"Sand and Sun"
The corner of the box dug deeper into my bare thigh as we bumped over a pothole in the road. I tried to shift the monstrous weight to my knees to conciliate the bruises forming on my legs, but I only succeeded in bumping my chin on the top of the box as we flew over another pockmark in the gravel road. My small noise of discontent at my bleeding lip went unnoticed in the boiling mini-van, one we had been stuck in for almost eight hours without air conditioning.
It was strange that I could feel so alone in the car with four other people in the tiny space with me; Mom in the driver's seat with a carton of Munchkins as her companion; Alyssa in the other captain, fiddling with the buttons on her Nintendo-something-portable; Millie and Lara sharing the back seat, with Lara slumped up against the glass of her window, oblivious in sleep. There was also Balderdash, the family mutt, curled somewhere beneath the back seat.
"Are we there yet?" asked Alyssa, her voice so whiny that I wanted to yank her blonde pigtails. "Mama, are we there?" I heard music somewhere behind me; Millie must've blasted the music on her iPod to drown out the dulcet tones of the seven-year-old. Millie never was very good with children, in fact, she had pushed me out of the tree house when I was six and she, at ten, was supposed to be babysitting.
"Does it look like we're there?" grumbled Lara, pushing her face away from the window and hanging her head over my seat. Her dark curls tickled the side of my face and I swatted them away, causing the box to nearly topple out of my lap.
"I don't know," sniffed Alyssa as her eyes, green like everyone in the family, tracked the little cartoon character across the screen. "It all looks the same out there."
I had to admit that she had a point there. For the past couple of hours, I had been forced to soak in the bleak desert of New Mexico, the scraggly cactuses and the reddish dunes blocked by even taller dunes, and a town every now and then. Coming from leafy, cool Wisconsin, the cultural shock was fatal.
"Five minutes," Mom announced as if the brief squabble hadn't broken out. "Are you alright back there, Bree? You've been awfully quiet this whole ride."
"Why do I have to carry the box?" I asked mutinously.
"It's because we couldn't afford a bigger moving truck. I'm sorry honey, we're almost there." Mom's eyes flashed up into the review mirror for a moment, green comets shooting across the glass, taking in my sullen expression. She didn't see my cheeks flush as I cowered guiltily against the back of the seat.
I should've known the penny-pinching would sneak its ugly head in somewhere.
"Way to go," breathed Lara in my ear, grape-scented air wafting to catch pungently in my nose. "That was brilliant, little Bree."
"Shut up!" I growled. "You didn't have to carry a box filled with stupid trinkets." Lara laughed gratingly and retreated to her own space, still smacking her violet gum between her molars. I grimaced, though she couldn't see me, and contented myself with gazing out the windows again.
New Mexico was no place for us. Millie, Lara, and I had been born here and we'd been happy, until Dad went psycho and resorted to killing domestic animals as a source of entertainment. So after a seven-year stint in Wisconsin, we were now heading back to a place that reeked of old memories. But upon confronting Mom about this, she had merely said, "I'm familiar with the area."
Right, as if we didn't have forty-nine other states to choose from.
"How quaint," Mom squealed as we passed through the crumbling main town, which took all of thirty seconds. "Just look at these little stores. I'll bet they've been around for a hundred years."
"Road!" intoned Millie without looking up from her magazine and Mom swerved back onto the gravel road. She had a nasty habit of getting very distracted while she was driving. It was almost as if unhinging her jaw also unhinged her ability to keep the car within the perimeter of the road, no matter how wide it was.
"I'm ordering pizza when we get to the house," whispered Lara as we reached the outskirts of town and took one of the few side roads to a neighborhood. "I'm absolutely starving." She pinched the skin on her tan stomach and let out a familiar belt of hyena-inspired laughter that we had long ago stopped cringing to.
"We just ate lunch a few hours ago," snapped Millie, winding dark mahogany hair around her finger, one streak of shamrock green swirled perfectly through the middle. Back when Millie had virgin hair, we had decided that her and I looked the most like sisters from our family; though we all had greenish eyes, Lara's hair was nearly black and Alyssa's was mousy, leaving Millie and I with reddish-brown. Then Millie had rebelliously streaked hers with green and I had gotten mine cut short, just to my shoulders, so we didn't look as similar anymore.
"Here!" Mom shrieked, a catalyst for the slam of the breaks and the box sliding off of my knees and onto my bare toes. I peered out of Alyssa's window with watering eyes in order to catch a glimpse of our new house.
It was… nondescript. Neither bigger nor smaller than the others, it looked like the ones on either side but with a different paint job. It was much smaller than our house in Wisconsin, but that had been expected and I was therefore able to decide it wasn't a bad looking house. At least, I wouldn't mind living in it for the next four years before I could escape back up north for college.
