1. "Memories"
Hadley Reyes was exhausted. She had been driving for hours since her last fuel stop. Her eyelids were heavy and her legs were numbing. She was white-knuckled gripping the steering wheel to keep from drifting into the other lanes on the freeway. The last year and a half had been hellish. She'd come to terms with leaving Amity Park behind. It broke what was left of her little stone heart, and she couldn't deny it anymore. After a few days of steady driving to get out of range of a certain angry phantom, she'd pulled off down a gravel road and cried searing tears of anger and hurt. She'd screamed and beat her poor, worn steering wheel until she was gasping for air.
It helped a little, and she managed to get back on the road long enough to find a hotel. She had been heading west then, all the way to the coast. She had to. It was time, and she couldn't put it off any longer. She was going home.
Of course, it wasn't home any longer. Not with her dear friends gone. It hurt to think of them, but they were the reason she returned.
Doctor Robert Sucidem was the town's only family doctor. He had been a sorcerer, and the only one that believed the ramblings of a six-year-old who had just lost her entire family. He had taken her into his home and raised her for the nine years that followed. He and his wife, Helen, had taught her of all the things that existed under the nose of humanity. Helen was also a healer. She worked as a nurse in the doctor's facility, and made medicines from herbs and other things she'd find in nature. If Hadley had been older, she might've thought it was ridiculous, but her young mind took to magic like a duck to water.
When she was ten, Hadley asked the doctor and his wife to help her become strong enough to defeat the dark creatures that haunted the human world. She wanted to protect others from experiencing the pain she felt when her whole world came crashing down.
Robert and Helen agreed, and flooded her with knowledge. She trained hard and became stronger every day. But she knew it wasn't enough.
"Is it possible to be more than I am?" she had asked them. "I can't beat these things as a human. I'm too vulnerable."
"There is a way to make you something more, of course," the Doctor replied kindly. "But there is always a price to being changed."
"What did you have in mind, dear?" Helen's soft voice filled the small garage.
Hadley looked around the front yard of the house through the large, open garage door. Redwoods towered over them, reaching into the night sky. Crickets sang in the cool darkness. The gate creaked in the breeze as one of the neighborhood's stray cats squeezed by it, headed to Helen for dinner. The post's gargoyles loomed in the night, facing outward as if to challenge intruders.
Hadley recalled the legend she read about gargoyles. As a child, they'd frightened her; their grotesque appearance serving its purpose. Helen told her Gargoyles were protectors. They watched over the house at night while the humans slept to protect them from evil.
That's how Hadley chose. She'd turned back to Helen and Robert, "A gargoyle."
That was all it took. They went to work to prepare a ritual that Hadley couldn't remember. She woke up a few days later with the marking of dark wings on her back.
People had looked down on her for it, thinking her to be barely in her teen years with a massive tattoo of demonic wings covering her back. It hurt her at first, but she became calloused to that eventually.
She enjoyed them immensely. At sundown, she trained in her new body. She'd defeated many dark creatures that threatened the town in her remaining years.
Until that horrible night.
Hadley heard the screams from her training in the forest. It was a horrible wail that sent waves of fear through her body. She flew home immediately, pumping her large wings with everything she had.
Something was in the house. The gargoyles that sat atop each post of the wall were missing, and parts of a few of them littered the front lawn. Hadley had rushed into the house through the ruined door, not caring that its splinters poked into her bare toes.
A beast was in there. In that moment, her mind wasn't clear enough to recognize it. The body of the doctor was limp in the beast's long fingers, drenched with blood and torn open at the abdomen.
Fear and disgust rose at the back of Hadley's throat in the form of bile. The beast was over seven feet tall, grey-skinned, and hauntingly slim. It hunched over the doctor's body, devouring it as Hadley devoured corn on the cob. Horrifyingly morbid smacking noises pierced the air, and bits of intestine and muscle fell from the creature's mouth. Stains of a red so deep it looked black colored the carpet below it, dripping over the remains of the gargoyles.
Hadley choked on her own gag reflex, making a noise that pulled the creature away from its meal.
Beady black eyes met Hadley's wide blue stare. Its face was coated in blood and chunks of muscle, and its long, jagged teeth were exposed. The lips had rotted away, as did the nose and eyelids. It was strangely humanoid, yet more beastly than anything Hadley had ever seen. It definitely wasn't an ordinary animal.
It wailed at her and tossed the minimalistic remains of the doctor at another heap of remains that Hadley feared was Helen.
Anger swallowed her fear and she screamed back at it, baring her own fangs. Tears streaked down her cheeks as she dove at it. She tore it apart with her fingers, not feeling its clawed nails dig at the stone that was once her flesh.
Hadley shook off the memory as she pulled into a dingy motel. She parked in front of the office and rubbed her face. She was only a few hours away from her destination, but she knew she couldn't possibly drive anymore.
She checked in and lugged her things into the small, grey room. A shower did little for her, but flopping down on the hard mattress felt like heaven.
Sleep came easily, but so did her nightmares.