Lou Ellen lived in the graveyard with the black dogs and was found by a boy made of sunlight one night.

She didn't know it yet but the black dogs were said to appear and bark on the crossroads of Hecate, that is why they took care of her. She didn't know it yet but that magic she could make was also Hecate's. She didn't know it yet, but her mother (the mortal one) died before her other mother (Hecate, the goddess one) could deliver her in a basket of black wicker. She didn't know it yet, but that is why she was in the graveyard living with the black dogs; a graveyard with a crossroads path in the middle. She didn't know it yet, but it was an old tradition to leave children to the elements to see if they would survive.

The black dogs taught her how to steal from the people in the market with that magic she could conjure. Lou Ellen learned how to talk from the same people of the market. The black dogs kept her warm in the cold nights, they opened the doors of the mausoleum for her and Lou Ellen's first roommates were Hecate's canines and the bones of a woman and her children from 1874.

She had no names to give to the black dogs. Thirteen black dogs, operating like a hive mind that nurtured her. Lou Ellen had never seen them die and if one disappeared the mist and the shadows offered her a replacement during the night.

Sometimes, their eyes looked like headlights.

Everyone knew of the little unnamed girl who ran up and down the market with the black dogs, but no one bothered to ponder beyond that.

Where were her parents? Why was she alone?

The Mist, Hecate's Mist, kept them from getting worried. The black dogs took care of Lou Ellen the same way the bear took care of Atalanta when she was abandoned on the mountain.

Lou Ellen chose that name for herself. She memorised the names and last names and dates on the gravestones around her home, she even learned the little phrases people put in as well. Lou Ellen was the oldest gravestone she found: Lou Ellen, 1600-1648. She didn't know Ellen was the last name, so she took both parts as her name and when people asked "Blackstone" was her last name. Because no one was really named Blackstone, so she remained nonexistent. Blackstone was what she looked in the mausoleum at night.

People didn't die and come to this graveyard too often. It was more of a forgotten space, with gravestones and statues washed by the rain. Lou Ellen took care of pulling the weeds and trimming the bushes with her hands because no one else would do it. The walls were graffitied on both sides. The only recent burials Lou Ellen performed herself, on the critters that died in her graveyard like stray dogs and birds.

(A stray mutt took fifteen minutes to die one autumn afternoon. Lou Ellen had never learned the concept of time but the sun was in the middle of the sky when the dog stopped heaving and whimpering. She buried it before the flies could start buzzing.)

So, she watched curiously when they brought a coffin and a group of five people dressed in dull colours watched two men lower it into a newly dug hole. When they left, Lou Ellen read the words on the gravestone.

Gabriela Solace, 1977-2005
"Keep your face to the sun and you will never see the shadows."

They only left sunflowers on this woman's grave, so Lou Ellen assumed she was made of sunshine. Just like the boy who came to visit the graveyard, first with two other adults and then alone.

Lou Ellen played hide-and-seek with him when he came alone. She didn't want to be found but he insisted on searching for her. Over and over again, he only found the black dogs behind the other gravestones, he was convinced by them that she didn't exist. Lou Ellen nursed the places where the boy petted the black dogs, because the sunlight on his fingers left marks like singes on the fur of her dogs. He was golden-haired like the sun, blue-eyed like the sky. He might be her age, if Lou Ellen knew how old she was herself.

Never had she had a friend who was also a kid, but this felt like friendship. What she understood of friendship. Lou Ellen left him flowers she picked from the rosebushes of the graveyard or stole from a kiosk in the market. The boy left her more sunflowers. Lou Ellen kept them in the mausoleum, a few where they could catch the sun but the majority where they couldn't and she watched them until they withered. (Sun was all sunflowers needed to live, she thought, that's why they were called sunflowers). The boy chased her down the market street once, he didn't catch her. When he cried sitting in front of the gravestone she let him be. Three times a woman had come to pick him up, rebuked him for running away. Once a man picked him instead. He brought a small fluffy dog to play with her black dogs, he didn't leave with the dog. (Lou Ellen found it dead by the gravestone of one Everett Duncan, 1956-1989 and her black dogs were to blame; she apologised with the lilies she stole). He didn't come back for two weeks after that, but he took the lilies so Lou Ellen considered herself — and her black dogs — forgiven.

"Gotcha!"

He came during the night, summertime, when Lou Ellen slept in the open with seven dogs around her. The boy grabbed her arm and didn't let go when Lou Ellen startled awake and tried to kick, scratch, and bite — all things the black dogs had taught her. She even went as far as baring her teeth and trying to bark. Though she was saved from the embarrassment on how non-threatening that sounded when the black dog she had been using as pillow barked as well, a real bark.

The boy let go and stepped back.

"I knew you were real."

Lou Ellen didn't move. She wrapped one arm around the neck of the black dog that had barked for her, burying half of her face in their fur.

"What are you?"

"A girl."

"Why are you here in the graveyard?"

"I live here."

"You can't live in a graveyard."

"Well, I do."

"I'm Will." Even in the night, with the lampposts so far they did a poor job to illuminate, his hair shined like the sun behind heavy clouds. Faintly, but still very much there.

"Lou Ellen."

"Why do you live in the graveyard?"

Lou Ellen shrugged. "I've always lived here."

"Are you really a ghost?"

"No."