"Let's get inside," fussed Mom as she pulled into the driveway haphazardly. "Alyssa, it's your turn to fee Balder, since Bree fed him at the rest stop." Alyssa pouted as she clicked off her Nintendo, cutting of the high-pitched and repetitive song that had been plaguing us for the last hundred miles.
I stretched my legs carefully onto the concrete and the box, of course, tumbled from my arms and landed with a smack upon the pavement.
"Careful!" Mom shrieked as something breakable tingled ominously behind the cardboard. "Bree, be careful with that." I grunted in response, trying to utilize my lack of upper-body strength in a way that would get the box into my arms. Millie, having gotten out through the other door moments ago, walked past me breezily.
"Don't expect me to close the door behind you."
"I wasn't!" I bit my slightly tattered lip and slammed the van door behind me. Balderdash yelped at the noise and scurried off into the house, leaping the porch steps easily. I was left alone in the cool evening air, watching the sun steal goldenly across the dunes our house stood in front of.
The only word I could think of to describe this little town was 'depressing'. Everything about it seemed so pale and lifeless compared to the bustling suburban life we had left behind. Anger flooded through my veins and made the tips of my fingers tingle. With a scowl, I rubbed my arms as gooseflesh prickled my nerves.
Was there something moving beyond the growing shadows? I probed my eyes through the darkness, searching for something that would betray movement. There was nothing I could see right off, though as I bent to retrieve the box, the hairs on the nape of my neck stood up from unseen eyes. Straightening, I pierced through the gathering nightfall once more.
"Bree!" Lara's voice made me jump with unpleasant surprise. "Get in here, will you? We're ordering pizza and Millie isn't going to wait for your opinion." I tripped over my flip-flops as I hurried into the wooden foyer of our new house. I still had the uneasy feeling that there had been someone lurking in the velvety blackness, the shadows beneath dunes and the alleys between houses.
"I got half pepperoni, half veggie," announced Millie as Lara and I meandered into the small, neat kitchen. She sat upon the counter top, knocking her shoes together with the music still blasting into her ears. Every time she did so dirt sprayed from their crevices and marred the white granite counter.
"Hawaiian would've been nice," I mumbled bitterly, feeling forgotten.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Bree!" cried Millie, and her usual cynicism was missing from her tone as emerald orbs probed my face. "You'll eat pepperoni, won't you?" She seemed generally concerned at the small matter of dinner, and I was slightly appeased.
"I'll have veggie."
"There we go," interjected Millie, knocking her feet together one more time and spraying more chunks of dirt off her shoes.
"Amelia Louise! Get off the counter!" Mom came flying back into the kitchen, her cell phone in one hand and a slightly maniacal look on her face. "That's unsanitary." Millie made a face when Mom had moved onto the next room, presumably a family room, but obediently hopped onto the linoleum.
"Are you alright, Bree?" asked Lara, squeezing my shoulder. "You've barely said two words this entire trip."
"Except for 'why do I have to hold the box?'" smirked Alyssa, taking her game station from her pocket as if it were a small child. The light pulsated in the corner as she flicked on the power switch again. "That was brilliant, Bree." Lara couldn't entirely contain her giggles and Millie wandered off to the sink as if taking in the sandy view outside. The smirk twitching the corner of her lip was a dead give away.
Sometimes I doubted Alyssa was a seven-year-old, corrupted by two sarcastic elder siblings. No, sometimes I was convinced she was a demon.
The door bell rang then and Balderdash skidding off, his click-clicking toe nails struggling frantically to gain purchase on the red foyer tile. Millie swerved after the mutt, yelling needlessly, "Pizza!" I heard the front door open and the exchange of food and money made next before Millie returned with a steaming pizza box in her hand.
"That was quick," remarked Alyssa vaguely. I was less surprised; in a town this small, how far away could the nearest pizza place be?
"Excellent!" crooned Lara, pulling a cheesy slice from the box the moment it was laid upon the counter. I was the last to take a piece, making a face at the huge chunk of mushroom that happened to lay in the piece I had chosen. The thought of eating fungus had creeped me out every since Millie had told me the athlete's foot was also another kind of fungus. I thought that might've been around the same time that she convinced me that there was a ghost living in the attic.
Needless to say, my childhood had been an interesting one.
No, I couldn't complain. We were happy, if slightly dysfunctional at times.
"Bree, it's your turn to take Balder for a walk," smirked Millie the moment I wiped my mouth off on the back of my hand. The tomato sauce glimmered, red as blood, on the back of my hand and I grimaced. If Mom hadn't been looking, I would've wiped it on my jeans; if we had chairs and chair-cushions, which would've sufficed as well. But without even a napkin in sight, I was forced to let the sweet-smelling sauce crust on my hand.
