What Was Waiting

Here is a thing they don't tell you about fear: it doesn't announce itself. It just moves your feet for you.

I was on the stairs before I'd decided to be, one hand on the banister, my heartbeat doing something that felt less like a rhythm and more like a fist against a door, and the first thing I saw when I reached the bottom step was Dad on the floor of our front hall.

He wasn’t moving. I mean he was moving but you don’t move that way when you just slip and fall. Coupled with the fact that he didn’t seem fine, there was a dark puddle growing around him which could only mean one thing.

He was lying in his own pool of blood.

My body worked faster than my brain and I screamed before I could fully process what was happening. I remember the sound happening, distant and strange, like it belonged to someone else but I didn’t know where it started nor ended.

 My screams turned into whimper when a hand, cold, wrong, far too strong, closed around my arm from behind.

 It then dawned on me that whoever had done this to my father was still in the house and was now holding onto me.

"There she is." The voice was pleasant and that further filled me with horror. He sounded like we were long lost friends being reintroduced to each other at a party  "The last ember. Do you have any idea how long we’ve been looking for you?"

I did not, in fact have any idea, on account of having been a functioning adult with a ledger and a mild grudge against my neighbor up until about four minutes ago.

"I think you have the wrong house," I said, surprising even myself because the amount of sheer terror running through me should have overridden my sarcasm but some things never change . "We don’t keep embers, they can be very dangerous. And besides, we live by the fire code."

The hand on my arm tightened hard enough to bruise, and somewhere behind the couch I heard my mother's voice, thin and shaking in a way I had never once heard it in my entire life, and every joke in me died at once.

"Aurora." Mom, on her knees managed to crawl into view, her hands pressed to a wound I refused to let myself look at directly. "Aurora, look at me. You have to listen. You were never ours to begin with. We swore an oath to protect you, to…….", she groaned in pain and pressed on her injury.

"Mom…..", I whispered at the same time whoever was holding me shouted “shut up, bitch”.

"You’re a Phoenix." She said, refusing to let whoever was behind me deter from making her confession. It was like she’d been waiting twenty-five years for the right moment and had just discovered that there wasn’t going to be one.

 "And lastly, there are people, things, who’ve been hunting you since before we ever held you. We were supposed to keep you safe until you were ready."

"Ready for what?" My voice came out cracked and much smaller than I wanted it to. "Mom, what are you….."

I didn't get to finish. The person holding my arm laughed and threw me backward hard making me hit my head and moved towards my mother.

What I remember most clearly, out of everything that happened in the next thirty seconds, is the door.

It didn't open. It came off its hinges and across the hall in a spray of splinters, and Cillian was already moving before the noise finished happening, faster than I'd ever seen a person move.

He didn't say my name. He didn't have too. He put himself between my mom and the person that was holding my arm with the kind of certainty that suggested he'd done this before. In a blink of an eye, they both changed form into things that was definitely not human and couldn’t be explained with silence. I was still reeling from what I was seeing before me when  heard his voice.

"Aurora, move!" Cillian’s voice was sharp and feral, nothing like the careful, guarded thing I was used to hearing across a quiet street but I could pick out his voice in a city fullof people so I knew it was him.. "Get to your parents — now!"

I moved at the speed of light. I didn’t even know my body could do that. Dad’s eyes were still open when I reached him. He found my face and held it, and his hand, when it closed over mine, was cold in a way hands aren't supposed to get this fast.

"We loved you," he said, "before we knew any of it. That part was never a lie." He took a deep breath and his hands went limp in mine. “No, Daddy please. Please open your eyes. Please stay with me”, I sobbed frantically, sending silent prayers to God that I should be in a dream.

Mom was laying so still with her hands still over her wounds and I screamed, shocking myself that I still had so much energy.

“Mom, please wake up. Please, please, please”, I pleaded but she still wouldn’t get up.

I don't know how long I knelt there crying but it was long enough that Cillian had to say pull me away from my Dad’s body, his hands under my arms, hauling me upright with a gentleness that felt completely at odds with the blood on his knuckles.

"I’m sorry," he said, and he sounded like he meant it more than two years of clipped hellos had any right to promise. "I’m so sorry, but we have to go. He wasn’t the only one. There are more coming, and we have maybe sixty seconds before they get here."

"I can’t just……." My voice broke somewhere in the middle of the sentence aand fresh tears streamed out of my face "I can’t leave them like this."

"You can. You have to" His hands found my shoulders, turned me bodily away from the two people I would have to grieve properly later. "Because they didn’t die protecting a house, Aurora. They died protecting you. Don’t waste that standing still. Don’t let their deaths be in vain"

Somewhere outside, too close, I heard the particular sound of more than one set of footsteps moving fast toward a house that had already given up everything it had left to give. I took one last look at my parents’ body and made up my mind.

If they died protecting me, I owe it to them to survive and get back at who did this to them.

“Before we go, there is something I must pick”, I told Cillian and tore my hands away from him, running up the stairs with strength that surprised me. I made it to my room in record time and, picked up the book I left on my bedside table.

Downstairs, we could hear commotion and one look at Cillian confirmed my thoughts.

He took my hands and led me near the window. “I know we are practically strangers but I’m going to need you to trust me on this one”. Without waiting for my answer, he scooped me up in his arms and we jumped out of the window.

Immediately his feet touched the ground, I didn’t need to be told twice.

I RAN!