is that a person?" I asked, confused as hell."It’s a place." He said it gently, the way you’d tell a child something that was going to change how they saw every day of their life afterward."It is a world, layered over this one. Close enough to touch and far enough that most people who live here never once suspect it exists” He went further to explain.“ Supernaturals, the things that attacked your house tonight, and others far less monstrous, have lived there for longer than human history has bothered to record." He finished and looked at me, waiting for a response."I don’t…..” I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, “I need a second." I stood up and paced in front of th

The room was silent after Orion spoke. Nobody moved for a long time either. I stood on a spot with the fire still tracing lazy, gentle lines along my fingers. I watched it patiently, waiting for it to feel less like someone else's hands. Cillian hadn't let go of me, and I hadn't asked him to. I enjoyed the way my hands felt in his."So what happens now," I finally said, "now that we’ve established I might be an apocalypse or a working disaster or anything else you might want to call it.""Now we figure out how to make sure you’re not one," Orion said. "Tonight though, you sleep. Everything else can survive until morning."It was, of course, exactly then that the window shattered.I didn't have time to be afraid in any organized way. One second Orion was still holding the word Phoenix in the air between us like something fragile, and the next there was glass everywhere and a shape moving through it too fast to be human, Cillian was up in a blink of an eye, already between it and me sna