"Are you hurt?"

Lou Ellen frowned. "No?" It came out as a halfway point towards a question, she didn't know why he was asking her that.

"You felt hurt."

Felt? "I'm not hurt. Who is the woman of the sunflowers?"

Is, because for her, the people of the graves were still here in present tense.

"My mum. She had cancer in her brain."

"I don't know what that is."

"It's a disease that spreads and kills you."

"Ah."

Will extended his hand to grab her again, but the black dog Lou Ellen still had her arms around bared their teeth and growled. Will stepped back.

"Are you sure you're not hurt?"

"Yeah. Why are you asking?"

"I felt it."

Felt. "Felt, how?"

"The same way I felt my mum's cancer."

At the hoot of an owl, all the black dogs turned their heads towards the mausoleum. Two owls perched on the wings of the angels on the roof— three, four, five, six. Those owls had never come here before. A daughter of Hecate or a son of Apollo at age eight, with no training and alone, wouldn't attract any monsters. A daughter of Hecate and a son of Apollo, together, might and do.

The black dogs began to growl when the owls reached double digits in number. Were they really owls? Their beaks looked too big, when they snapped them they sounded like metallic pincers. They appeared on the gravestones and other statues.

Were they bigger? They seemed bigger.

Lou Ellen realised then… she only had five black dogs. They pressed around her and Will, teeth still bared, still growling.

One of the owls landed on the ground.

Lou Ellen smelled the blood.

When the owl got too close, the black dog she was holding sprang forward with lips pulled back in a snarl. A snarl turned to a whimper and the smell of blood intensified, it splattered. The owl tore through the black dog. Lou Ellen was more surprised to find her black dogs bled like her than horrified with the gore, even as she tasted some of it with the tip of her tongue.

The owl ripped the stomach of the black dog open, snapped at guts and blood and flesh with the beak of an eagle. The other owls swarmed from their perches to feast too. They tore through the black dog in seconds, all twenty of them, and they turned for another leaving only the bones like piles of splinters.

Lou Ellen felt the beaks and the talons. The three black dogs still standing pushed her and Will into the mausoleum. Lou Ellen counted two dogs and Will when she closed the creaking door. Thirteen dogs and only two left, would the mist and shadows replace the eleven she had lost? The whimpers from outside had ceased as quickly as the owls had destroyed the black dog, as quickly as they had destroyed eleven of her black dogs.

Will stood between the walls and the stone coffin in the middle, where the woman of 1874 (Elizabeth Miller) slept eternally. On the opposite wall, in cabinets, slept her two children. Lou Ellen had been unable to find their names or their dates of death.

The lights in the skulls of the black dogs shined on their eyes but didn't illuminate the darkness of the mausoleum. It was impossible to hear anything crawling and Lou Ellen more heard her own breathing rebound inside her own head than on the walls. The owls bashed against the stone outside, hooting louder and more penetrating than any real owl should have. Lou Ellen felt the sting where they had managed to scratch her.

Will found her sunflowers, the petals crinkled when he grabbed them.

In a second, the world exploded.

After the explosion, there was silence.

Lou Ellen heaved for breath, her bruised arms ached where they held the black dog. There were voices above and around there, something heavy pressed down on every point of her body. She couldn't feel the black dog breathe, she couldn't remember if they were supposed to breathe . If she was supposed to breathe. The wings of a stone angel dug on her shoulder blades, like if they had grown from her the wrong way. What she should have heard were the low howls of her black dogs, but instead she heard voices from beyond the water the was submerged in — or water trapped inside her skull. She tried to bring the black dog closer but couldn't, if she tried the wings of the angel might go through her.

"It's two kids."

"Shit."

"Are you sure there's only two?"

"What were they doing in there?"

"The strix must have been after them."

Underneath her, the black dog was starting to feel less warm and more like pelt thrown over bones without anything else in between. The ribcage created indents on her arm. Had she broken the spine with her wrist?

Lou Ellen tried to breathe in deeply when the wings of the angel were removed from her back. She couldn't breathe, couldn't breathe, couldn't breathe.

"Alright."

The weight from her arms and legs and head disappeared, not that she could tell the difference with the pain that felt like if her heart had multiplied to settle on every pressure point. Two hands grabbed her and hefted her up. Lou Ellen tried to scratch, kick, bare her teeth, bark. None of her black dogs barked for her. She couldn't bark for herself.

"Get the other one!"

She was cradled against someone.

"Fuck's sake, Al, put her down. The damn thing just caved down on her."

"We didn't bring a healer, we need to leave now. She's one of mine."

"One of yours?"

"Hecate."

"Got the other one!"

"Where's the closest base?"

"Twenty minutes by foot."

"Are you sure they can hold on that long?"

"They will have to, we didn't bring any supplies."

"I don't want this kid to die on my arms, Torrington."

"Give him to Mendes, then."

"This one is Apollo for sure."

"Good. We need more healers."

Lou Ellen tried to wrap her arms around who carried her. She tried to open her eyes to check if her black dogs were following, if Will had the sunflowers, to see what happened to the owls of eagle beaks and eagle talons. She couldn't bring her eyes to open but they were moving, they were leaving the graveyard, her graveyard.

"Hold on, okay?" said a voice to her ear, the voice of who held her against their chest with care she had never known. "We're gonna make you and your friend all better."