"I'm not done eating," I snapped, reaching for another piece of pizza. Mom stayed my hand and I was forced to meet her olive eyes.
"That's not very nice," she implored. "Look at the poor thing. Just take him for a quick loop around the backyard, won't you?" I sighed heavily. With Balder looking up at me with huge ocher eyes, it would be like kicking a small child to say no. With another piece of pizza dribbling greasily down my hands, I took the leash Mom handed me and dragged Balder out the back door.
The air here was so warm and dry that I could feel the static calling my hair to attention even as I stepped onto our lawn, if it could be called that. Two concrete steps led down to about ten feet of thick, coarse grass. Beyond that there was nothing but sand, tall dunes that glowed slightly in the moonlight.
At least the stars were the same.
I bit into the pizza morosely, hissing when red sauce exploded from the back and splattered over my shirt. Now it looked like I had been mortally wounded and my favorite T-shirt was ruined.
Balder pranced, stiff-legged, around the perimeter of his new yard. He stopped once to pee against a cactus—the poor thing would wither and die by tomorrow surely—and was making his way back to me when he halted. Even from here I could see the hackles rise up along his back, inches of bristling fur. A snarl edged from his throat as he looked at something in the shadows of the side of our house.
With a strange feeling of dread pulsating in my stomach, I called, "Is anyone there?"
At first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. A glimmer of white, it must've been a patch of sand in the moonlight. The swift, cat-like shadow that eased itself from the darkness, it couldn't be real. Two glowing burgundy orbs caught and held the broken slants of moonlight, almost ruby in the white light.
Balder choked on his next bark and it subsided to a whimper as he backed up toward the untamed desert. I caught this only out of the edge of my vision because I was actually focused on the tall woman that had materialized from nowhere. My mind was locked in a sort of haze as she walked forth and I noticed the strangest things.
Her hands, white and curled in front of her like claws.
I could note her absolutely inhuman beauty— slender nose, alabaster skin, full mouth, and bright brown hair that fell in spirals to her mid back. She was tall and slender, straight from a European runway, and perhaps mid-twenties. The only thing that disturbed me was her eyes—they were strange, dark, catching red in the moonlight. They were locked; I realized when she got within a few feet, not on my face, but on my stomach where the stain of pizza sauce lingered as a blood-red blob.
Balder let out an ear-piercing yelp and took off over the dunes, running as I could never convince him when I was training during cross-country season. I was suddenly afraid and glanced swiftly over my shoulder. All the blinds were drawn in the windows and I could only hear my family chattering happily, laughing.
I turned my head back and a sharp gasp slipped from my lips—how had she moved so quickly? She was merely inches from me and breathtakingly beautiful. But her eyes were feral, a look that that absolutely terrified me. There was something about her movements, something so predator-like in every single move she made. I blinked and she shifted herself; I exhaled a frightened breath and she moved again.
"C-can I h-help you?" I stuttered, thinking of nothing better to say, or at least nothing that would be nearly as well-mannered.
"Your scent," she breathed in a husky voice. "It's simply mouth-watering."
"I… what?"
Her cupid-bow lips drew back over gleaming white teeth and I swear she was in mid-lunge toward my neck when there was a flash of white—of gray—the sound of a rock slide. Something that was as hard as marble whacked me just above the temples and I fell off the stoop with golden stars fluttering just out of my reach. The sand was reassuringly soft in my palms as I struggled to sit up.
"Sara, no! This—isn't—part—of—the—plan!" There was a male speaking now, his velvety voice punctuated by snarls from the woman—Sara?
"Just a mouthful!" she howled and as my vision cleared, I cringed back. Her eyes were huge, bulging, and she was no longer pretty. She clawed at me from behind the muscular arms of the newcomer. His face was turned away from me but he had a shocking mess of blonde hair against snowy skin. His arms were the cage that held the panic from building in my throat as I crouched against the ground in terror.
"What was that?" asked someone clearly from inside the house.
We froze.
"Damn it," swore the new man. "Sara, get back to the hideout now, that's an order! I'll have to take her with us, she's seen too much." With an untamed snarl of loathing, Sara ripped herself from the young man's arms and dashed off over the dunes with impossible grace and speed, slinking like a lion but moving like a train. I watched her disappear into the silky sand, rubbing my head where I could feel a lump forming.
"You're a bit young for this," said the young man almost sadly.
My mouth had stopped working. He reached out with long fingers and tapped the side of my head with his fingers, literally tapped. It felt like a horse had decided to take my head off and I reeled backwards.
As I slid in the emotionless black gathering at the edge of my mind, I felt the arms of an ice-statue gather around me and then—
Then we were flying.