A/N: Just polished this up a bit.

Screams echoed around my house, female screams, jolting me awake. It took only a second for my brain to go to work. My mother was at an overnight conference so it wasn't her. My parents were divorced and my father lived in another state. Also, the screams were clearly female so it wasn't him either. My younger sister was sleeping over at a friend's which meant that I was alone in the house with my older sister, Rachel. She had to be the source of the screams.

The thing you need to know about Rachel is that she's one of those people who get all the luck: tall, blond, athletic, supermodel good looks, plenty of friends, good grades. Sometimes I hated her; most of the time I loved her. Unfortunately, we had drifted apart the past few years but we still saw each other everyday. I just wasn't an important part of her life anymore.

Lately, she had begun to scare me, unintentionally. It could happen anytime and anywhere, in any conversation. Her eyes would suddenly flash with a fury I hadn't known she was capable of, hadn't even known was possible. As soon as it was there, though, the rage would be gone and she would be back to being a typical teenager who thought she too cool to hang with her younger sister.

Except none of it mattered at that precise moment: she was my sister and she was screaming, end of story. I was out of bed and rushing into Rachel's room without even making a conscious decision. She was tangled in her sheets and blankets, thrashing, and sweat was pouring down her face but she was still asleep, though I had no idea how. I tried to shake her awake but she whacked me on the head and I had to take a step back to regroup. I went to try again but she woke herself up before I got a chance.

Her eyes were red and puffy, something I'd never really seen before; she must have been crying in her sleep, but it was the look in them chilled me to the bone. It was a mixture of hatred, defiance, terror and heart-wrenching pain and, underneath all that, there was something else, something broken. If I couldn't see that those eyes were my sister's, I wouldn't have even known they were human, her eyes were that feral.

"Jordan?" she asked, her voice low. She couldn't see me as clearly as I could see her because my back was to the window, silhouetting me against the light from the streetlamps.

"Yeah." I paused as I gathered my courage. "You okay, Rach?"

"Fine, fine." It was a lie and we both knew it: Rachel wasn't fine, not by a long-shot. She squinted at me. "Just a nightmare, Jor. You can go back to bed now." I left: there was nothing more to say. Any questions I had asked, she wouldn't have answered. This was not the first time these past few years that she had woken up screaming. Rachel's nightmares were something we never spoke of, rarely thought about.

But Mom had always managed to wake Rachel up. This time was different because Rachel had woken herself up. She hadn't known anyone else was in the room, hadn't had time to hide her feelings. I, out of the whole family, had seen what Rachel kept hidden.

It terrified me. Terrified me because the girl that I had woken up wasn't Rachel, wasn't my big sister, the girl who had taught me how to plait my hair and ride a bicycle. She had changed so much but, until then, I had been too caught up in jealousy to realize it. So I stumbled into my room and collapsed on my bed and cried. I cried for the Rachel I had known and loved. I cried for the empty, terrified husk that was all that was left of her.

I cried for the Rachel who was now dead.