1
Kaitlyn
The flames come for me—vivid orange and yellow. I can feel the heat baking off them and their bright fingers reach for me hungrily—wrapping around me, enfolding me in the terrible searing pain I can never escape…never forget.
Outside the door, I hear my mother and father screaming.
The door bursts open at last and they are there, but the flames already have me—I can feel them licking up the back of my nightgown like hungry tongues, setting my hair afire with light. They are ravenous—insatiable. They intended to eat me alive—I know that just as I know there is no escape from them.
“Katy!” my mother screams as she runs to me, heedless of the wall of fire between us. “Katy—my baby!”
She dives through the flames, not caring that they catch her too, wrapping around her like the wings of a great and terrible bird enfolding her. She pulls me close and begins to beat at the fire that is trying to eat me, all while my father is shouting for us to hurry, yelling that we have to run…have to get out…
Get out, I think. We have to get out!
We will never get out.
And then I smell the awful scent of burning flesh and know it is my own…
I woke up with tears in my eyes and my throat closed tight with panic, as I always did when I dreamed of The Fire.
I thought of it that way—capitalized in my head. Why not? It was certainly important enough—it had taken everything from me. It was probably what my English teacher would call “the seminal event” of my entire life and though it had happened over two years ago, when I was barely fourteen, the dream made it seem as fresh as ever. I could still hear my parents screams, echoing above the roaring flames…
A sob caught in my throat and then another as a vast sense of loss filled me. They were gone—they had left me all alone and they were never coming back. My wonderful, wise mother and my handsome, smartass father, who was always cracking dad jokes to make us groan. I would never see them again—not on this side of eternity, anyway.
I know lots of teenagers don’t get along with their parents—and my relationship with mine hadn’t been perfect. But we had laughed together and loved each other and really, almost never disagreed.
I wondered if it would hurt less if we had fought more.
The vast ocean of grief—its waters as deep and black and cold as space—threatened to overwhelm me. I felt like I would drown in it sometimes.
Sometimes I even wanted to.
The loss of my parents filled me for a moment and my heart ached almost as much as my scars, which covered my arms and the entire left side of my body. Sometimes I tried to remember what I had looked like without them—back when all of my face—not just the right side—was pretty and pleasing to look at. Now the left side looked melted and what used to be smooth, light brown skin had been replaced by pinkish-white scar tissue, knotted and lumped and ugly…so ugly.
I avoided mirrors these days and, except for when I was alone with my Coven-mates at Nocturne Academy, I kept to myself as much as possible.
I wished I was there now—wished I could reach out to Emma or Megan, the newest member of our little clan—for some comfort or at least some distraction from my bleak thoughts and the awful memories.
But it was the weekend and I was home. Well, at Mr. and Mrs. Breedlove’s home, anyway.
I had been babysitting their little girl, Allegra, almost from the time she was born. After The Fire and the weeks I spent in the hospital, I had no home of my own to go back to so Alastair and Anastasia Breedlove had taken me into their house and given me a room of my own—right next to Allegra’s. They had even sponsored me for Nocturne Academy—paying the extremely expensive tuition out of their own pocket.
I was grateful for their kindness though, being Nocturnes, neither one of them was exactly very warm. But Allegra made up for her parents’ coolness and distance by being sweet and bubbly and incredibly lovable. I knew what my friend Avery said—that I was basically the Breedloves’ nanny, at least on the weekends—but I didn’t care. Allegra was a ray of sunshine in my dark life and I loved her as though she was my own.
As though my thoughts of her had called the little girl, I heard the light patter of footsteps in the hall outside my room and then the door creaked open. In the darkness of the hallway, I saw the soft glow of her pale blue eyes.
“Katy?” she whispered, approaching my bed. “Katy, I had a nightmare. Can I sleep with you?”